The Cooperative Neuron

"A new era is dawning in the sciences of mind and brain. This book provides an overview of a conceptual revolution that is occurring in our understanding of the cellular foundations of mental life and its disorders. It relates conscious perception, thought, and action to recently discovered capabilities of a special class of neocortical neuron that has long been known to be widely distributed through the cerebral neocortex. These neurons are called pyramidal cells because their cell bodies have an approximately pyramidal shape. Many, though not all, of those cells are sensitive to context - as this book describes in detail. Though this cellular context-sensitivity involves complex events that are unfamiliar to many neuroscientists and to most psychologists, the conceptual revolution to which these discoveries lead is in essence simple. It is now known that many pyramidal neurons in the neocortex have two functionally distinct sets of input. One set provides the input about which the neuron usually transmits information. The other set can selectively amplify that transmission when it is useful to do so in the context of information being transmitted by other neurons. This form of context-sensitive information processing is cooperative in that it seeks agreement between the active neurons, thus reducing mental conflict"--