Neuroscience¶
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16 primes originate from Neuroscience and 22 more draw from it as a secondary origin — sort the Origin column to separate them. They span 20 subdomains; sort by that column to group them, or click any subdomain to filter to it.
| Prime | Origin | Subdomain | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Associative Memory | Primary | — | Content-addressable storage where a cue retrieves linked content. |
| Attention | Also draws from | — | The selective allocation of a fixed processing capacity to some inputs while the rest are filtered out, surfacing scarcity upstream of every decision. |
| Attentional Capacity | Also draws from | — | Finite pool of selection bandwidth whose exceeded supply degrades processing through interference, slowing, or capture. |
| Awareness | Also draws from | Awareness is the capacity of a cognitive or adaptive system to register a target state or occurrence and make that registration available for discrimination, report, coordination, or context-sensitive response. | |
| Cascade | Also draws from | A change in one element triggers a chain of further changes. | |
| Cognitive Appraisal | Also draws from | — | The interpretive step that evaluates a situation's significance and one's coping resources, determining the emotional and behavioral response rather than the raw stimulus doing so. |
| Cognitive Resource Depletion | Also draws from | — | Cognitive capacity degrades from sustained resource consumption. |
| Conditioning (Behavioral) | Also draws from | — | Learning via association. |
| Contrast | Also draws from | — | Emphasized difference. |
| Criticality | Also draws from | Regime poised at a phase boundary where response becomes scale-free and correlations diverge. | |
| Curiosity | Also draws from | — | Drive to explore. |
| Efference Copy | Primary | Routing an internal copy of a command to the perceiver so self-caused effects can be predicted and subtracted, leaving only the world-caused remainder. | |
| Harmonic Distortion | Also draws from | Passing a signal through a nonlinear transfer function generates new frequency components — harmonics and intermodulation products — absent from the input, an artifact of the nonlinearity itself rather than of any sampling or discretization. | |
| Hebbian Learning | Primary | A connection between two units strengthens as a function of their correlated activity, through a local, correlational, unsupervised, cumulative update. | |
| Latency | Also draws from | — | The irreducible delay between an input and the system's response. |
| Lateral Inhibition | Primary | — | Active elements suppress their neighbours, sharpening contrast. |
| Multiplexing | Also draws from | Sharing one channel among many signals by dividing time, frequency, or code. | |
| Pattern Completion (Filling the Incomplete) | Also draws from | — | Infer missing structure. |
| Population Coding | Primary | Information about a quantity is carried by the joint pattern across many individually noisy elements and read out by a decoder, yielding precision and robustness no single element provides. | |
| Potentiation | Also draws from | — | One factor enhances another. |
| Prediction Error | Also draws from | The signed discrepancy between a model-generated prediction and its realized observation becomes an operational signal for updating, routing through, or diagnosing the predictor. | |
| Predictive Coding | Primary | A system predicts its input and propagates only the prediction error. | |
| Rate Coding | Primary | A continuous magnitude is represented by the frequency of identical discrete events, decoded by integration over a window that trades latency against precision. | |
| Receptive Field | Primary | A processing unit responds only to inputs falling inside a bounded region of an input space, so a large system covers its input by tiling many such local jurisdictions. | |
| Reconsolidation | Primary | A stored item returns to a malleable state when retrieved and must be re-stored, so every retrieval is a read-modify-write and a potential edit of the original. | |
| Refractory Period | Primary | Immediately after an action, a unit enters an intrinsic, self-imposed window during which it cannot repeat that action, capping its rate and preventing runaway re-triggering without external governance. | |
| Remapping | Primary | A single substrate holds multiple disjoint, context-keyed representations and switches discretely between them on a context cue, preserving inactive ones for later re-entry. | |
| Replay | Primary | After live experience, a system reactivates captured sequence-traces in a decoupled offline window, and that rerun — not the original experience alone — writes durable structure into memory or skill. | |
| Reward Prediction Error | Primary | The signed difference between received and expected reward or value becomes a teaching signal for updating value estimates, policies, and reward-linked behavior. | |
| Segmentation and Boundary Drawing | Also draws from | — | Partitioning continuous domain via boundaries concentrates meaning. |
| Self Control | Also draws from | — | Overriding immediate impulses in service of longer-term goals. |
| Sparse Coding | Primary | A system represents each input by activating a small content-specific subset of a much larger pool of units, gaining combinatorial capacity from the choice of which few are active. | |
| Synchronization | Also draws from | — | The emergence of stable shared timing or phase among independent oscillating processes through local coupling, without any central conductor. |
| Temporal Synchronization and Phase Alignment | Primary | — | Phase alignment or misalignment determines efficiency and coherence. |
| Threshold | Also draws from | — | Safe vs harmful levels. |
| Topographic Map | Primary | A source space is laid out on a substrate by a neighbourhood-preserving map with non-uniform magnification, so positions encode relationships and damage to a substrate region predicts a localised source deficit. | |
| Transient Response | Also draws from | The time-course by which a system approaches (or departs from) a state after a disturbance — the trajectory between disturbed and settled, with a named anatomy (settling time, relaxation time, overshoot, damping) that is distinct from the resting state it approaches. | |
| Wisdom of the Crowds | Also draws from | — | Many independent noisy signals combine into an estimate better than any individual (information aggregation). |