life inspired

"we show that computation can be seen as a feature emerging from the collective dynamics of an ensemble of networking neurons, which interact by means of adaptive dynamical connections. Namely, by associating logical states to synchronous neuron's dynamics, we show how the usual Boolean logics can be fully recovered, and a universal Turing machine can be constructed. Furthermore, we show that, besides the static binary gates, a wider class of logical operations can be efficiently constructed as the fundamental computational elements interact within an adaptive network, each operation being represented by a specific motif. Our approach qualitatively differs from the past attempts to encode information and compute with complex systems, where computation was instead the consequence of the application of control loops enforcing a desired state into the specific system's dynamics. Being the result of an emergent process, the computation mechanism here described is not limited to a binary Boolean logic, but it can involve a much larger number of states. As such, our results can enlighten new concepts for the understanding of the real computing processes taking place in the brain." Full paper @ PLoS ONE