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Chiyin Zheng
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Mounting evidence in neuroscience suggests the possibility of neuronal representations that individual neurons serve as the substrates of different mental representations in a point-to-point way. Combined with associationism, it can potentially address a range of theoretical problems and provide a straightforward explanation for our cognition. However, this idea is merely a hypothesis with many questions unsolved. In this paper, I will bring up a new framework to defend the idea of neuronal representations. The strategy is from micro- to macro-level. Specifically, in the micro-level, I first propose that our brain prefers and preserves more active neurons. Yet as total chance of discharge, neurons must take strategies to fire more strongly and frequently. Then I describe how they take synaptic plasticity, inhibition, and synchronization as their strategies and demonstrate how the execution of these strategies during turn them into specialized neurons that selectively but strongly respond to familiar entities. In the macro-level, I further discuss how these specialized neurons underlie various cognitive functions and phenomena. Significantly, this paper, through defending neuronal representation, introduces a novel way to understand the relationship between brain and cognition.
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