EMPIRICAL AND THEORETICAL ACTIVE MEMORY - THE PROPER CONTEXT - AUTHORS RESPONSE

The context of the target article is delimited again, underlining the intended location of the argument in the bottom-up hierarchy of brain study. The central message is that collective delay activity distribut ions (reverberations) in cortical modules extend the role of a spike ( a potential information carrier across long distances) to an active me mory of structured, learned information that can be carried across lon g time intervals. Moreover, the population code of the reverberations makes them readable down the cortical processing stream. Most of the c ritical comments are then interpreted and addressed in relation to mis reading of the proper context. The price for the limitation of the con text (in cognitive, behavioral, and computational terms) is compared w ith the advantages of a clear, direct contact with experiment on the o ne hand and with a well controlled body of modeling and analysis on th e other.