Concerning the Neural Code

Abstract: The central problem with understanding brain and mind is the neural code issue: understanding the matter of our brain as basis for the phenomena of our mind. The richness with which our mind represents our environment, the parsimony of genetic data, the tremendous efficiency with which the brain learns from scant sensory input and the creativity with which our mind constructs mental worlds all speak in favor of mind as an emergent phenomenon. This raises the further issue of how the neural code supports these processes of organization. The central point of this communication is that the neural code has the form of structured net fragments that are formed by network self-organization, activate and de-activate on the functional time scale, and spontaneously combine to form larger nets with the same basic structure.