“Mental Coherence” refers to the ability of the human mind to .doc

The Neural Basis of Mental Coherence James L. McClelland, Co-Director, Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition Carnegie Mellon University Mental coherence refers to the ability of the human mind to integrate multiple threads of information from different sources that all relate coherently to each other, blocking out irrelevant sources of information. The ability to achieve mental coherence is central to perception, comprehension, problem solving, and action selection. Many brain disorders, including schizophrenia, autism, attention deficit disorder, and Alzheimer’s disease, may affect mental coherence, perhaps in interestingly different ways. We request a three-year, $1.4 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to begin a coordinated effort to understand the neural basis of mental coherence and to apply what we learn to explore disrupted coherence in brain disorders. Our work builds on the view that mental coherence emerges from the mutual, bi-directional influence of widely distributed neural populations, a view consistent with the PI’s Parallel Distributed Processing theory of human cognition and shared by several other leading theorists. Recent experimental studies have provided support for this view, but existing studies in humans sacrifice either spatial or temporal precision and have not always been fully coordinated with efforts to characterize the underlying neural activity. In short, we do not yet understand how mental coherence is achieved in the nervous system. Our work will break new ground by integrating data across brain imaging modalities to achieve the high levels of spatial and temporal resolution that are required to visualize coordinated neural activity in widely distributed brain regions. These methods will be coupled with and guided by advanced theoretical investigations and results from studies recording simultaneously from multiple individual neurons in rhesus monkeys. With these convergent approaches, we will investigate interregional c