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action. In typical environmental situations, overt behavior is required for "need satisfaction," and then the satisfaction is only temporarythe organism consumes the resources involved in order to maintain itself. Innate internal mechanisms in the organism automatically "reward" satisfaction of hunger, thirst, etc., and perhaps some more generalized needs such as curiosity. These "rewards" may be mediated by innately organized neural networks which exhibit increasing activity as a corresponding need increases. Such internally generated stimuli would progressively disturb established configurations and sequences, unless they resulted in reduction of the corresponding need. Ultimately, in the absence of satisfaction, this disruption would cause an increasingly broad search through the organism's behavioral repertorya kind of hunt through increasingly unusual cell assembly configurations in an attempt to produce an appropriate overt response. Temporal associations of cell assemblies, active when such a disturbance is reduced, would retain their incremented synapse levels. Those active during a period of increasing disturbance would encounter subsequent interference, causing synapse level increments to be transitory. Assemblies having precursors occurring early in ''need satisfaction" sequences acquire a particular role. They serve as "leading indicators," becoming active in advance of actual primitive needs; they may serve as "learned needs" [goals]. A hierarchy of precursors of precursors, etc., can provide the system with a hierarchy of "learned needs," some of them quite remote from the primitive needs. That is, assemblies containing substantial segments of the innately organized networks as components, or assemblies closely associated therewith, could give rise to secondary and higher-order "learned needs." The effects of these new assemblies will be much like those generated by the innately organized networks.) |
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6. An active cell assembly primes cell assemblies associated with it as successors in temporal sequences, making them more likely to be active subsequently. (A neuron producing pulses at a high rate tends to become fatigued, with a consequent drop in pulse rate. A neuron that is being inhibited tends to exhibit less fatigue than normal because of its very low pulse rate. A kind of inhibitory priming results, because the neuron is hyperresponsive once the inhibition ceases. It is also likely that priming occurs by transmission of "priming molecules" through the synapses of active neurons. Priming provides the CNS with expectations and predictions. In effect the system expects and is ready to respond to selected sets |
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