Pub Date : 2025-12-01Epub Date: 2025-09-19DOI: 10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.005
Francisco Barceló
{"title":"Beyond stimulus-centric, dualist and modular theories of cognitive control: fact or fiction? Comment on “Active inference and cognitive control: Balancing deliberation and habits through precision optimization” by Riccardo Proietti, Thomas Parr, Alessia Tessari, Karl Friston, & Giovanni Pezzulo","authors":"Francisco Barceló","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.005","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.005","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 95-97"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145118355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01Epub Date: 2025-09-23DOI: 10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.007
Michael J. Walker
<div><div>A phylogenetic split ∼7.5 Ma (million years ago) separated paninan ancestors that were unlike today's chimpanzees, from homininan ancestors that were unlike <em>Homo sapiens</em> today; neither had evolved into their modern physical and behavioural forms. Those paninans gave rise to the mainly frugivorous woodland-dwelling chimpanzees (<em>Pan troglodytes</em>), whose multifemale-multimale troops have social hierarchies where prominent parts are played by promiscuous males whose female offspring have little choice after menarche but to seek sexual partners in other troops, hostility between troops notwithstanding, whilst male promiscuity is incompatible with paternal interest in their offspring, interest being provided mainly by mothers or female alloparents. Contrary to widespread conjecture that the social arrangements of <em>Pan</em> were those of primaeval homininans, it is proposed here that ∼4 Ma the nature of the mosaic landscapes (of grasslands and stands of trees) that were the habitat of australopithecine homininans, had 4 consequences that impinged on homininan evolution, differentiating it from that of woodland-dwelling paninans: (1) The diversity of whatever was available to eat was not the same in adjoining habitats of homininan social units, each of which may have been constrained by whatever mostly could be foraged, scavenged, eaten, or carried away, within perhaps a 2-hour walk; (2) Whatever was forageable, scavengeable, and edible within that distance likely was limited at any period of the year, so social units were increasingly omnivorous and <em>necessarily small</em>; (3) <em>Smallness</em> demanded <em>cognitive ingenuity</em> and <em>transmissibility of existential information</em> acquired by <em>active inference</em> generated by self-evidencing through enacted neuroethological behavioural responses, in line with the free energy principle, thanks to the cognitive <em>broadening</em> of <em>homininan “zones of bounded surprisal”</em> (<em>ZBS</em>) with respect to <em>paninans' ZBS,</em> both <em>within</em> each homininan “<em>small-world</em>” social unit and <em>between</em> nearby homininan units spreading out, in space and time, as budding very <em>small-world</em> information networks; (4) The <em>existential continuity</em> of small homininan social units depended on cooperation and sporadic collaboration between social units with mixed-sex philopatry (perhaps present ∼4 Ma among <em>Australopithecus anamensis</em>), behaviour which, together with (a) the generation of <em>information</em> within each unit that is enhanced by the intimate proximity to toddlers and children of older females and males in small mixed-sex social units<em>,</em> and (b) mixed-sex dispersal of sexually-active partners establishing mixed-sex social units at newly-formed localities nearby, was behaviour that maintained not only heterozygosity, but also, <em>crucial cognitive awareness of kinship links favouring transmissibility o
{"title":"“Homo informatio”","authors":"Michael J. Walker","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.007","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A phylogenetic split ∼7.5 Ma (million years ago) separated paninan ancestors that were unlike today's chimpanzees, from homininan ancestors that were unlike <em>Homo sapiens</em> today; neither had evolved into their modern physical and behavioural forms. Those paninans gave rise to the mainly frugivorous woodland-dwelling chimpanzees (<em>Pan troglodytes</em>), whose multifemale-multimale troops have social hierarchies where prominent parts are played by promiscuous males whose female offspring have little choice after menarche but to seek sexual partners in other troops, hostility between troops notwithstanding, whilst male promiscuity is incompatible with paternal interest in their offspring, interest being provided mainly by mothers or female alloparents. Contrary to widespread conjecture that the social arrangements of <em>Pan</em> were those of primaeval homininans, it is proposed here that ∼4 Ma the nature of the mosaic landscapes (of grasslands and stands of trees) that were the habitat of australopithecine homininans, had 4 consequences that impinged on homininan evolution, differentiating it from that of woodland-dwelling paninans: (1) The diversity of whatever was available to eat was not the same in adjoining habitats of homininan social units, each of which may have been constrained by whatever mostly could be foraged, scavenged, eaten, or carried away, within perhaps a 2-hour walk; (2) Whatever was forageable, scavengeable, and edible within that distance likely was limited at any period of the year, so social units were increasingly omnivorous and <em>necessarily small</em>; (3) <em>Smallness</em> demanded <em>cognitive ingenuity</em> and <em>transmissibility of existential information</em> acquired by <em>active inference</em> generated by self-evidencing through enacted neuroethological behavioural responses, in line with the free energy principle, thanks to the cognitive <em>broadening</em> of <em>homininan “zones of bounded surprisal”</em> (<em>ZBS</em>) with respect to <em>paninans' ZBS,</em> both <em>within</em> each homininan “<em>small-world</em>” social unit and <em>between</em> nearby homininan units spreading out, in space and time, as budding very <em>small-world</em> information networks; (4) The <em>existential continuity</em> of small homininan social units depended on cooperation and sporadic collaboration between social units with mixed-sex philopatry (perhaps present ∼4 Ma among <em>Australopithecus anamensis</em>), behaviour which, together with (a) the generation of <em>information</em> within each unit that is enhanced by the intimate proximity to toddlers and children of older females and males in small mixed-sex social units<em>,</em> and (b) mixed-sex dispersal of sexually-active partners establishing mixed-sex social units at newly-formed localities nearby, was behaviour that maintained not only heterozygosity, but also, <em>crucial cognitive awareness of kinship links favouring transmissibility o","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 98-119"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145216572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01Epub Date: 2025-09-08DOI: 10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.013
Heiko I. Stecher , Daniel Strüber , Christoph S. Herrmann
{"title":"Modeling network connectivity may reveal further insights on how transcranial alternating current stimulation modulates brain activity","authors":"Heiko I. Stecher , Daniel Strüber , Christoph S. Herrmann","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.013","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.013","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 87-89"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145045588","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01Epub Date: 2025-08-25DOI: 10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.011
Li-Xia Yuan , Yu-Feng Zang
{"title":"From dark to bright: Comment on “Dark brain energy: Toward an integrative model of spontaneous slow oscillations” by Gong and Zuo","authors":"Li-Xia Yuan , Yu-Feng Zang","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.011","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.011","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 58-60"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144912719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01Epub Date: 2025-09-04DOI: 10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.001
Soumya Banerjee
{"title":"Balancing objects and processes: advocating pluralism in biology: Comment on “Thoughts and thinkers: On the complementarity between objects and processes\" by Chris Fields and Michael Levin","authors":"Soumya Banerjee","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.09.001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 79-82"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145004753","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01Epub Date: 2025-08-20DOI: 10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.007
Jiaqi Li , Wangzheqi Zhang , Yan Liao , Yanhao Qiu , Yalin Zhu , Xiaomin Zhang , Changli Wang
Neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease, stroke, and epilepsy frequently result in irreversible disability. Brain–computer interface (BCI) technologies offer the promise of recovering or replacing impaired sensory, motor, and cognitive functions by directly stimulating cortical activity or by converting self-generated cortical activity into commands for external assistive devices. In-depth studies of cerebral cortex connectivity, function and neural hierarchical coding mechanisms can provide novel solutions for BCI-based treatments. This review summarizes the fundamental principles and history of BCI technology and current research progress, including the utilization of known cortical functions and the potential impact of newly discovered cortical functions on the future development of BCI-based applications. The article then systematically reviews the application of BCI technology for the treatment of motor, cognitive, and psychiatric disorders, innovative uses of hydrogels and carbon nanomaterials in BCI systems, and the current limitations and future research directions of BCI systems with respect to the reliability of neural decoding. This article aims to provide clinicians and researchers with the latest progress and a comprehensive overview of BCI applications for diagnosing and treating neurological diseases from in-depth studies on cerebral cortex structure and function, and to propose potential future applications based on interdisciplinary approaches, especially in enhancing the reliability of neural decoding.
{"title":"Neural decoding reliability: Breakthroughs and potential of brain–computer interfaces technologies in the treatment of neurological diseases","authors":"Jiaqi Li , Wangzheqi Zhang , Yan Liao , Yanhao Qiu , Yalin Zhu , Xiaomin Zhang , Changli Wang","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.007","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.08.007","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease, stroke, and epilepsy frequently result in irreversible disability. Brain–computer interface (BCI) technologies offer the promise of recovering or replacing impaired sensory, motor, and cognitive functions by directly stimulating cortical activity or by converting self-generated cortical activity into commands for external assistive devices. In-depth studies of cerebral cortex connectivity, function and neural hierarchical coding mechanisms can provide novel solutions for BCI-based treatments. This review summarizes the fundamental principles and history of BCI technology and current research progress, including the utilization of known cortical functions and the potential impact of newly discovered cortical functions on the future development of BCI-based applications. The article then systematically reviews the application of BCI technology for the treatment of motor, cognitive, and psychiatric disorders, innovative uses of hydrogels and carbon nanomaterials in BCI systems, and the current limitations and future research directions of BCI systems with respect to the reliability of neural decoding. This article aims to provide clinicians and researchers with the latest progress and a comprehensive overview of BCI applications for diagnosing and treating neurological diseases from in-depth studies on cerebral cortex structure and function, and to propose potential future applications based on interdisciplinary approaches, especially in enhancing the reliability of neural decoding.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 1-40"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144891918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01Epub Date: 2025-11-01DOI: 10.1016/j.plrev.2025.11.001
Fenfang Li
{"title":"The dynamic duo: Calcium signaling and ultrasound modulation of cellular viscoelasticity: Comment on “Viscoelastic mechanics of living cells” by Zhou et al.","authors":"Fenfang Li","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.11.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.11.001","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 232-234"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145457103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01Epub Date: 2025-10-31DOI: 10.1016/j.plrev.2025.10.008
Frédérique de Vignemont
{"title":"Time in peripersonal space. Comment on \"computational models of peripersonal space representation\" by Tommaso Bertoni, Ishan-Singh J. Chauhan, Jean-Paul Noel, Andrea Serino","authors":"Frédérique de Vignemont","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.10.008","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.10.008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 253-254"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145511455","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-01Epub Date: 2025-11-07DOI: 10.1016/j.plrev.2025.11.003
Matej Hoffmann
{"title":"The body is not there to compute","authors":"Matej Hoffmann","doi":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.11.003","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.plrev.2025.11.003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":403,"journal":{"name":"Physics of Life Reviews","volume":"55 ","pages":"Pages 250-252"},"PeriodicalIF":14.3,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145494163","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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