I’ve been studying and thinking about the physical side of this phenomenon in neuroscience recently. There are groups of columns of neurons in the cortex that form temporary voting blocks, regarding whatever subject that particular Brodmann area focuses on. These alternating groups have to deal with physical limits of how many groups the regions can stably divide into, which limits the number of active distinct hypotheses or ‘traders’ there can be in a given area at a given time. Unclear exactly what the max is, and it depends on the cortical region in question, but generally 6-9 is the approximate max (not coincidentally the number of distinct ‘chunks’ we can hold in active short term memory). Also, there is a tendency for noise to collapse too similar of traders/hypotheses/firing-groups to fall back into synchrony/agreement with each other and thus collapse back down to a baseline of two competing hypotheses. These hypotheses/firing-groups/traders are pushed into existence or pushed into merging not just by their own ‘bids’ but also by the evidence coming in from other brain areas or senses. I don’t think that current day neuroscience has all the details yet (although I certainly don’t have the full picture of all relevant papers in neuroscience!).
I’ve been studying and thinking about the physical side of this phenomenon in neuroscience recently. There are groups of columns of neurons in the cortex that form temporary voting blocks, regarding whatever subject that particular Brodmann area focuses on. These alternating groups have to deal with physical limits of how many groups the regions can stably divide into, which limits the number of active distinct hypotheses or ‘traders’ there can be in a given area at a given time. Unclear exactly what the max is, and it depends on the cortical region in question, but generally 6-9 is the approximate max (not coincidentally the number of distinct ‘chunks’ we can hold in active short term memory). Also, there is a tendency for noise to collapse too similar of traders/hypotheses/firing-groups to fall back into synchrony/agreement with each other and thus collapse back down to a baseline of two competing hypotheses. These hypotheses/firing-groups/traders are pushed into existence or pushed into merging not just by their own ‘bids’ but also by the evidence coming in from other brain areas or senses. I don’t think that current day neuroscience has all the details yet (although I certainly don’t have the full picture of all relevant papers in neuroscience!).