{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/can-the-brain-use-waves-to-solve-planning","title":"Can the brain use waves to solve planning problems?","arxiv_id":"2110.05158","date":"2021-10-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Henry Powell","Mathias Winkel","Alexander V. Hopp","Helmut Linde"],"abstract":"A variety of behaviors like spatial navigation or bodily motion can be formulated as graph traversal problems through cognitive maps. We present a neural network model which can solve such tasks and is compatible with a broad range of empirical findings about the mammalian neocortex and hippocampus. The neurons and synaptic connections in the model represent structures that can result from self-organization into a cognitive map via Hebbian learning, i.e. into a graph in which each neuron represents a point of some abstract task-relevant manifold and the recurrent connections encode a distance metric on the manifold. Graph traversal problems are solved by wave-like activation patterns which travel through the recurrent network and guide a localized peak of activity onto a path from some starting position to a target state.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.05158v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.05158v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"can-the-brain-use-waves-to-solve-planning","repo_url":"https://github.com/emdgroup/brain_waves_for_planning_problems","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Hippocampus"},{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"Position"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":null,"method_name":"Travel"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}