This One Equation May Be the Root of Intelligence

At its core, Tsien's theory of connectivity describes how our billions of neurons flexibly assemble to not only gather knowledge, but to crystalize concepts and extrapolate from learned ideas to reason about things we have not yet experienced. "Intelligence is really about dealing with uncertainty and infinite possibilities," Tsien said in a press release. The theory is so seemingly banal that it's easy to dismiss as another pompous attempt at solving the brain's neural code -- all theory, no evidence. But in a new paper published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, Tsien and his team took the theory to task in a series of animal experiments and found it at work in seven different brain regions, governing basic behaviors such as feeding, memory and fear. Even more controversially, the theory goes head-to-head with a fundamental teaching in neuroscience: cells that fire together, wire together.