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Neuroscience

Fault tolerance in the brain

Nature volume 532, pages 449–450 (2016)Cite this article

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If stored information is erased from neural circuits in one brain hemisphere in mice, the lost data can be recovered from the other. This finding highlights a safeguarding mechanism at work in the brain. See Article p.459

When we send an e-mail or save a file on our hard drives, information can be lost, owing to dropped data packets or corrupted bits. We typically do not notice such failures because systems are designed with built-in mechanisms to restore the lost data. Dropped packets are retransmitted, and multiple copies of data are saved. The brain also stores and transmits information — is it, too, fault-tolerant? In this issue, Li et al.1 (page 459) report the perturbation of brain activity to erase stored information in mice. They discover that the lost information can be rapidly restored by an unperturbed brain region.

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Figure 1: A mechanism of redundancy.

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References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Byron M. Yu is in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213, USA.,

    Byron M. Yu

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  1. Byron M. Yu
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Correspondence to Byron M. Yu.

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Yu, B. Fault tolerance in the brain. Nature 532, 449–450 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature17886

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