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Every glance triggers a complex exchange of signals among millions of neurons. Some cells excite the network, others inhibit it, while additional signals arrive from the thalamus and neuromodulatory systems. This activity does not run with the regularity of a clock. Nevertheless, we can recognize a face, judge the direction of an approaching car or read a sign even when conditions change rapidly.

This flexibility is one of the fundamental paradoxes of the brain. The visual system must remain variable enough to respond to new information, but it cannot become fully chaotic. If it did, even a minimal difference in initial neural activity could soon produce a completely different response. Reliable encoding of visual stimuli would no longer be possible.

The problem was investigated by a team comprising Dr. Mehdi Borjkhani from the International Center for Translational Eye Research (ICTER), part of the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences; Morteza A. Sharif from Urmia University of Technology; and Hadi Borjkhani from HTW Berlin.

Their findings are presented in the article, "Intrinsic chaos control in cortical circuits: A minimal E-I-M rate model for the primary visual cortex," published in the Journal of Computational Neuroscience.

"In this context, chaos does not mean ordinary noise or disorder. It is a deterministic form of dynamics in which a very small difference at the beginning can rapidly take the entire system in a different direction.

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