Talk:Neural binding

Explanation of edits

The editing of the neural binding page was done due to our groups interest in the content and the shortage of information on the page. It was our goal in editing this page to introduce the people to some of the many ideas of neural binding and any underlying mechanisms of it. The information on this page is not the whole entirety of the neural binding idea as it is still a growing idea. Therefore, further readings have been placed at the end of the page if the subject interests you. We hope you enjoy it and welcome your critique. -brolenchek — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brolenchek (talk • contribs) 02:12, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Thank you. Looie496 (talk) 14:22, 4 April 2015 (UTC)

Primary Reviews

Review One

The article on Neural Binding was very interesting. The page was well written and gave a lot of good detail on many aspects of the topic. I really enjoyed learning about sensory and cognitive cases involving neural binding. However, some of the writing is very technical. It may not be easy for readers without a science background to understand some of the language. For example, the first sentence of the lead section is very complex and may confuse readers. It might be more helpful if the sentence was broken down into smaller sentences with less information. In addition, it might help to add more links so that readers can use other pages to better understand the content. There are also some links that are red indicating that they do not go to a specific page. It would be helpful to delete these links so as not to confuse readers.

The article covered a broad range of topics concerning neural binding. I thought it was interesting that clinical implications were included on the page. I thought the section on autism was helpful in understanding that a level of underconnectivity in regions of the brain could result in this disease. It was a good way to broaden the scope of neural binding and put it in a real world prospective. The article was also neutral in its approach to covering the topic. There were no personal opinions from the authors. The article was written in a professional manner.

The sources were well cited overall. However, there were some articles that were a bit too old. The source "The Correlation Theory of Brain Function" by Von der Malsburg is from 1981. The article is considerably dated and I believe Wikipedia prefers sources from the last 5 years. However, it is cited in reference to a history of the proposed models so it may be okay. You also have a few other sources from the 1990s including: one from 1993 by Olshausen and the other from 1994 by Pare that I would consider looking for more recent research. Despite the older articles, you stated what the original others had intended. I thought you used the information in your sources well, especially since your topic could be very broad in its scope. Overall, you cited secondary sources well, I would just recommend finding more current sources.

I would also recommend adding images to the page. I think it would help to explain your content. There are a lot of good images that would be relevant to neural binding. Although the article has a lot of good information, images will help the page to appear more interesting. In addition, it will help readers to better understand the content. Overall, I thought the article was very well written and I think I learned a lot about neural binding. --Sweng15 (talk) 03:10, 9 April 2015 (UTC)

Response from the Authors

Dear Sweng15, We appreciate your critique of the article and have decided, as a group, to address some of these issues. The first sentence will be broken up. We felt it was definitely pivotal to not turn the reader away so quickly.

To the critique of "dumbing down" the article; I find it especially confusing that in this project we are supposed to describe such a complex pathway in the body (probably the most complex) yet we are put up with the challenge of putting things into Layman's terms. Now this is not really your fault but I feel the need to address it since you brought it up. For neural binding specifically it is hard to describe to an un-scientific fellow how oscillations in your brain pair with each other, relay in the thalamus and then become recognized in the cortex, giving the human the image. Then whether those oscillations can be recognized as previously happening before in the hippocampus or that the paired oscillations need to form a new episodic memory.

This is me trying to dumb that down: Ok so there are these wavy lines, in your head, made up by small things that when two of these wavy lines are paired together they help in creating an image. But it is not that direct. First, the wavy lines pair but then they run off to another part in your brain where they are relayed to a place where your brain either gets a match for the previous pair of wavy lines or it creates a new matching pair. This is the recognition stage, the image that you see.

Now that may help this un-scientific fellow better understand what neural binding is all about but science is not about just being given all the answers. It is about not being ashamed about not knowing what certain things mean. This is exactly what the Wikilinks are there for. If the person looking at the neural binding page truly is an interested party or future scientist they will hold this fact dear in their heart: That they do not know everything and that they may not understand everything they read so it is their job to begin the long journey of pressing more links, opening more tabs and reading more into what they do not understand. It is not my job as a college educated scientist to spoon feed them information so they can spit it back out at the local watering hole to impress their parent or compatriot.

Quick story to back my claim. The Royal Society of Science, founded in November 1660, home to scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Stephen Hawking has a motto that envelops the very idea that I described. The motto is "Nullius in Verba" or translated "take nobody's word for it" or "see for yourself". I will not be a part of making the article more elementary because it is not good science.

I am sorry because I am surely you did not expect that type of response but it needed to be put out for consumption.

Ok. Now that that is over. To your response on the addition of Wikilinks. There are just a fine amount of them. I have been through the article thoroughly and have been assured by my other group members that the Wikilinks provided are enough for our future enthusiasts/scientists to begin the process of becoming educated and humbled.

Lastly, we are in the process of adding images. Thank you for your time. Have a nice day. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brolenchek (talk • contribs) 02:38, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Review Two

This article was very interesting and well put together overall. I think you did a great jobs with the subsections/headings, with the table of contents, and with citations. However, some of the material gets very confusing. First, the first sentence is really complicated. I found it to be very confusing and believe other readers would be as well. One way to improve it would be to break down the sentence into two sentences. Keeping the sentences short and simple will help the readers follow along and have a better understanding of the material. Additionally, I think you could add more links to the article page. If there's no link available, then I believe it would be helpful to provide a sentence to briefly explain what the subject is. On that note, be careful about what you link. If you look back at your page, the items that are in red do not have a linked page available. Also, I would add an image as well to the page.

Another suggestion would be to omit article names and authors from your article page. I recommend that to state the findings and just refer to the article in the reference section. An example of this would be when you stated, "A paper by titled 'Neuronal Binding of Space and Time'...". I think you could omit naming the article and just state the findings. Furthermore, I believe everything on a Wikipedia page should be paraphrased or put into your own words. In this article page, there are a few quotes so my suggestion would be to omit the quotes. On that note, with the quotes, this article sounds more like a research paper, with previous findings to support an idea. Excluding authors names, titles, and quotes will help this article sound more like an encyclopedia page.

Lastly, I looked through the article "Synchrony Unbound: A Critical Evaluation of the Temporal Binding Hypothesis". It is a secondary source, a review, and was correctly cited. However, I do not see that much information pulled from this article. It has a lot of information that seems helpful to your page such as other responses towards Von der Malsburg's proposal (1981). Additionally, I agree with the other prior primary reviewer when noting that some of the articles are a little older than recommended. I would recommend to stay within the last 10 years if possible.

Overall, your page is looking great! With this Wikipedia page, I learned a lot about neural binding that I did not know before.PrestonBIO (talk) 19:14, 11 April 2015 (UTC)PrestonBIO

Response from the Authors

Dear PrestonBIO,

We want to start off by thanking you for your feedback! We took your advice in trying to simplify our writing style, particularly in the first sentence and paragraph. We have also scanned the page and added additional links as well as several images. The nonexistent links have also been removed from the page.

In terms of including article titles and authors on the page, we took some of your suggestions but left a few things unchanged. We did remove the article titles, but we felt that in some cases, it was appropriate to include quotes and researchers' names in the body of the text due to the highly speculative nature of the topic of neural binding. There are many varying viewpoints and hypotheses regarding its mechanisms, and since the idea is still in its early stages we felt that we needed to include this information to do justice to the topic. Still, we did try to minimize our usage of the quotes. This relative lack information on neural binding is also what led us to make the decision to use the older research articles. We feel that the history of the topic is relevant and important information to include in the beginning stages of research on neural binding. These articles are also the foundation upon which all of the later research is built, so they need to be cited in order for the article to be complete. Yayneuro (talk) 22:31, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

Review Three

I’ll start by saying that a lot of the changes I’m going to suggest are grammatical changes that I feel like would use the voice that I would write with. This in no way means that what I’m suggesting is the right thing to do, or perhaps even correct for that matter. I’m hoping what I suggest helps the reader navigate through the piece in a more fluid motion.

Introduction

The introductory sentence seems a little too demanding of the reader to keep reading through the commas on topics that they might not be well versed in. I would suggest breaking up the sentence after the link to binding problem, just to give the reader a pause and a chance to click on the link before continuing with the information. Also, I sort of find myself needing to reread the last chunk of the first paragraphs several times to fully understand what was trying to be conveyed. “Couplings of networks” threw me off a bit, and I had to backtrack to figure out what was being said. Otherwise, I like the flow of the introduction section, starting with the definition, moving to what kinds of questions this mechanism needs to answer, and moving to difficulties of a proposed model.

Gestalt psychology and correlating critiques

In the first line of the second paragraph, I would recommend putting a comma in after the link to single-unit recording. In the second paragraph, you seem to be missing the author when you are introducing the paper “Neuronal Binding of Space and Time.” In the third paragraph, I would suggest putting a comma in after “make correct bindings” and I would remove the comma two sentences later that follows the word “that,” or maybe rephrasing that sentence to “The idea of attentional binding is as follows:” The sentence “This ratio of 1:1 could simply not work.” Seems kind of unnecessary to end the paragraph. I would suggest either removing the sentence as a whole or rewording it. I appreciate the use of academic papers in this section. When balanced with the wiki group’s own words, I think the flow of information works well.

Proposed Models

I would suggest putting a comma after the word encoding in the second sentence, as it is a relatively lengthy sentence. I’m not sure if Criticism is its own section, or is just a heading after which sub sections relating to criticism follow it up? The font is a different size, which makes me believe it is. The first sentence in Quantum models is pretty lengthy, and I would suggest breaking it up.

Test Cases

In the second sentence of the sensory section, is there a better word to use for “things?” I would change “Much of the research for the understanding” to “Much of the research regarding the understanding.” I think you should indicate which study the experimental determination of 40 hz was from. I would change the sentence “there must be help from the dorsal thalamus” to “assistance is needed from the dorsal thalamus” or something of that nature. I would change “between what is happening in the brain and outside of it” to “between what is happening inside and outside of the brain.” Perhaps for the last sentence, explaining why/how the low thresholds allow for quick sensory awareness.

Cognitive

I would suggest putting “states” in after REM sleep. At the start of the third paragraph, I would change features to structures. I would refigure the structure of the first sentence of the last paragraph. It is easy to see what is trying to be said, but I feel as if it’s kind of choppy.

Learning and Memory

I really like the wording of this paragraph. It is easy to follow, and is simple yet sophisticated. In my opinion, this particular section is great as it is!

Clinical Implications

In the Autism section, there is a sentence which talk about the one major piece of evidence, and another that described the rate at which autistic brains develops. I think readers would benefit from a source here, knowing from which study the evidence came from and knowing where it was taken from.

Regarding pictures, I think a reader would benefit from an some kind of image that shows some anatomical structure of the brain, since many anatomical structures are mentioned and they play a critical part in the relationships of binding. Perhaps for the clinical implications section, pictures showing development of the brain in autistic or schizophrenic persons would be beneficial to the readers. But since one of the criteria under “what is a good article” is illustrations, pictures are a must. Even something like some of the scientists mentioned in the piece would be aesthetically pleasing to the reader (hopefully.)

Overall, I thought the piece was very informative, and also well written. I feel as though there is enough external links to direct a reader if they seek more information than what is given on the page. There is plenty of secondary sources given, and I feel as though the group did a good job on using there own voice to avoid wordiness of secondary sources. Good work! Specialtexas (talk) 00:42, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Review Four

Overall, I found the article well written and very interesting. I am majoring in psychology, and felt the article nicely represented both the neuroscience and the psychology aspects of neural binding.

Guidelines for Good Article-->

Well Written: The writing is too technical in many places, and some terms warrant more explanation (see comments below)

Verifiable with no original research: You cite original research and even take direct quotes from it. Try to use secondary review sources only and paraphrase the results.

Broad in Coverage: Covers lots, but is a bit too techinally detailed in certain areas (see comments below)

Neutral: This article is free of bias.

Illustrated: This article needs more pictures. I included specific areas where images could be included in the comments below.

I have a few suggestions for improving the article, and figure they would be more easily understood if I listed them by subcategory.

Introduction: The Introduction seems too technical for the general public. The sentences, especially the very first, seemed very content heavy. I would suggest perhaps using more sentences to relay that same amount of information and including a bit more explanation. Try to use more general terms rather than neuroscience wording. However, you included lots of internal links, which I found very helpful!

Gestalt Psychology: You included an internal link for Gestalt psychology twice in the first two sentences. I would the second link. In the last sentence of the first paragraph, you said “The scientists that supported this theory were solely focused on the idea that that mechanisms…”. The second that should be changed to “the”. Instead of relying on internal links, perhaps both include the link but also explain the term after you use it. It may be difficult for readers to keep having to click on links while in the middle of reading the article. For example, you talk about Gamma wave activity and link it but do not explain it. Gestalt psychology would be a good place to insert an image. Gestalt psychology is involved in optical illusions, such as using negative white space to create the image of a shape, like a triangle (shows how we see things in a global manner, rather than as individual parts). There are tons of these pictures on the web, and on the gestalt psychology wikipage. You probably should not address specific primary studies. Wikipedia likes to see more secondary information that sums up research. You definitely should not directly cite the literature like you do for the “Neuronal Binding of Space and Time” article or for L. Chen’s viewpoint on neural binding. I would summarize the studies in a way that the general public understands the results and what they mean for neural binding as a whole.

Proposed Models: you used an external link for Christoph Von der Malsburg, but a wikipage about him does not exist. Again, the writing style seems to technical with little to no explanation of terms like “spike coordination”, “”rate code”, and “spike rate coding”. Maybe you should explain what the temporal binding hypothesis is before you talk about the history.

Test Cases: Again, you linked to a wikipage about “sensory awareness” that does not exist. You don’t really need the link though, because you explained the term well in the next sentence. This section seems like it is written in less technical terminiology. That’s great! I’m not sure if the cat study used was from a primary or secondary source; I would check that. This section was especially well-written.

Clinical Implications: You could include an image of diffusion tensor imaging, to show how it displays neuronal connectivity. Perhaps explain what anesthesia is (I know you included a link, but still). This section was very helpful in understanding the implications of incorrect neural binding.

I read the article “Crossmodal binding through neural coherence: implications for multisensory processing” by Senkowski, Schneider, Foxe, and Engel. It is a secondary review source, and is warranted for use on the neural binding wikipage. I enjoyed that the article began with a glossary of important terms. This glossary may be useful to further define complex terms like neuron oscillation in your paper. This article was cited twice in the introduction, and both citations included information found in the article. The article was published in 2008, so the information, especially fundamental introductory information, is not likely outdated.

Overall, I know it seems like a lot, but all of these are merely suggestions! I learned a lot from the wikipage and it is clear that all of you put a lot of work into it! Nice job. LaurenNicole7911 (talk) 01:54, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

Response from the Authors

Thanks for the response! I'll address it by section as written.

Introduction: the introduction is definitely heavy with content, so I appreciated your suggestion to break it into smaller, more directed sentences. I've made changes which reflect these comments (made by many reviewers) and utilize more wikilinks.

Gestalt: I got rid of the redundant wikilink, good catch. Fixed the minor grammatical error. I've chosen not to further explain terms which have been wikilinked for the sake of clear and direct content in the paragraph. I feel that this could disrupt the flow of the ideas being presented in the sections. We've added an illusion as suggested and feel that it is a valuable addition to the article. Although there is primary source information presented in the article, there is a majority of secondary information which we feel provides a suitable context for the content. This allows us to invoke specific, significant theories in the literature.

Proposed Models: We've removed the empty Von der Maalsberg wikilink.

Test Cases: The empty wikilink has been removed.

Clinical Implications: Some clarification has been added on anesthetics, I think the section really benefits from it.

Thanks so much! Tthiess (talk) 03:22, 23 April 2015 (UTC)tthiess

Secondary Reviews

Review One

I found this article extremely interesting and thought you did a great job! I particularly enjoyed the clinical implications section. After reading the rest of the article and becoming better aquatinted with the topic, this section did a nice job of showing how changes involving neural binding can impact a human's actions and thinking. Relating the topic to real life circumstances allows for a better understanding of the topic in general. My only criticism would be that the introduction section and interdisciplinary correlates section contain somewhat technical wording that can make the content confusing. Reading through these sections I really had to work to understand what was being said, so simplifying the wording is something to consider! Overall it is a good article on a very interesting topic. Mprosser17 (talk) 03:37, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

Review Two

As your primary reviewer stated your page could definitely use some pictures! You have a lot of great information and pictures would just add to the experience especially because you have so many opportunities to add pictures. As your secondary reviewer said, the first sentence of your introductory paragraph could use a lot of work to make it more clear to those who do not have as in depth of a background as you do about this topic. Also be aware that any links that show up in red are not associated with any page and you may want to go back and check on that! In the section about Gestalt, I am pretty sure wikipedia highly discourages the use of direct quotations on the page, you may want to just paraphrase that with the citation instead. Overall your article is great, very thorough, and follows a logical order. The clinical application part really brought this subject into reality and I thought that was a great addition to the article! Maddyshea3 (talk) 23:18, 11 April 2015 (UTC)

Review 3

I agree that there are sections of your page that could be reworded for clarify, especially the introduction. Make it simple, so common readers can understand with out backgrounds in science! Also, it seems like there are run on sentences throughout the paper. Make sure that the thoughts are completed but broken up into grammatically correct sentences. The topic is interesting but complicated. Making sure that it is readable for a standard audience would be the biggest change to make. You have a couple red links, make sure to take these out or see if the pages are named something different than what you have them coded for. Also, add some pictures and figures to aid in understanding. Due to the technical nature of your article figures could aid in understanding. Also, the anesthesia section is only a sentence long, is there more information that could be provided. If not, it doesn't make sense to have it as a subheading to me. As stated in other reviews, make sure to check your citations to make sure they correlate between their listing and when they are used in the article and avoid the full quotations. In science work, quotes are rarely used. Good read, very interesting! Thank you!Sfiore315 (talk) 23:30, 12 April 2015 (UTC)

Review 4

This article is a great extension of the neural binding. One piece of criticism I have for you would be to try and go through the article in order to make it easier to understand. Going through your article I often found myself thinking that the only way I would be able to understand this is if I had an extensive background in science. I would recommend relating to a younger audience and trying to help the reader better understand the content. Another thing I noticed was there were many red links. A red link means that there is not an article on wikipedia for such a topic. Therefore you need to go back through and remove these wiki-links. One suggestion I would have is to maybe find other parts that you can wiki-link in order to help explain the words that do not have wikipedia articles. Overall I thought this was a very well done article and enjoyed being able to read it. Good luck with your revisions. Scienceguy21 (talk) 03:36, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Review 5

To being with, the layout/organization of the article is very well put together. Also I really enjoyed reading the section about Gestalt psychology and correlating critiques because I personally have not been introduced to this before so it really caught my attention while reading it along with the fact that it was well written. The only suggestions that I would make would be that the introduction was a little difficult to read. I think that if possible it would be best to see if you can make it an easier read for the viewer just because people may not know what you are talking about. I know that it is not easy to do with something’s but I would see if you are able to do it with at least some of the introduction section. Also note that if the links are red that they do not exist so I would take out the one in the Interdisciplinary correlates section that is “neuroscience and psychology”, in the Temporal section “Christoph Von der Malsburg”, in the sensory section “sensory awareness”, in the Autism section “myelin” and lastly in the references section for number four. Overall, I enjoyed reading about Neural binding because I knew very little about it and this article gave me a broader perspective on it. Good job! Buchaly15 (talk) 06:38, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Review 6

This article is very interesting and well written. I especially liked the connections made to Gestalt psychology and Sigmund Freud’s theory of the subconscious mind. It was nice to finally understand some of the scientific evidence for these two theories. Although this article is well written, I also agree that it has a lot of technical words that make it difficult to understand. Even though I’m familiar with most of the technical words, I still had a hard time understanding some parts of the article. I would highly suggest trying to simplify your wording and possibly explaining more some of the most important concepts instead of just linking them to other wikipedia articles. For example, someone with little scientific background would have a hard time understanding what “synchronized oscillations” and “spikes” are and how they contribute to neural signals. Pictures and diagrams would also help clarify some of the concepts. Overall, this is a very well written and organized article. I would just try simplify the wording to make it easier to understand. BiologyGF (talk) 18:42, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Review 7

Neural Binding is an interesting topic to write about. This article gives a broad overview of multiple proposed understandings of this topic. However it would be helpful to use simpler terms in order to appeal to a general audience. For example in the lead paragraph, the phrase, “conscious unification of highly distributed endogenous and exogenous neural information” appears. This sentence could be streamlined to make the first sentence of your article more digestible. Another example of a sentence that should be made more digestible is in the second sentence of the proposed temporal mechanism, “one of conventional rate code in relation to the ‘effectiveness’ of the feature it is encoding and another which is conveyed in terms of spike coordination between assemblies of neurons”. Here, “conventional rate code” and “spike coordination” should be explained or at least linked to a page that will explain these terms. Another word to define/change is “preattentively” used under the heading “Gestalt psychology and correlating critiques”. This word is used several times without actual explanation of what it means

As far as technical editing: Links that appear red should either be unlinked, redirected to an appropriate existing page, or a page should be made for them. Otherwise the reader is just directed to a page that does not exist. Additionally it would be great if the writers included PMIDs, DOIs for all of the cited material available online. Additionally a heading for “Gamma band activity” is not needed unless further explanation is given as to how neurons oscillate with this frequency or at least what this activity means. If no additional information is added, the single line there should be relocated to the “Temporal” heading.

In summary, try to consolidate information and make the article as digestible as possible for a general audience. Make sure that someone who reads the lead paragraph gains a clear, concise understanding of neural binding using as little jargon as possible. Btw777 (talk) 22:18, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

Review 8

I think that this article definitely helps out with explaining the concept of neural binding. My favorite part of the article is that it uses test cases to facilitate their explanation. By using a real life application of neural binding, it will definitely help the reader learn more about the topic in a more open ended depiction of the material. Also, the use of figures and images would be helpful as there is quite a lot of information listed in the articles. Images would help alleviate the focus of all text and allow the reader to get a visual of what neural binding might look like. Overall, this is a good article that needs a little refinement. The grammar looked to be well reviewed, so the revision process hopefully won't take too long. ReteshGSW94 (talk) 23:57, 13 April 2015 (UTC)

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