By a Whisker: Scientists Discover Predictive Coding in a Surprising Place

The closer you look at a biological phenomenon, the more complex and fascinating it gets. Most people probably figure that their pet dogs and cats use their facial whiskers to enhance their sense of touch. But would you have ever guessed that the twitching whiskers on mammals perform complex algorithms and do predictive coding?

That's what a recent paper in Nature Neuroscience says, based on experiments with rats. Three scientists from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, begin our jo...