Democratic Integration: A Theory of Adaptive Sensory Integration

The human brain has to integrate the inputs it receives from different sensory modalities into a coherent description of its environment. This integration is often adaptive, showing recalibration or suppression of discordant sensory modalities. This paper proposes a qualitative theory of sensory integration which relates these adaptation phenomena to the anatomy of the neocortex and a rapid reversible synaptic mechanism as proposed in von der Malsburg''s correlation theory of brain function.