Can game theory help us understand neurobiological interactions across biological scales?

Schematic neural network as a signaling game.See figure 3 from Fenton et al. 2023.

José Hurtado

The pandemic forced us to pause, which gave us the opportunity to learn some game theory guided by Bud Mishra’s expertise. In this opinion piece we consider the potential for the concepts and formalisms of information asymmetric signaling games to explain all sorts of neurobiological phenomena, operating at diverse levels of biology including molecular signaling, synaptic plasticity, neural discharge, network cofiring, and neural circuits. José’s network simulations that incorporate optimal expenditure of metabolic energy to drive game theoretic utility can make artificial neural network behavior more robust. The paper is only an opinion piece and so doesn’t have the game theoretic simulations. Stay tuned!