Neuroscientists record two main data modalities: electromagnetic waves and Spiking activities. A longstanding debate in neuroscience is whether the brain waves are essential for understanding how the brain works, or are they merely epiphenomenal. In more scientific terms, do the waves carry a causal influence on the behavior when spiking activities are recorded?
When I first heard about this from
@ZabehErfan I assumed neuroscientists are already discussing in causal inference terms; turns out that it is not quite the case. Each neuroscientist has their own qualitative beliefs/knowledge about the brain mechanisms, but to our surprise, they are not using the causal inference semantics to express it.
The debate is not settled despite decades of advancement in recording technologies and statistical modeling breakthroughs, and it is not too surprising from a causal inference perspective: due to Causal Hierarchy Theorem (
@eliasbareinboim et al. 2020), no amount of data alone can identify the causal quantities. Thus it is necessary to use a formal language to express the qualitative knowledge, and
@yudapearl’s do-calculus is precisely the syntax and semantics we need to settle the spike-wave duality.
In particular, we ground the discussion in Structural Causal Models, and boil down the epiphenomenality claim to assessing a certain inequality:
P(behavior | spikes) ?= P(behavior | spikes, do(waves))
Once the qualitative domain knowledge is properly expressed in causal terms, e.g., a semi-Markovian causal graph, then a graphical criterion for epiphenomenality can be derived. Grounding the discussion in causal language sheds light on many hidden aspects of the problem, even if the debate remains unsettled:
1. What is the inference bottle neck? Is it the amount of data, regimes of data, scope of measurements, or the statistical modeling methods?
2. Data-driven knowledge discovery: what can be said about the causal graph using the data? which forms of heterogeneity and surrogate interventions are useful?
If you’re at
@NeurIPSConf come check out our poster along many other cool work at
@CauScien workshop!
Finally a causal formulation of spike-wave duality.
Over the past couple of years I have been constantly asked about causality of brain waves.
After two years of spontaneously thinking about this, I dared to put this "baby" out.
Shout out to my talented collaborator
@causalkasra whom perfected the causal machinery behind this work.
If you are at
@NeurIPSConf come to our poster and let’s chat.
arxiv.org/abs/2511.06602