Brain optimizes for bits per ATP

I read the book Principles of Neural Design recently. It’s extremely dense, which you’d hate or love depending on how much you’re in awe with how our brain works. I totally loved it! The book is unique in trying to explain the wonderous complexity of brain using few unifying principles, all of which can be traced to constraints evolution faces, especially with energy efficiency. The central insight from the book is this: Brains maximize information (bits) per ATP Consuming energy and producing ATP is hard. The organism has to work to get energy. During evolution, inefficient designs get outcompeted by efficient designs so we should expect to see efficient designs. For brain, this means squeezing max information and computing using least amount of energy. From this insight, we could derive the following principles: Send only what’s surprising. Why waste energy in sending what can be predicted/estimated efficiently. This explains why predictive coding makes sense for the brain. Minimize…