Thermally activated processes: the underlying mechanism of activated state formation.

In the present manuscript, we highlight the contradictions in the thermally activated processes theory which treats a system's activated state as a state of the phonon subsystem. We offer an alternative model, in which the activated state is treated as an electron subsystem state. The mechanism of the activated state formation is as follows: thermal fluctuations excite electrons of some particles within the activation zone.

A function-based mapping of sensory integration along the cortical hierarchy.

Sensory information mainly travels along a hierarchy spanning unimodal to transmodal regions, forming multisensory integrative representations crucial for higher-order cognitive functions. Here, we develop an fMRI based two-dimensional framework to characterize sensory integration based on the anchoring role of the primary cortex in the organization of sensory processing. Sensory magnitude captures the percentage of variance explained by three primary sensory signals and decreases as the hierarchy ascends, exhibiting strong similarity to the known hierarchy and high stability across different conditions.