  To learn and reason in the presence of uncertainty, the brain must be capable
of imposing some form of regularization. Here we suggest, through theoretical
and computational arguments, that the combination of noise with synchronization
provides a plausible mechanism for regularization in the nervous system. The
functional role of regularization is considered in a general context in which
coupled computational systems receive inputs corrupted by correlated noise.
Noise on the inputs is shown to impose regularization, and when synchronization
upstream induces time-varying correlations across noise variables, the degree
of regularization can be calibrated over time. The proposed mechanism is
explored first in the context of a simple associative learning problem, and
then in the context of a hierarchical sensory coding task. The resulting
qualitative behavior coincides with experimental data from visual cortex.
