Jean-Pierre Changeux is a French neuroscientist who was a Ph.D. student of
Jacques Monod and Monod's colleague who shared their Nobel Prize, François Jacob.
Changeux argues that the central nervous system is not merely reactive (to external and internal stimuli), but is interactive and originates actions.
In 1973 he developed a formal model of synapse selection, which was a precursor of the "neural Darwinism" theory of Gerald Edelman.
The way the brain learns from its interaction with the environment is the selective stabilization of pre-existing neuronal structures, as opposed to the idea of creating new structures.
