Coincidence as a Bit of Information: Receiver-Defined Spatiotemporal Events, Phase-Wave Differentials, and the Sensory-to-Action Bridge

In April 2017, Micah Blumberg publicly proposed that a coincidence pattern could serve as a bit of information in the brain. His September 2018 clarification made the intended claim more precise than the later deposited paper: coincidence was the basis of an information unit, not a claim that one spike always equals exactly one Shannon bit; the relevant event could be subthreshold; and its information content could be greater or smaller than one bit. In 2022, the proposal was extended across synaptic, dendritic-branch, somatic-burst, and oscillating-network scales, then joined to the tonic-context/phasic-differential architecture of Self Aware Networks (SAN), Neural Array Projection Oscillation Tomography (NAPOT), and phase-wave differentials (PWDs). A 2024 book carried that joined mechanism into a sustained account of neural rendering. This paper supplies the missing mathematical and experimental contract. It distinguishes (i) raw temporal co-occurrence, (ii) a receiver-defined detected event, and (iii) a causally used event. A receiver combines delayed, weighted, and phase-sensitive inputs against its current tonic context. Phase-compatible PWD inputs can add constructively; a thresholded receiver can convert that continuous resultant into a discrete event symbol. The symbol is binary only after the receiver, window, threshold, and alphabet have been declared. Its self-information is −log2 p, its entropy is at most one bit for a binary alphabet, and its task-relevant value is the conditional information it contributes beyond firing-rate, stimulus-history, and state baselines. The resulting SAN hypothesis is a measurable chain: broad tonic coordination → phasic PWD events → phase-compatible summation and locking → increased effective receiver drive → motor-pool threshold crossing → neuromuscular transmission → muscle or vocal action → sensory return. Bat vocalization research provides a particularly useful architecture-level test case: pre-vocal frontal and striatal oscillations predict call class, frontal-to-auditory information flow predominates before vocalization, and echolocation produces a later bottom-up return. These findings do not themselves prove the SAN mechanism. They make it possible to test whether receiver-relative PWD variables add explanatory and predictive value beyond established rate, power, phase, and connectivity measures.