For a long time, because attention seemed so intricately tied up with consciousness and other complex functions, scientists assumed that it was first and foremost a cortical phenomenon. A major departure from that line of thinking came in 1984, when Francis Crick, known for his work on the structure of DNA, proposed that the attentional searchlight was controlled by a region deep in the brain called the thalamus, parts of which receive input from sensory domains...
Anki is an open source framework for creating your own flash cards. A neat system for helping your kids with classwork, or even just testing yourself on topics.
Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and...
Yesterday was Neuralink’s unveiling of what they’ve been working on. Their team of engineers, neurosurgeons, and computer science experts are working on a “neural lace” brain-computer interface.
Elon Musk announced the launch of a company to work on this problem back in 2016. Seeing this amount of progress, it’s clear now that the science fiction story of a cybernetic implant looks like a possible near future reality. The idea itself conjures images of Neuromancer’s console cowboys and Effinger’s “moddies”, neural augmentations that...
Most of the popular conversation around intelligence these days (at least in circles I follow) is about the artificial variety — AI, deep learning, neural networks, and the like. Neuroscientists Jeff Hawkins and his company Numenta have been studying intelligence since 2005, but oriented on how the brain itself works. Hawkins’s belief is that true “general AI” won’t be possible at all if we can’t first understand deeply how the brain works.
He recently published a paper on the “Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence”, which posits that the brain is simultaneously generating predictions on multiple threads from different...
Neuroscientist Karl Friston is the world’s leading authority on brain imaging science and on the forefront of our understanding of how brains actually work. He’s the creator of the free energy principle, an idea that attempts to unify an organizing framework for what drives all life: minimizing free energy.
The predictive processing model is a cognitive framework for modeling how the brain synthesizes information from two channels:
The “bottoms up” stream of raw data coming in through our senses for processing
The “top down” stream of predictions about the world
These two channels merge together in a continuous interplay inside the brain and allow us to make sense of the world, with each system continually feeding back to the other in a process we’d refer to as “learning”.
“It may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk,” the authors wrote in the study. In this case, that would be a floppy disk that holds about 1.5 megabytes of information, or the equivalent of about a minute-long song as an Mp3 file. [3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain] The researchers estimate that in the best-case scenario, in a...