4 ms·
Hi Eric, I haven't read the paper in depth yet, but we've discussed it some as a lab. I love the concept, but I'm a little perplexed by something I hadn't thoug
by kevinalexbrown 10y ago
Hi Eric, I haven't read the paper in depth yet, but we've discussed it some as a lab. I love the concept, but I'm a little perplexed by something I hadn't thought of when we first discussed it.
It looks like many analyses were performed by binning transistor switching as you might spikes from neurons, or by linearly combining transistor activity across transistors or time.
This is slightly puzzling to me, because transistors would appear to not work on the basis of average activity at their level of computational composition. I would be surprised if you could really understand circuit activity at a computational level with most of the measurements you describe.
On the other hand, I suspect the methods used work slightly better in a real brain. Of course, the computational purpose of many neurons is difficult to parse or even construct useful hypotheses about. But at the very least, neurons in the outer periphery seem to behave in a way that is at least consistent with firing rate, e.g. impulses at the neuromuscular junction to cause muscle contraction, and retinal ganglion cells to fire at higher rates when the input matches their certain luminance features.
- stochastician 10y agoI think that's totally correct! but I'm skeptical that a lot of the non-sensory neurons work on the basis of average activity -- rate codes versus timing codes and all of that. I spent a fair amount of time in the hippocampus where individual spikes. We were always going to run into challenges with how to interpret the voltage levels of the transistor, so we tried to be "fair" and not cheat on either side (we could have decoded the values on the memory bus or the adder numerically, for example). For the next paper, though, we're taking a more careful look at a lot of these encoding questions, as well as trying to use processors with a greater degree of functional specialization so we can more accurately capture what's going on.