7 ms·

Tangentially related: Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? [1] (short answer: not with current analytic tools) [1] https://journals.plos.org/plo

by gbjw 7y ago

Tangentially related: Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? [1] (short answer: not with current analytic tools) [1] https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

lonelappde 7y ago
That's a bit silly because neuroscience tools are built got biological brains. electrical engineering tools are used on microprocessors, as they should.
- jvanderbot 7y ago
  OP and TFA meant "Would a similar method of observing a complex, connected system of systems work on a less complex example like a microchip if we had just up and found one?"
SubiculumCode 7y ago
This is an over-rated article by those outside the field of neuroscience. While it brings up a few good points, it fails to acknowledge the sophistication of our neuroscience and behavioral techniques, and the value of converging evidence across levels of description. Also, its relatedness to the present article is tenuous at best.
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  I don't care how often I get down voted for making the above comment in response to posts about this article. I am a neuroscientist and I will defend my field from overrated, simplistic criticisms that happen to appeal to the HN crowd's sensibilities.
  - hsitz 7y ago
    Do you have any suggestions for what the average layperson could read to get a better understanding of contemporary neuroscience? Any articles or books you'd recommend?
    - SubiculumCode 7y ago
      That is a bit difficult because the field is very broad, and I don't tend to read popular science books. Mostly, I'd look up recent review articles on Google Scholar...
    - dr_dshiv 7y ago
      "rhythms in the brain" is highly recommended
  - earthboundkid 7y ago
    Ah yes, the very mature science that has no consensus description of what memory is.
    - SubiculumCode 7y ago
      As someone who did his dissertation on episodic memory development, I see the wry humor, but I think your comment is a non sequitur. It is not that we have figured it all out, but rather can we gleam knowledge about cognition (e.g. episodic memory) and the brain from neuroscience and behavioral techniques. I think the answer is clearly yes. In terms of memory, we understand, for example, that the hippocampus is critical to some forms of memory, most critically memory that requires binding of arbitrary information/percepts representations into a more cohesive event representation, that the hippocmapus may achieve this through computational properties potentially afforded to it in microcircuits in subfields of the hippcampus (e.g. pattern completion from heavy recurrnecy in CA3) and pattern separation of information in the dentate gyrus, etc. and so on.
- forgotpwagain 7y ago
  Mostly agreed. In my eyes, the takeaway from this piece is not that neuroscience is futile and that we should give up, but rather that we now should redouble efforts on analysis methods to make sense of the large, complex datasets that we are on the cusp of generating.
  - SubiculumCode 7y ago
    I'd have preferred to see follow up experiments conducted on the microcircuit. If the test bed was made into a platform to ease set-up and experimentation by other researchers, maybe the paper would be built upon. Specifically, I'd like to see a series of behavioral neuroscience papers that looked at specific responses to user behavior, differences in task demand, etc, then coupled with inferences from knowledge about "neurons" i.e. transistor, registers, etc, that one would gather from the "harder" neurosciences.

by gbjw 7y ago

lonelappde 7y ago

That's a bit silly because neuroscience tools are built got biological brains. electrical engineering tools are used on microprocessors, as they should.

jvanderbot 7y ago
OP and TFA meant "Would a similar method of observing a complex, connected system of systems work on a less complex example like a microchip if we had just up and found one?"

SubiculumCode 7y ago

This is an over-rated article by those outside the field of neuroscience. While it brings up a few good points, it fails to acknowledge the sophistication of our neuroscience and behavioral techniques, and the value of converging evidence across levels of description. Also, its relatedness to the present article is tenuous at best.

SubiculumCode 7y ago
I don't care how often I get down voted for making the above comment in response to posts about this article. I am a neuroscientist and I will defend my field from overrated, simplistic criticisms that happen to appeal to the HN crowd's sensibilities.
- hsitz 7y ago
  Do you have any suggestions for what the average layperson could read to get a better understanding of contemporary neuroscience? Any articles or books you'd recommend?
  - SubiculumCode 7y ago
    That is a bit difficult because the field is very broad, and I don't tend to read popular science books. Mostly, I'd look up recent review articles on Google Scholar...
  - dr_dshiv 7y ago
    "rhythms in the brain" is highly recommended
- earthboundkid 7y ago
  Ah yes, the very mature science that has no consensus description of what memory is.
  - SubiculumCode 7y ago
    As someone who did his dissertation on episodic memory development, I see the wry humor, but I think your comment is a non sequitur. It is not that we have figured it all out, but rather can we gleam knowledge about cognition (e.g. episodic memory) and the brain from neuroscience and behavioral techniques. I think the answer is clearly yes. In terms of memory, we understand, for example, that the hippocampus is critical to some forms of memory, most critically memory that requires binding of arbitrary information/percepts representations into a more cohesive event representation, that the hippocmapus may achieve this through computational properties potentially afforded to it in microcircuits in subfields of the hippcampus (e.g. pattern completion from heavy recurrnecy in CA3) and pattern separation of information in the dentate gyrus, etc. and so on.
forgotpwagain 7y ago
Mostly agreed. In my eyes, the takeaway from this piece is not that neuroscience is futile and that we should give up, but rather that we now should redouble efforts on analysis methods to make sense of the large, complex datasets that we are on the cusp of generating.
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
  I'd have preferred to see follow up experiments conducted on the microcircuit. If the test bed was made into a platform to ease set-up and experimentation by other researchers, maybe the paper would be built upon. Specifically, I'd like to see a series of behavioral neuroscience papers that looked at specific responses to user behavior, differences in task demand, etc, then coupled with inferences from knowledge about "neurons" i.e. transistor, registers, etc, that one would gather from the "harder" neurosciences.