3 ms·
The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them from New Sensations
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- nazgul17 6y agoDoes anyone have an insight into how this orthogonality physically works? My understanding is that "orthogonal" is used metaphorically here, and I am curious to know how it works under the hood.
- sdwr 6y agoThe article isn't available for free, but the preprint is at: https://postlab.psych.wisc.edu/files/9215/6743/5810/libbybuschman2019.pdf https://postlab.psych.wisc.edu/files/9215/6743/5810/libbybus... Very cool experiment. They played half-second-long sequences of chords for mice, and had electrodes in the auditory cortex recording a bunch of individual neurons while that was happening. Sometimes the mice heard ABCD, sometimes XYC*D, and rarely the third chord was switched out, so they heard ABC*D or XYCD. The mice heard the chords thousands of times, and the timestamps were all synced up so that the researchers had lots of examples of "a mouse hearing an A chord" or "a mouse hearing a C* chord" or "a mouse hearing a tenth of a second of silence between an A and a B chord" Here's where the black magic is. They used their neuron spike data as training data for an ML algorithm that learned "fingerprints" for each chord in the overall neural data, then fed the data back into the algo for analysis. The algorithm is learning what hearing an "A" looks like from the data, and then measuring the data according to how much the data looks like what the algo thinks hearing an "A" looks like. Craziness! That's really bootstrapping by the original definition. [not done writing about this, have to read the rest of the paper first though]