5 ms·
Learning produces a hippocampal cognitive map in the form of a state machine
- throwaway290 3y ago(in mice)
- Nowado 3y agoIt bothers me way less when it's not a medical treatment research.
- insanitybit 3y agoMy naive perspective is that the foundational properties of the brain are probably really similar between mice and humans. For example, we have put human brain cells into rats and the brain cells have done... something. The chemistry is probably different in a bunch of ways "rats evolved to use this hormone to feel X, we use it to tell us Y" or some other such thing, but structurally I'd imagine that neurons function similarly. Anyone know more?
- convolvatron 3y agoeven if there are structural differences, just the fact that we can establish a loose isomorphism between our knowledge about computational models and the cognitive processes of any living creature seems like a really profound step forward for cognitive science if it holds up. there isn't any issue about clinical relevance
- insanitybit 3y agoI agree
- chaxor 3y agoLack of Wernicke's and semantic representation similarity is a big difference for one
- SubiculumCode 3y agoThere are some important differences between mice and human hippocampi, including different long range connections...however the overall patterns of organization across the hippocampal subfields e.g. heavy recurancy in CA3, sparse separation of signals in dentate gyrus, etc...these are very similar in structure and response patterns between species. ..gotta love the spiking data in human epilepsy patients
- xjay 3y ago2020-12: Some research done with human subjects regarding how the brain reacts when we're reading code. > The researchers saw little to no response to code in the language regions of the brain. Instead, they found that the coding task mainly activated the so-called multiple demand network. This network, whose activity is spread throughout the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain, is typically recruited for tasks that require holding many pieces of information in mind at once, and is responsible for our ability to perform a wide variety of mental tasks. [1] [1] https://news.mit.edu/2020/brain-reading-computer-code-1215 https://news.mit.edu/2020/brain-reading-computer-code-1215
- mdp2021 3y agoGood news (are suggested) since the hippocampus is one of the few places in which neural regeneration is possible.
- padolsey 3y agoIt seems to reflect the general way we understand the brain right? Wiring together/firing together? Then ~ abra cadabra ~ meaningful blobs of brain buzzy stuff emerge from seemingly simple rules? It seems beautifully pure that mind maps are literally "mind maps" in a sense, a bit like we have grid cells arranged proximally to mirror physical spaces as we walk through them.
- samstave 3y agoWe need to study hummingbirds deeper, and ravens They have the largest hippocampus to brain ratio and have 3D spatial memory of all their food source locations as well as (with ravens) who their human enemies are. We can learn a lot about memory from these birds
- samstave 3y agodocumenting a random thought here: The hummingbirds hippocampus allows for an astonishing memory which will give them a 3d map to all the food-nodes it knows of. What I wonder is if the flapping of the wings is so unconscious to the fore-front of the birds intentions, such that ALL of its awareness is in its intent to find food - and she looks, and steers her head wherever - but the hippo just complies and manages flying the bird - think of the hippocampus as an in flight navigator that the frontal perception of the bird can dial in and direct. what would be interesting would be to map out feeding locations, then see if the follow the same route? (p.s. Ive captured hummingbirds and even taken them in an Uber, had them fly around inside of the car on a freeway... and had one that met me at breaktime daily)... they are my spirit animal... but I think their hippocampus-brain ratio is the key to memory
- ilaksh 3y agoThey mention an RNN with Hebbian learning. What's the SOTA for that? I found this: https://github.com/JonathanAMichaels/hebbRNN https://github.com/JonathanAMichaels/hebbRNN Is there anything optimized for GPU or TPU?
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- giardini 3y agotl;dr or ELI5 please?
- x86x87 3y agoThe brain is just a bunch of ifs
- taneq 3y agoQuantity of ifs has a quality all of its own. After all, a CPU is just a bunch of transistors, and a transistor is just an 'if'.
- x86x87 3y agoThis was the ELI5 part. Of course that the wiring of the ifs is as importany as the quantity of ifs
- taneq 3y agoAah, true, and therein lies the rub. I definitely think the structure and function of cortical columns as described by Numenta is getting close to the mark on a part of it. It seems to me like Transformer models are doing something very similar to this, where each attention head is roughly analogous to a cortical column. You can't build a mind on prediction alone, though (or can you?) so we need helper structures like the hippocampus.
- x86x87 3y agoprediction is an essential part. basically between the state you have + the inputs from the sensors you generate a prediction. this prediction is compared to the "real world" and the state is adjusted until the prediction matches the output.
- gridspy 3y agoA hidden state machine plus a neural net appears to be similar to how mice learn to navigate a maze. If you hold them still and probe their brain while they navigate in VR you see a state-machine map appear in their mind. That map varies if the VR map varies.
- Animats 3y agoActual paper text.[1] How the mouse's brain is scanned, very intrusively.[2] That's both impressive and scary. They're scanning the surface of part of the brain at a good scan rate at high detail. They're seeing the activation of individual neurons. This is much finer detail than non-intrusive functional MRI scans. Does the data justify the conclusions? The maze being used is a simple T-shaped maze. The "state machine" supposedly learned is extremely simple. They conclude quite a bit about the learning mechanism from that. But now that they have this experimental setup working, there should be more results coming along. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.03.551900v2.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.08.03.551900v2.... [2] https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-017-0426-y https://bmcbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12915-01...
- ImHereToVote 3y agoSo technically we have the technology to simulate a human brain. Just not anywhere near real time. And not at any semblance of reasonable cost. And not guaranteed to simulate the important parts.
- aatd86 3y agoAt the civilian level. Who knows what exists out there... :|
- Animats 3y agoThis is a misconception that shows up now and then. In the 1940s through the 1970s, the military really did have a broad tech edge over the civilian market. The USAF was once the largest buyer of transistors. In the 1980s, the civilian electronics market became much larger and passed the military market. This upset some military people. Articles about "premature VHSIC integration" appeared, complaining that civilian electronics was ahead of military devices. There were a lot of minicomputers in DoD systems for years after everybody else was using smaller and cheaper microprocessors. Some stuff was even older. The USAF's satellite control facility and NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain had the same consoles NASA used for 1960s Apollo well into the late 1980s. We had a very early Sun workstation, one with an auxiliary color monitor. Someone put a world map on the screen, and overlaid it with the current positions of USAF satellites and ground stations, as a demo. A visiting USAF general saw this, and demanded that the entire system be immediately shipped to the USAF's satellite control facility. They were still using big manual plotting boards, updated by people reading printouts, to track what was coming into range of each ground station. So the USAF got the Sun system and it was immediately replaced by a new one. There was some cool stuff. I got to see a system in the 1980s where you could look at stored photos and do pan, zoom, and rotate. The UI was a zoom lever, a pan joystick, and a rotate knob. Took a half rack of custom electronics. They were building something like Google Earth for satellite photos. Now, of course, everybody has that capability. There were niches where DoD tried to stay ahead. NSA put much effort and money into cryogenic computing. They had gigahertz electronics in the 1960s. There were several generations of NSA cryogenic technology, but each time, the commercial market pulled ahead with a cheaper and faster technology.[1] If you read DARPA solicitations, you can see where DoD is trying to get ahead. Non-GPS precision navigation is a big thing, for example. This was the typical pattern by 1990. DoD would be ahead in some very narrow niche for which there was little commercial market, but overall, behind commercial technology. I've been out of that world for many years, but from what I hear, it's still pretty much like that in the land of classified tanks. [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/will-the-nsa-finally-build-its-superconducting-spy-computer https://spectrum.ieee.org/will-the-nsa-finally-build-its-sup...
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoTeaching my kid has been fun and educational. The rule in the house is we don't say "I don't know." If we don't know something, we are required to think about it and then ask a question. Recently, he asked how an audio recoding dog trainer worked in terms of how it "went back up" because he couldn't see the internals. He knew that it went down and back up, and then knew that it was not electronic, but mechanical. I asked him to think about it. He thought, and I could see his mind working, thinking about everything in his mind where a toy of his would go down and up. He sat for around 20 seconds and asked, is it a spring? I was quite impressed considering he is 4 years old and was able to come to this conclusion. There is a map we create, a list of things that go up and down. From that list of things that can go up and down, knowing it was not a pulley or a plunger, because it returned to its original state, he's able to limit it to the one object that would work. The biggest jumps in my education have been directly related to people mapping Concepts and ideas instead of memorization. That's like the idea that everything is a file. From that framework you can pull out questions like, can I read, do I have permissions to read, can I write, so now when someone explains to me I knew shiny object, like a fancy Wiz Bang database, I asked a couple questions and generally know how it works.
- aio2 3y agoThat's something I do too, but a bit modified: instead of going to someone about a problem, we try and figure it out instead, and if we can't, we go and ask help while explaining our original solution.
- hanniabu 3y agoI really hate how people always try to put programming labels on brain activity "This is a state machine", "this is a natural net", "it's running a coroutine", "it's garbage collection"...
- convolvatron 3y agoThey aren’t just making a bad metaphor, they are actually establishing a correspondence
- MeriB 3y agohttps://youtu.be/9qOaII_PzGY https://youtu.be/9qOaII_PzGY