Wednesday, November 21, 2012

How to create a mind 4-6

So chapter 7 looks to be the meat of the book. He alluded to it several times in these chapters. This was basically an overview of some topics from biology and neuroscience. He went over all the other brain structures besides neocortex and talked about some other interesting thigs about neocortex - like the idea that visual areas can process auditory information in blind people.

He dismisses everything that doesn't have a "neocortex". And reptiles are just basically useless. I don't know what he thinks about turtle dorsal cortex-like structures.

He mentions that his pattern recognizers are on order of hundreds of neurons, and basically is a cortical column. He says that they are intertwined in such a way that you wouldn't see them (for whatever reason). He talked about how most of synaptic structure was hard encoded within the columns, and that learning was really about changing connections between columns. Connections are avaible and utilized or pruned - not completely regrown.

One thing he talked about that I was just thinking about was the temporal expansion of receptive fields. There was some work by Uri Hasson he cited that pertains to increasing temporal expansion of the higher-order receptive fields. It will be important to consider how this is implemented by neurons. At the highest level it could be like Mongillo, there could be different amounts of like STP/STD that changes the temporal responses of the circuits. It would be interesting to know if neurons with longer receptive fields are firing constantly when their preferred stimulus is shown.

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