linkedin facebook twitter rss

20 Feb Learning Cause and Effect

Cause and Effect Lightbulbs

Sparks of Kinesthesia When does a person begin to learn about the relationships between things that happen? Does the brain have an innate capacity to make the connections necessary to associate outcomes with catalysts? At what point does a person begin to learn that she or he can affect outcomes in the real world? One […]

13 Feb Remember Yorrick

Excavate Knowledge

Mouldering Memories Sometimes dredging up old memories is a major operation in excavation. Yet we have an amazing capacity to retain information learned long ago and not recalled in recent memory. Today, I’d like to address questions of learning, especially in the context of the earliest learned things. In order to recognize something, we must […]

13 Feb Yorrick: Seeds of Knowledge

Spiral Pattern of Light

A Wise Geek once said: “Knowledge acquisition typically refers to the process of acquiring, processing, understanding, and recalling information through one of a number of methods. This is often a field of study closely tied to cognition, memory, and the way in which human beings are able to understand the world around them.” Our exploration begins […]

11 Feb Conscious Sensibility

Spiderweb 1

Watergate Revisited More than one President of the United States has been asked this question: “What happened, and how soon did you know about it?” Many cognitive psychologists perform experiments in which they ask subjects (people) the same question, seeking to mark the boundaries between conscious and unconscious phenomena. I recently spoke of mindfulness. Wakefulness may be a […]

08 Feb Seeing Within: Proprioception for Robots

Nervous System

I saw a couple movies awhile back, “The Terminator” and “Terminator 2” in which artificial intelligence in computers became hazardous to the survival of humanity. One of the premises, as I recall, was that the critical event that lead to the disastrous attempt of man-made machines to destroy humanity, was when they became “self-aware”. This […]

03 Feb Mapping a Thought

Human Mind

What is truly going on in a network of billions of cells with trillions of connections? Can we even begin to figure it out – is mapping a thought possible? When I was in the midst of my studies in which I initially wrote this, MRIs and CAT scans were the best of our ability […]

31 Jan Feature Selectivity in Vision

Color, Feature and Line Selectivity

This post is another in the series on specialization, in which the author stresses the need for very heterogeneous models for imitating brain capabilities with computers. An important discovery of neurophysiological and cybernetic research is that many neurons, particularly those in areas of the brain that specialize in processing perceptual data, are feature selective. Vision processing is […]

27 Jan Go With the Flow

Brain Flow

Modeling Neural Electrical Flow Patterns From looking at possible mechanisms for information storage, we move back to its movement. It may be important to understand the patterns of electrical flow in the brain to define good models for artificial systems that attempt to match human competence in cognitive processing tasks. This is what neural network and […]

14 Jan Timing is Everything: Asynchronicity of E/I

Stopwatch

Time marches straight on in a never-ending rhythm, never stopping to rest – never missing a beat. After memory fails, and all the mainsprings unwind, time strides forward. Coincidence and synchronicity of events in the physical universe are time bound, but not necessarily meaning bound. In the human brain, time loses relevance and thought flows in lesser […]

14 Jan Visual Input Processing

Brodmann Back of the Brain

The visual cortex in the human brain is arguably the pattern after which most artificial neural networks were modeled: the flow of signals is directional through layers 1, 2 then 3; and large numbers of the cells are touched by the flow of action potentials through the system. The variations in the cells, however, contrasts with the artificial […]