Tag Archives: neural network
25 Feb Discrimination, Association and Recognition
Discrimination Although discrimination has negative connotations, we do it every millisecond. We must discriminate between distractions and important information we see and hear. The environment is filled with ambient noise, sometimes so much so as to prevent understanding. Once we have filtered out the noise through discrimination, we must further discriminate between incorrect and correct interpretations of the […]
21 Feb Pattern Recognition in Two Dimensions
Perceptual Grid We live in three dimensional space, and understanding three dimensions is critical to our ability to go places and do things, but we comprehend things in many dimensions. Our senses, however, tend to flatten things out. Images are projected on our light-sensitive retinas in exactly two-dimensional patterns. The rods and cones possess light-sensitive […]
20 Feb Learning Cause and Effect
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 […]
17 Feb Call in the Reinforcements
I think of learning like photography. The length of time of the exposure and the width of the aperture determine whether the film or digital array receives sufficient light to capture the image. The focus of the lens is important too. As adults, we can sometimes control the number of times we return to a […]
15 Feb Perceptual Signatures
We will momentarily leave Yorrick in his warm, cozy waterbed, to consider perceptual signatures that take place in the world outside him. This world is characterized by patterns, visual, audio, aromatic, tactile and complex, that each have their own signature. The section of this blog on cognition, which deals with logic and reasoning, explores that […]
12 Feb Conscious Phenomena
Conscious Phenomena For the past few posts, I have been exploring consciousness. Extra-sensory perception is a part, or an extension of consciousness. Are you sometimes psychic? Some people have truly remarkable extra-sensory capabilities while others do not. I read a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, though I can’t for the life of me remember the […]
03 Feb Mapping a Thought
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 […]
30 Jan From Aristotle to the Enchanted Loom
“Swiftly the brain becomes an enchanted loom, where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern-always a meaningful pattern-though never an abiding one” (Charles Sherrington). What of the centillion warps and woofs of ideation? Does it never abide? Passing seems to take away all that was ever weft, unless the Gods endow immortality on our thoughts and carry them […]
29 Jan Brain Signal Variations
I’ve focused, in the last few posts, on the structural and functional variety in neurons and synapses. Brain signal variations include local potentials and post-synaptic potentials. Local potential differs from action potential in that the latter is generally characterized by a brief electrical spike and return to resting potential. This characterization of action potential does not always apply: […]
27 Jan Go With the 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 […]