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21 Aug How Do You Think?

Activated Network

Weighing the Options As part of my quest for the truly intelligent system, I have invested much in investigating and attempting to describe how people think. I am particularly concerned with how people integrate multiple ideas or constraints into their thinking and decision-making processes. More ideas help make better decisions: consider my posts on exformation and […]

17 Aug Stimuli

Cybernetic Eye

Responses to Stimuli When we speak of computational systems, we use words like “input” and “output” and “program“. When computers become able to communicate, understand and process knowledge in context, will we use different words: words that are more anthropomorphic? I’ve been playing with anthropomorphic concepts with MIPUS. In today’s post I will draw us […]

15 Aug MIPUS and Association Neurons

Coordinating Areas in the Cerebrum

Association Neurons ==> Coordination Association Neurons are tied to motor neurons, though they are much more numerous (30 to 1 ratio). They have multiple roles depending on where in the nervous system they are found. Innovateus has a convenient primer on this category of nerve cell. To understand the importance of association neurons, consider the plight […]

11 Aug Emotion – The Perturbable Mr. Amygdala

Amygdala in Man

Fear and the Amygdala Have you ever been asked not to be so emotional, or on the contrary, to show more emotion? Or have you been asked to suppress a specific emotion, such as fear? I recall a scene from an Indiana Jones movie in which, after a scene of amazing heroics, a pilot tells […]

09 Aug Emotional Intelligence

Emotions

What Does it Take to Think In describing the role of the hippocampus, we discussed the correlation of various sensory inputs to form a cohesive picture of our physical surroundings. The direct links between the amygdala and the central gray matter demonstrate the importance of emotional feedback or emotional intelligence in cognitive processes. Dr. Travis […]

06 Aug Finding yourself in the Hippocampus

Hippocampus

On October 6, 2014, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awarded The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine to John O´Keefe and to May‐Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain. John O´Keefe is Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre in Neural Circuits […]

03 Aug Exformation vs. Subtext

gutenberg press

Many of us humans like to congregate and communicate. Much of our communication, including this blog, is intended to be shared widely and to persist beyond the moment, whether we are attempting to share the thought of the moment, or change the course of human history.  When we congregate, whether for a TED talk, a […]

02 Aug What is a Set: Multiple Meanings in Digital Lingo

Set in Volleyball

Polysemy What is the meaning of “bump” or “set” or “spike”? Polysemy means multiple meanings, or semantic representations for a single word or phrase. In digital Lingo, that is ones and zeros, we have the ultimate example of minimal symbolic diversity delivering infinite possible meanings. Fortunately human languages give you more than two choices of symbols, […]

01 Aug Section 6 Intro – Language and Dialog

Speak 2 U 3

Dialog: Is this something limited to humans – to sentient beings? Natural Language, its components, acquisition, and use are the subjects of this sixth section of the Understanding Context blog. Here, you will find theories about communication and cognition, along with descriptions of computational approaches to analyzing and automatically generating human language and dialog using computers. […]

14 Jul Understanding Subtext

If human interaction were simple and straightforward, computers would have been able to do a credible job of imitating it years ago. Examples of simple interaction machines, including the Rogerian Psycho-therapist named Eliza and the question answerer named Watson, show that computer algorithms can do pretty well at some interaction tasks. If all human interactions […]