Related papers: Thinking about the brain
When we look at the world around us, we see complex physical systems and emergent phenomena. Emergence occurs when a system is observed to have properties that its parts do not have on their own. These properties or behaviors emerge only…
This review aims to contribute to the quest for artificial general intelligence by examining neuroscience and cognitive psychology methods for potential inspiration. Despite the impressive advancements achieved by deep learning models in…
As we discussed in Part I of this topic, there is a clear desire to model and comprehend human behavior. Given the popular presupposition of human reasoning as the standard for learning and decision-making, there have been significant…
Visual object recognition -- the behavioral ability to rapidly and accurately categorize many visually encountered objects -- is core to primate cognition. This behavioral capability is algorithmically impressive because of the myriad…
It is widely believed that the brain performs approximate probabilistic inference to estimate causal variables in the world from ambiguous sensory data. To understand these computations, we need to analyze how information is represented and…
By retracing my scientific journey that began 20 years ago, I highlight in this thesis the need to consider the organization of the brain, which is certainly globally hierarchical, but also highly distributed and mixed in the neuronal…
Our knowledge of the sensory world is encoded by neurons in sequences of discrete, identical pulses termed action potentials or spikes. There is persistent controversy about the extent to which the precise timing of these spikes is relevant…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
The brain did not develop a dedicated device for reasoning. This fact bears dramatic consequences. While for perceptuo-motor functions neural activity is shaped by the input's statistical properties, and processing is carried out at high…
The brain can be considered as a system that dynamically optimizes the structure of anatomical connections based on the efficiency requirements of functional connectivity. To illustrate the power of this principle in organizing the…
The theoretical base for consciousness, in particular an explanation of how consciousness is defined by the brain, has long been sought by science. We propose a partial theory of consciousness as relations defined by typical data. The…
We investigate cortical learning from the perspective of mechanism design. First, we show that discretizing standard models of neurons and synaptic plasticity leads to rational agents maximizing simple scoring rules. Second, our main result…
Consciousness is the window of the brain and reflects many fundamental cognitive properties involving both computational and cognitive mechanisms. A collection of these properties was described as the "easy problems" by Chalmers, including…
Artificial neural networks are being proposed as models of parts of the brain. The networks are compared to recordings of biological neurons, and good performance in reproducing neural responses is considered to support the model's…
This paper demonstrates that some non-classical models of human decision-making can be run successfully as circuits on quantum computers. Since the 1960s, many observed cognitive behaviors have been shown to violate rules based on classical…
Biological visual systems learn from limited experience, unlike deep learning models that rely on millions of training images. What learning principles make this possible? We tested whether efficient coding, the idea that neural…
Artificial neural networks often struggle with catastrophic forgetting when learning multiple tasks sequentially, as training on new tasks degrades the performance on previously learned tasks. Recent theoretical work has addressed this…
Ten years into the revival of deep networks and artificial intelligence, we propose a theoretical framework that sheds light on understanding deep networks within a bigger picture of Intelligence in general. We introduce two fundamental…
Human learning is a complex phenomenon that requires adaptive processes across a range of temporal and spacial scales. While our understanding of those processes at single scales has increased exponentially over the last few years, a…
We explore the main characteristics of big brain network data that offer unique statistical challenges. The brain networks are biologically expected to be both sparse and hierarchical. Such unique characterizations put specific topological…