Related papers: Thinking about the brain
The human brain has many remarkable information processing characteristics that deeply puzzle scientists and engineers. Among the most important and the most intriguing of these characteristics are the brain's broad universality as a…
Deep learning's success in perception, natural language processing, etc. inspires hopes for advancements in autonomous robotics. However, real-world robotics face challenges like variability, high-dimensional state spaces, non-linear…
Deep neural networks and brains both learn and share superficial similarities: processing nodes are likened to neurons and adjustable weights are likened to modifiable synapses. But can a unified theoretical framework be found to underlie…
Deep learning has arguably achieved tremendous success in recent years. In simple words, deep learning uses the composition of many nonlinear functions to model the complex dependency between input features and labels. While neural networks…
Some of the strongest evidence that human minds should be thought about in terms of symbolic systems has been the way they combine ideas, produce novelty, and learn quickly. We argue that modern neural networks -- and the artificial…
This essay, derived from a lecture at "The Physics Modeling of Thought" workshop in Berlin in winter 2023, explores the mutually beneficial relationship between theoretical neuroscience and statistical physics through the lens of efficient…
The brain is a highly complex system. Most of such complexity stems from the intermingled connections between its parts, which give rise to rich dynamics and to the emergence of high-level cognitive functions. Disentangling the underlying…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
What fascinates us about animal behavior is its richness and complexity, but understanding behavior and its neural basis requires a simpler description. Traditionally, simplification has been imposed by training animals to engage in a…
Any problem is concerned with the mind, but what do minds make a decision on? Here we show that there are three conditions for the mind to make a certain answer. We found that some difficulties in physics and mathematics are in fact…
Nowadays, it is possible to record the activity of hundreds of cells at the same time in behaving animals. However, these data are often treated and analyzed as if they consisted of many independently recorded neurons. How can neuronal…
Experiments in cognitive science and decision theory show that the ways in which people combine concepts and make decisions cannot be described by classical logic and probability theory. This has serious implications for applied disciplines…
There are two important things in science: (A) Finding answers to given questions, and (B) Coming up with good questions. Our artificial scientists not only learn to answer given questions, but also continually invent new questions, by…
Understanding the fundamentals of human reasoning is central to the development of any system built to closely interact with humans. Cognitive science pursues the goal of modeling human-like intelligence from a theory-driven perspective…
The nervous system displays a variety of rhythms in both waking and sleep. These rhythms have been closely associated with different behavioral and cognitive states, but it is still unknown how the nervous system makes use of these rhythms…
The underlying physiological mechanisms of generating conscious states are still unknown. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we will need to experimentally design a system that evolves in a similar way our brains do. Recent…
Cognitive brain imaging is accumulating datasets about the neural substrate of many different mental processes. Yet, most studies are based on few subjects and have low statistical power. Analyzing data across studies could bring more…
We will argue that a phenomenological analysis of consciousness, similar to that of Husserl, shows that the effects of phenomenal qualities shape our perception of the world. It also shows the way the physical and mathematical sciences…
Logic-based problems such as planning, theorem proving, or puzzles, typically involve combinatoric search and structured knowledge representation. Artificial neural networks are very successful statistical learners, however, for many years,…
Quantum computing and the workings of the brain have many aspects in common and have been attracting increasing attention in academia and industry. The computation in both is parallel and non-discrete. Though the underlying physical…