Neuroscience
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Neural Networks
Jeff Hawkins
An On-Line Biology Book
Text ©1992, 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007, M.J. Farabee, all rights reserved. Use for educational purposes is encouraged. Welcome to an On-Line Biology Book Table of Contents. Click on the underlined items to go to those chapters.
Guide to Getting Started in Machine Learning
Someone at work recently asked how he should go about studying machine learning on his own. So I’m putting together a little guide. This post will be a living document…I’ll keep adding to it, so please suggest additions and make comments.
To make memories, new neurons must erase older ones
ScienceDaily (Nov. 12, 2009) — Short-term memory may depend in a surprising way on the ability of newly formed neurons to erase older connections. That's the conclusion of a report in the November 13th issue of the journal Cell , a Cell Press publication, that provides some of the first evidence in mice and rats that new neurons sprouted in the hippocampus cause the decay of short-term fear memories in that brain region, without an overall memory loss. The researchers led by Kaoru Inokuchi of The University of Toyama in Japan say the discovery shows a more important role than many would have anticipated for the erasure of memories. They propose that the birth of new neurons promotes the gradual loss of memory traces from the hippocampus as those memories are transferred elsewhere in the brain for permanent storage.
Blogs been dark lately, but I've been busy, busy
I've read a couple of "Intro" to neuroscience and psychology books, and what I've learned has fascinated and inspired my way more than anything I've learned about computers and electronics over the years. The Brain is truly the more complex "computer" the work has ever seen! I've decided to start in the pursuit of a degree in Neuroscience; instead of Computer Science even though CS may be "easier" since I've been doing software programming/development/architecture for ~8+ years now. There are TONS of things that an academic path in Neuroscience can lead to. So, I really don't know exactly where I'll end up, but I do know that i want to learn more about the Brain, how it works and what awesome things can be done.
In the cloud of connections, we each become social neurons, mimicking the biological human brain but on a giant scale. This collective knowledge is far beyond anything a single search engine could index and archive. Intelligence is spreading everywhere, every minute, and cloud computing can draw new links across new ideas. (80+1, 2008) This idea of the connected world as a global brain is not new, nor surprising. It seems clear that we can identify something like social intelligence in the community, and the analogy between humans and neurons is compelling. Peter Russell's The Global Brain explicitly makes the connection.
The Cloud and Collaboration
For unknown reasons, the human brain distinctly separates the handling of images of living things from images of non-living things, processing each image type in a different area of the brain. For years, many scientists have assumed the brain segregated visual information in this manner to optimize processing the images themselves, but new research shows that even in people who have been blind since birth the brain still separates the concepts of living and non-living objects. The research, published in today's issue of Neuron , implies that the brain categorizes objects based on the different types of subsequent consideration they demand—such as whether an object is edible, or is a landmark on the way home, or is a predator to run from. They are not categorized entirely by their appearance.
Brain innately separates living and non-living objects for proce
