How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
quantamagazine.org
How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
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Re: How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
#2"Just a few months after Howard and Shankar started to flesh out their theory, other scientists independently uncovered neurons, dubbed “time cells,” that were “as close as we can possibly get to having that explicit record of the past,” Howard said. These cells were each tuned to certain points in a span of time, with some firing, say, one second after a stimulus and others after five seconds, essentially bridging time gaps between experiences."
Most relevant idea from the article for me
Re: How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
#3Are there any research groups who are actively investigating how insights into the human mind may be applied to artificial intelligence methods? If that's even applicable?
Edit 0: I should clarify that I am well aware that neuron architecture already has influenced modern AI methods, I was leaning more towards non-neuron based methodologies.
Re: How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
#4Are there any research groups who are actively investigating how insights into the human mind may be applied to artificial intelligence methods? If that's even applicable? Edit 0: I should clarify that I am well aware that neuron architecture already has influenced modern AI methods, I was leaning more towards non-neuron based methodologies.
Neural networks has greatly been influenced by insights into the human mind. Hence, also why it's called "neural".
So yeah there are research groups actively into this :D Usually, researchers at universities.
Re: How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
#5Hopefully this leads to better temporal priors for machine learning models. Sequence encoding frequently uses position coding[0] but the typical approaches (e.g. low frequency sin waves) are fairly naive. In reinforcement learning we have (somewhat obvious) works that show that providing explicit time representations help[1]. Simply throwing a recurrent model at a sequence may pick up simple ordering but improving the temporal representation would improve data efficiency.
Re: How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
#6Are there any research groups who are actively investigating how insights into the human mind may be applied to artificial intelligence methods? If that's even applicable? Edit 0: I should clarify that I am well aware that neuron architecture already has influenced modern AI methods, I was leaning more towards non-neuron based methodologies.
Numenta is probably the most direct / well-known example of what you're asking. They get mixed reactions from the community (some fair, some not). DeepMind occasionally publishes crossover papers from neuroscience (e.g. grid cells; metalearning). Lots of other groups are looking at neuroscience for applications to ML too like University of Washington and Columbia.
Re: How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
#7Are there any research groups who are actively investigating how insights into the human mind may be applied to artificial intelligence methods? If that's even applicable? Edit 0: I should clarify that I am well aware that neuron architecture already has influenced modern AI methods, I was leaning more towards non-neuron based methodologies.
This is what everybody has been working on for the past ten years.
Re: How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
#8Are there any research groups who are actively investigating how insights into the human mind may be applied to artificial intelligence methods? If that's even applicable? Edit 0: I should clarify that I am well aware that neuron architecture already has influenced modern AI methods, I was leaning more towards non-neuron based methodologies.
"Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures" and they have some overlap with the AGI (AI at human level and beyond) folks as well.
Re: How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
#9We know that entering a new room in your house impacts your thinking -- like a new "window" of thought opens. There is, in fact, a concrete reason why you will forget what you were looking for as soon as you enter the room you intended to search for said object.
It's interesting, as mentioned, how you can recall other things that happened in temporal or spatial proximity to another memory you're recalling.
My mother has an uncanny ability to unwind a series of connected memories -- "I know that was in 1973 because that's when so-and-so got married, and we had traveled to such-and-such location that year, which is why I had the new suitcase that..."
Fascinating research.
Re: How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
#10Maybe a bit unrelated but I thought of this as I was reading through the article: I think it'd be very interesting to invest in a dreams research centre and I'll definitely do so as well eventually