Aging brains blend memories together instead of just forgetting them

Yes I’ve come across reservoir computing. As a neuroscientist, it made me sit up and take notice.

I’d say that I feel there’s homology in language. What reservoir computing says about the efficiency benefits of having a fixed but tunable dynamics to use as an underlying reservoir feels very adjacent to how I intuitively think of brain function.

The key thing from the circadian field you’ll appreciate:

The biological clock is a limit cycle oscillator. You have a bunch of chemical reactions that have negative feedback and some feedforward arms, and together they create a dynamical 24-regime. About 40-60% of the transcriptome of any given cell shows circadian dynamics.

Now this gives you phase, and an internal temporal reference for all your functions. In chronobiology, you call this the organisms subjective time. The system is chemically partitioned not just physically but over time, and behavior results from the dynamical interactions underneath which are concerned with anticipating solar and lunar periodicities in the environment, since those are so very common and determinative to fitness in many niches.

Note the fact that it is subjective time but has an objective description. However, external measurement without the background of the chronotype accounted for will thing of a lot of variance as “noise”.

My own philosophical conclusion has been that this is the source of our confusion with consciousness. We don’t account for the internal causal order of events, which are timed, and with cross frequency coupling and phase-amplitude linkages begging to be worked out with real world data.

I’m not sure what you think I’m arguing against but saying that it matches with one of the cognitive models du jour is… odd.

The problem with the hopfield model is it simplifies the brain too much. The base unit is “the neuron”. Ok… but what about the Astrocyte? Mathematically you can write it as a different kind of neuron. Or ignore it. But why, as a biologist, must I buy this model which ignores the third partner of every synapse, which has an entirely distinct physical tiling architecture compared to neurons, and which are at a temporal offset from neurons?

Those facts about the brain are missing from the model from 1982. Which isn’t shocking since we didn’t know all this then.

Are you saying the brain is a Hopfield network, and that’s it? Because later you indicate otherwise. Kinda confused what I’m to make of it.

> Again, my impression is that the original author's idea was about capacity in general, then he gave an analogy. The analogy was wrong, but your reply went way beyond his specific analogy to the extreme of discarding memory itself as useful concept. To be clear, I agree that it is distributed and lossy and time-dependent. I agree it is not just a simple read-off of a static chunk with a fixed address.

Ok, but my argument wasn’t with the OP mentioning capacity, but with their analogy. Am I not allowed to break down that analogy with evidence?

> I would say that is both non-falsifiable and well-accepted.

Why’s it non-falsifiable? If you do find a single computational paradigm that explains all brain dynamics we can measure, then you have falsified the hypothesis that it’s an integration of multiple computational types.

That actual evidence already gives the notion credence doesn’t make it unfalsifiable in principle.

> https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262041997/theoretical-neuroscie... might interest you

Went through the description. Doubt it’ll interest me. As a rule I’ve stopped giving too much time to models that predate the last decades actual mechanistic facts. They’re fun curiosities, but hard to take seriously anymore. Here especially, the absence of astrocytes in the picture makes it hard to buy they have anything real to say about the mechanics at play. Half the cells of the brain not in the explanatory picture is just too likely to fail.

(note: I’m certain astrocytes are mentioned as support cells, or maybe regulators… but we just know a lot more now due to new techniques that makes downgrading them like that questionable science to me)

i had the same thought about to much information in the brain. this is why you don't use /compact and should prefer a fresh session.

Did they really need a ai image for this article? https://stock.adobe.com/images/elderly-man-with-illuminated-...

I wonder the effect of diary writing on the brain, I see always recommended as either part of the self-improvement space or meditation. But reading your comment, I wonder if it allows to strengthen memories, especially if ones reread it after a while. I must experiment, now it's easier than ever with LLMs