

The Synapse Memory Doctrine Threatened? - DiabloD3
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2014/12/27/synapse-memory-doctrine-threatened/#hntest3

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hyp0
Followup experiments with more than two neurons should be interesting, to see
whether graph arc destinations are remembered, or just the total.

A far-fetched mechanism could be that each neuron transmits a signature (UID),
that we've not detected because we've not been looking for it (perhaps it's
slower than expected, taking hours to transmit it once...). It could include
gross addressing information, based on chemical gradients at the time of its
formation.

I'm partial to the idea that neurons use more than just synaptic connections.
It just seems too simple, especially when there's all that powerful cellular
machinary (e.g. RNA transcription) just lying around...

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pwr22
This is certainly interesting but it doesn't look conclusive

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gaalze
How will this impact research into artificial neural nets?

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Houshalter
Artificial neural networks are very distant from actual neuroscience.
Researchers try to make their nets more "brain-like" but it rarely results in
better algorithms. In the end they just use whatever works, and that happens
to involve a lot of algorithms which are "biologically implausible". I.e.
things that the brain couldn't physically do even if it wanted to.

E.g. sharing learned weights between different parts of the net is extremely
effective, but probably not possible in actual physical neurons. Even the main
algorithm used to train NNs, backpropagation, is considered biologically
implausible. Although a lot of theories exist as to how neurons could
implement very similar algorithms.

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gaalze
I think that gasnet neural networks that took into account the locally
inhibitive? impact of nitrous oxide are far superior to traditional ANN. But I
just read that recently, so maybe misunderstood that.

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revelation
_To put it another way, while it’s easy to see how a neuron could ‘store’ a
scalar variable using epigenetics, it’s much harder to imagine that it could
store a vector of values._

Of course a vector is just a scalar in disguise. Take Gödel numbering and you
can store anything, even if all you have is unary coding.

Given the complexity of the _genetic code_ , why would we just consider this
implausible from the outset?

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eru
Depends on your system of computation. If all you can do to your numbers is
add, multiply, but you don't have a eg a floor function, you can't do Goedel
numbering.

