
Brain approaches tricky tasks in a surprisingly simple way - kurthr
https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/your-brain-approaches-tricky-tasks-in-a-surprisingly-simple-way
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euske
I don't see if it's all that "simple". They just found that we use the same
information flow for doing a complicated task, but that applies pretty much to
a computer; when it carries out a difficult task, its execution loop is still
the same. The simplicity of structure does not necessarily mean the simplicity
of the method.

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ww520
So they are saying the brain is a general problem solving machine, capable of
using the same mechanism to address different kinds of problems.

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therein
Perhaps a turing machine that can rewrite its own logic and microcode... but
that still makes it a turing machine, right?

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sadness2
This doesn't seem simple to me. A fully connect external coordinator, helping
to determine which preexisting central weightings can be re-used for the
specific task at hand, which tasks need to be redirected to less well-trained
networks, and which need novel training, with the final prediction being an
amalgamation of all results. Just the idea of trying to design a DL network
with similar properties blows my mind!

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strainer
Further to this picture, in recent years the processing potential of extensive
microtubule networks which feature in all cells, and can have special
characteristics in nerve cells is beginning to be recognised:

> Microtubules are major architectural elements without which the neuron could
> not achieve or maintain its exaggerated shape. In addition to serving as
> structural elements, microtubules are railways along which molecular motor
> proteins convey cargo. Microtubule arrays in axons, dendrites, growth cones,
> and migratory neurons are tightly organized with respect to the intrinsic
> polarity of the microtubule, which is relevant to both its assembly and
> transport properties. Vibrant research is being conducted on the mechanisms
> by which microtubules are organized in different compartments of the neuron,
> how microtubule dynamics and stability are regulated, and the orchestration
> of microtubule-based transport of organelles and proteins. While all of this
> is surely enough to cause one to marvel, we cannot avoid pondering - what
> other work might microtubules do for neurons?

Microtubules as neuron information carriers:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3979999/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3979999/)

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marmaduke
The notion of manifolds as mechanism for behavioral or cognitive control is
not new; much work has been done in the field of movement science e.g.
juggling and other forms of dynamic pattern generation. See for example JAS
Scott Kelso's Dynamic Patterns or Spivey's Continuity of Mind or the newish
field of Radical Embodied Cognition.

This is fairly systems neuroscience oriented approach much welcome, but not
ground breaking.

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kzrdude
Which sense of 'manifold' is used here? I vaguely know the locally flat object
with an atlas of maps, but I'm not sure that's what they mean.

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joeyo
That's what it means here, too. The idea is that if you take the N-dimensional
state-space of neural activity --- each dimension being the activity of a
neuron or electrode or voxel or whatever --- and look at how the state evolves
through time, you discover that it "lives" in a manifold, k, of much smaller
dimension than the full space, N.

This is, I think, simply a restatement of the fact that neurons exhibit
correlations in their activity patterns. That is, not all vectors of activity
are "allowed". Still, it has implications for everything from learning to
brain-machine interfaces.

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The_rationalist
This is ridiculously obvious. How is that a discovery? If they had accurately
quantified the frequency of correlations now that would be a news.

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bonoboTP
A meta comment: in academia, for an outsider a specific paper's contribution
is usually hard to decipher. Many papers will sound fairly similar. Popular
articles like TFA will essentially have to resort to describing a whole branch
of research or even a whole subfield. Authors of the academic paper often
don't even recognize their work from just reading the PR summary produced by
the marketing department of the university (although this one is written by
the original authors).

Hardly any work is ground breaking in science nowadays. There are incremental
advances most of the time.

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samcodes
I love when people publish companion blog posts with their academic papers.

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mctt
The post is weirdly similar to the American Scientist article from the July
2019 issue entitled "How the Mind Emerges from the Brain's Complex Networks"

By Max Bertolero and Danielle S. Bassett

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/2019/07-01/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/2019/07-01/)

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known
In the natural world, ants of some species (initially) wander randomly, and
upon finding food return to their colony while laying down pheromone trails.
If other ants find such a path, they are likely not to keep travelling at
random, but instead to follow the trail, returning and reinforcing it if they
eventually find food

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algori...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms)

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bobobob420
So kinda like dynamic programming ? Recursion with maps or object stores to
quickly recollect information already calculated.

