
Google in your Brain?  PageRank is a Decent Model of Semantic Memory - botbooty
http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2007/11/is_google_in_your_brain_pagera.php
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robg
It's good work, and they're a good group. But the result shouldn't be too
surprising. It's based on word association data (salt-pepper, bread-butter)
and if there's anything Google does really well, it's that. And funny enough,
the "search" area of the brain (left inferior prefrontal cortex) has been
associated (using fMRI) with those types of linguistic relations and
especially in amplifying them when they are weak. Still, that's a very small
piece of semantic memory. Indeed, it leaves out the whole rest of the brain!

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botbooty
You think that liPFC is involved in gain? An alternative is cue specification,
which is consistent not only with the work purportedly showing a gain-like
function in liPFC, but also with other work suggesting a role for liPFC in
episodic retrieval.

what's your venture to "find brains" btw?

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robg
I think a lot of brain regions are involved in gain functions, but that the
LIPFC is specifically involved in gain for word associations (which is no
doubt multivariate). But that's saying a lot without really saying anything. A
specific hypothesis is that the more you have to code knowledge in verbal (vs
perceptual) terms (or with increasing "abstractness"), the more you rely on
LIPFC. We have one paper out which supports this account.

The venture is geared to quantifying knowledge - what is it online and, more
importantly, who has it best. The finding brains bit is just a simple way to
describe what we'll do, where brain = storehouse of knowledge (versus database
of information). In our formulation, real people, via the output of their grey
matter, are wholly needed to compute ai (actual intelligence). I know I'd
rather find, learn from, and interact with knowledgeable people, than "search"
among pages.

If you're interested, feel free to send me a note at robg AT psych DOT upenn
DOT edu and we can chat.

