Archive

Towards an Artificial Brain

The goal of MICrONS is three­fold. One is they asked us to go and mea­sure the activ­i­ty in a liv­ing brain while an ani­mal actu­al­ly learns to do some­thing, and watch how that activ­i­ty changes. Two, to take that brain out and map exhaus­tive­ly the wiring dia­gram” of every neu­ron con­nect­ing to every oth­er neu­ron in that ani­mal’s brain in the par­tic­u­lar region. And then third, to use those two pieces of infor­ma­tion to build bet­ter machine learn­ing. So let it nev­er be said that IARPA is unambitious.

Recreating the Brain

The thing that makes us unique is our com­plex­i­ty. But not com­plex­i­ty in some gener­ic sense. Nature is rife with com­plex­i­ty. What makes us spe­cial is the com­plex­i­ty of our brains.

Ethical Machines episode 4: David J. Klein

One of the most impor­tant insights that I’ve got­ten in work­ing with biol­o­gists and ecol­o­gists is that today it’s actu­al­ly not real­ly known on a sci­en­tif­ic basis how well dif­fer­ent con­ser­va­tion inter­ven­tions will work. And it’s because we just don’t have a lot of data.

Controlling the Brain with Light to Reactivate Lost Memories

The key mol­e­cule of opto­ge­net­ics is a light-sensitive pro­tein called chan­nel­rhodopsin, which is extract­ed from green algae. Scientists can insert chan­nel­rhodopsin into mem­o­ry cells. Subsequently, sci­en­tists can even acti­vate these with blue light which they deliv­er deep inside the brain with optic fibers.