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.

Reverse Engineering the Brain

I sus­pect that when many of you think about neu­ro­science, the first things that come to mind are med­ical appli­ca­tions: men­tal dis­or­ders, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals. But what I’m going to try and argue today is that the stakes are much greater in the year 2015

Molecular Mechanisms of Reward and Aversion

Why do we do the things that we do? Why do we some­times choose to be lov­ing par­ents and oth­er times engage in irra­tional self-destructive behav­iors? What dri­ves us to some­times be altru­is­tic and oth­er times make deci­sions that real­ly threat­en our very sur­vival? Well, the answer lies in our brains. Our brains evolved to ensure that we repeat behav­iors that will lead to our survival. 

Engineering Thoughts and Memories

In brain decod­ing, we take our mod­el that we’ve devel­oped of the brain (and this can be a mod­el for any­thing, vision or lan­guage) and we reverse it. And instead of going from the stim­u­lus to the brain activ­i­ty, we go from the brain activ­i­ty back to the stimulus.