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