We take so many of these statements at face value because they seem to make sense in our #patriarchal system, and then before we know it we’ve got terrible, repressive, socially-accepted "knowledge."
Hi :)
I'm a new member of this amazing community and I would like to have my first post on the amazing breakthrough of Jeff Hawkins.
Before giving my opinion, I would like everyone to tell me whether they know the theory of have they read the book or the original papers and If so what's their insight on them?
I think the material in this research is pretty much fascinating and would like to engage and talk about it more.
@jonny well it's a long story and I plan to tell the story here bit by bit and exchange opinions
You can check out the book "A Thousand Brains: a new theory of intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins as I mentioned earlier which he gradually introduces the concept himself, the book is made to be convenient to read and easy to understand.
But in a nutshell here is what you will be seeing in this theory(it got a bit long sorry in advance, it's worth it though=) :
Long ago in 1970s Professor Mountcastle introduced the idea of "cortical columns". He proposed that essentially different parts of our brain is doing the same thing and their building block is "cortical column"s. This idea itself has many biological evidence backing it from the idea of evolution copying what has works throughout the brain based on huge increase in our cortex (or to be more accurate "Neocortex") in the last 2 or 3 million years which is nothing compared to the age of evolution. and examination of same pattern of each slice of our brain even with different responsibilities and so on...
So mountcasle Knew that all this diversity of intelligence is in our brain and these cortical columns but didn't know what the algorithm was.
As Hawkins says, It reminds of the Darwin Theory of evolution. Darwin suggested that there is an algorithm for diversity of life and Mountcastle suggests there is one for diversity of Intelligence.
The interesting difference is that Darwin knew "what" the algorithm is but didn't know "where" it was in our body.
Mountcastle didn't know "what" the algorithm is but he knew "where" in the body it is.
Jeff Hawkins new theory of Intelligence unravels what might this "algorithm" be.
It's fascinating isn't it? :)
And to make you more excited, after understanding the idea of this new theory, it walks you through how "understanding language", "vision" or even "touch" are essentially the same
How cool is this?
Tethering transgenic fruit flies to a torque meter inside of a 360° display to let them learn how to control a punishing heat beam with their turning attempts.
It looks like we have finally discovered in which neurons the plasticity takes place that is required for this kind of learning:
We may not be 100% sure, yet, but everything is pointing towards plasticity in the motor neurons of the ventral nerve cord that control the wing angles.
@brembs
The idea of short term learning in motor neurons in a ganglionic nervous system is giving me chills and I cant quite pick out why. Embodied learning where there isnt a clear distinction between "symbolic" learning of "how to control beam" as some thought abstracted from its physical reality as a motor pattern is beautiful to me, even if I am oversimplifying/misunderstanding bc I know next to nothing about fly brains and this long research question
Neuroscientists and electrophysiologists of Mastodon, what would your top choice analysis tool be for a novice getting started with working with ECoG data? I have a graduate student I will be co-mentoring starting this Fall who is very bright but has no programming experience, and I'd like to help her get up and running as quickly as possible. I've generally been a roll-my-own-analyses type of electrophysiologist so I don't have a favorite framework to get her started with. I know EEGLAB is popular, but my main experience with it has been helping other people get their Matlab path working properly again after something in EEGLAB clobbers it. I've played with MNE in Python but it doesn't seem to be as purely-GUI as EEGLAB and I don't want her to get bogged down in learning Python before she can do any analyses at all.
So, what's your favorite tool for ECoG analysis? What would you recommend a student who's starting from zero background in electrophysiology or programming begin to learn in 2024?
Boosts for reach appreciated. I also just like hearing folks' opinionated takes on their research tools.
Clever neuronal activity labelling strategy: Engineered Ca2+ sensor biotinylates nearby proteins. Those proteins can then be stained - works for single vesicles, organelles, dendritic compartments, all the way to neuronal engrams. Both in culture and in vivo!
I'm excited to share a new publication from my graduate work!
In this opinion piece, we describe a new idea about how the brain represents more than one object - by having neurons switch their activity over time. This new idea has implications across a wide range of other areas of neuroscience, including how parts of objects come together to form a whole, and how we select what to pay attention to in busy environments.
I’m part of the #EEGManyLabs project testing the #replicability of influential #EEG studies. We are using #PredictionMarkets as a tool in this effort and you are invited to take part, especially if you have some expertise in EEG research, no matter how little. See below for details.
You may well know about the success of “prediction markets” in forecasting the likelihood of replication (e.g., Dreber et al., PNAS 2015). We are delighted to announce that we have partnered with economists who led these seminal studies to test the wisdom of the EEG community.
From today (as we near the end of recruitment for this project - please see last calls below), we are opening a survey to ask you to vote on the likelihood of some hypotheses studied in the #EEGManyLabs project. Subsequently, you will be invited to bet on the likelihood of success through a stock market platform, where you will earn real money for you or a selected charity.
The success of this effort will become clear when we complete the full project in a few years time. But the results will immediately tell us about the degree of optimism/pessimism amongst our community.
So, please share this widely and place your bets now...
How can I sign up for the prediction markets? Registrations to participate in the prediction markets are administered via the sign-up form linked below. You must have experience of working with EEG (for example, through collecting and/or analysing EEG data, which may be evidenced by having published peer-reviewed articles or preprints with EEG or equivalent experience e.g. designing, collecting and analysing data from EEG experiments).
"A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution" by Shapson-Coe et al. 2024 (Lichtman lab).
The reconstruction at its current state is already useful and very interesting. Here is to hoping the authors will put in more time and resources to further polish it.
A remarkable finding from Shapson-Coe et al. 2024 paper on human brain #connectomics: the presence of canalized connections in the human brain cortex. Canalized in the Kauffman boolean networks sense [1], which here means: among the many synaptic inputs that any one neuron integrates, some are far stronger (by number of synapses) than the rest.
[1] Canalisation as a term was introduced by Waddington in 1942 in the context of genetics to mean "some phenotypic traits are very robust to small perturbations" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canalisation_(genetics)
@albertcardona I was confused about the need for three separate ICs until I actually looked at the paper. Using a few op-amps is not too unreasonable. :-)