mind-builder's blog

Stephen Grossberg, an early pioneer in the field of neural nets and the brain, recently published a book called “Conscious Mind Resonant Brain” that describes the theories he’s developed since the 1970s. In chapter five he discusses one theory he named ‘Adaptive Resonance Theory” (ART) that led to a product that has been used in […]

The neocortex is responsible for sensory perception, cognition, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning and language. There are new theories being developed on how it works. One theory comes from a company named Numenta. Numenta was founded by an entrepreneur named Jeff Hawkins who invented the Palm Pilot (the first commercially successful example of a […]

In my prior post, I wrote about Professor Michael Hasselmo’s book on grid cells in the brain, which create a type of GPS grid as we walk through a space.   But the main point of the book is that grid cells plus ‘place cells’ can be part of a circuit for storing episodic memory. […]

An interesting way to represent information in neurons is explained in the book “How We Remember” by Michael Hasselmo. We have a type of GPS system – a grid that appears in our head whenever we go into a room, for instance. In fact, we have multiple spatial grids that vary in their spacing and […]

Eric Kandel wrote the standard textbook of Neural Science (in which he was a pioneer) and just published a book titled The Disordered Mind – What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves.. I will just select a few interesting points from the book about the pre-frontal cortex, since that is a part of the brain […]

Much of human cognition can be though of as ‘constraint satisfaction’ according to philosopher Paul Thagard. For example, think of applying to a university. One college is in a beautiful setting, but another college has a professor who is an expert in your desired major. The first college is in a quaint town with a […]

In “The Eureka Factor – Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain”, authors John Kounios and Mark Beeman discuss insight – the kind of insight that might occur to you when taking a walk or taking a shower as opposed to trying to force a solution to a problem in your office under a deadline. […]

Often popular books on the brain will tell you that a particular part of the brain is responsible for various human attributes, but there is no common thread that jumps out at you. You learn more about people reading a good novel than you do after reading 100 pages of bewildering functions of grey matter.. […]

Backpropagation nets have a problem doing math. You can get them to learn a multiplication table, but when you try to use the net on problems where the answers are higher or lower than the ones used in training, they fail. In theory, they should be able to extrapolate, but in practice, they memorize, instead […]