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My name is Artem, I’m a computational neuroscience student and researcher. In this video we talk about cognitive maps – internal models of outside world that the brain to generate flexible behavior that is generalized across contexts.

Continue reading “How Your Brain Organizes Information” »

The free-to-access IoT network could help bring billions of connected devices online — if you’re willing to share.

One of the largest mysteries of science is that humans have conscious awareness of their complex subjective experiences – or what we call “qualia” – such as being aware of what it’s like to delight in the color of a flower, melt into the comfort of a bed, or to feel sharp pain. Why and how qualia could emerge from physical matter and be a part of the human experience is unknown, and this is called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. Related to qualia is the mystery of why humans feel like they have free will, or the ability to intentionally choose and execute actions.

The ‘easy’ problem of consciousness is mapping these mind states to brain states, such as identifying which brain regions are active during a certain experience, such as smelling a flower. Despite advances in classical physics and neuroscience, many aspects of the mind-brain relationship, such as qualia, remain unresolved. New theories of mind are required to address this perennial mystery.

In a new paper, we propose that some aspects of mind are quantum and can play an active role in the physical world, explaining some of the unexplainable.

A few select users will now be able to enjoy Google Maps’ immersive view, according to a blog by the company published last month. The new feature is meant to allow users to reimagine how they explore and navigate, while helping them make more sustainable choices.

“Immersive view is an entirely new way to explore a place — letting you feel like you’re right there, even before you visit. Using advances in AI and computer vision, immersive view fuses billions of Street View and aerial images to create a rich, digital model of the world. And it layers helpful information on top like the weather, traffic, and how busy a place is,” said Chris Phillips, VP & General Manager, Geo, in the blog.

In this video, we will explore the positional system of the brain — hippocampal place cells. We will see how it relates to contextual memory and mapping of more abstract features.

OUTLINE:
00:00 Introduction.
00:53 Hippocampus.
1:27 Discovery of place cells.
2:56 3D navigation.
3:51 Role of place cells.
4:11 Virtual reality experiment.
7:47 Remapping.
11:17 Mapping of non-spatial dimension.
13:36 Conclusion.

Continue reading “Place cells: How your brain creates maps of abstract spaces” »

Year 2022 😗😁

For decades we have dreamed of true holographic displays for entertainment, communication, and education. Star Wars had 3D projections rendered in real-time — the definition wasn’t great, but they were communicating across interplanetary distances — and Avatar had holographic maps showcasing the terrain of Pandora. In reality, we mostly have 2D images which show dimension and depth when viewed from different angles. That might be on the verge of changing.

Pierre-Alexandre Blanche from the Wyant College of Optical Sciences at the University of Arizona recently published a paper in Light: Advanced Manufacturing which acts as a roadmap toward true 3D holographic displays.

Continue reading “3D holographic televisions are much closer than a galaxy far, far away” »

Deep learning has made significant strides in text generation, translation, and completion in recent years. Algorithms trained to predict words from their surrounding context have been instrumental in achieving these advancements. However, despite access to vast amounts of training data, deep language models still need help to perform tasks like long story generation, summarization, coherent dialogue, and information retrieval. These models have been shown to need help capturing syntax and semantic properties, and their linguistic understanding needs to be more superficial. Predictive coding theory suggests that the brain of a human makes predictions over multiple timescales and levels of representation across the cortical hierarchy. Although studies have previously shown evidence of speech predictions in the brain, the nature of predicted representations and their temporal scope remain largely unknown. Recently, researchers analyzed the brain signals of 304 individuals listening to short stories and found that enhancing deep language models with long-range and multi-level predictions improved brain mapping.

The results of this study revealed a hierarchical organization of language predictions in the cortex. These findings align with predictive coding theory, which suggests that the brain makes predictions over multiple levels and timescales of expression. Researchers can bridge the gap between human language processing and deep learning algorithms by incorporating these ideas into deep language models.

The current study evaluated specific hypotheses of predictive coding theory by examining whether cortical hierarchy predicts several levels of representations, spanning multiple timescales, beyond the neighborhood and word-level predictions usually learned in deep language algorithms. Modern deep language models and the brain activity of 304 people listening to spoken tales were compared. It was discovered that the activations of deep language algorithms supplemented with long-range and high-level predictions best describe brain activity.

After 12 years of work, a huge team of researchers from the UK, US, and Germany have completed the largest and most complex brain map to date, describing every neural connection in the brain of a larval fruit fly.

Though nowhere near the size and complexity of a human brain, it still covers a respectable 548,000 connections between a total of 3,016 neurons.

Continue reading “The First-Ever Complete Map of an Insect Brain Is Truly Mesmerizing” »

South Korea’s giant leap into space started with a small step on the internet.

With treaties banning certain tech transfers, South Korea’s rocket scientists turned to a search service to find an engine they could mimic as the country embarked on an ambitious plan to build an indigenous space program. The nation launched its first home-grown rocket called Nuri in October 2021.