3D structures of cells and connections reveal new role for an understudied brain cell.
Category: neuroscience – Page 558
Michael Levin | Cell Intelligence in Physiological & Morphological Spaces
Talk kindly contributed by Michael Levin in SEMF’s 2022 Spacious Spatiality.
https://semf.org.es/spatiality.
TALK ABSTRACT
Life was solving problems in metabolic, genetic, physiological, and anatomical spaces long before brains and nervous systems appeared. In this talk, I will describe remarkable capabilities of cell groups as they create, repair, and remodel complex anatomies. Anatomical homeostasis reveals that groups of cells are collective intelligences; their cognitive medium is the same as that of the human mind: electrical signals propagating in cell networks. I will explain non-neural bioelectricity and the tools we use to track the basal cognition of cells and tissues and control their function for applications in regenerative medicine. I will conclude with a discussion of our framework based on evolutionary scaling of intelligence by pivoting conserved mechanisms that allow agents, whether designed or evolved, to navigate complex problem spaces.
TALK MATERIALS
· The Electrical Blueprints that Orchestrate Life (TED Talk): https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_levin_the_electrical_bluep…trate_life.
· Michael Levin’s interviews and presentations: https://ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/levin/presentations/
· Michael Levin’s publications: https://ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/levin/publications/
· The Institute for Computationally Designed Organisms (ICDO): https://icdorgs.org/
MICHAEL LEVIN
Department of Biology, Tufts University: https://as.tufts.edu/biology.
Tufts University profile: https://ase.tufts.edu/biology/labs/levin/
Wyss Institute profile: https://wyss.harvard.edu/team/associate-faculty/michael-levin-ph-d/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levin_(biologist)
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=luouyakAAAAJ
Twitter: https://twitter.com/drmichaellevin.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-levin-b0983a6/
SEMF NETWORKS
Cellular Automata
This educational video about cellular automata was filmed, narrated, and edited by Rudy Rucker in 1990, using some “CA Lab” software he worled on at Autodesk. Renamed “Cellab,” the software and manual are available for free on Rucker’s website.
http://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm.
But certainly you can watch the video without using the software. Two-dimensional CA rules discussed include Langton’s worm, the game of Life, Silverman’s Brain, the Vote rule, the Rug rule, gas-simulating rules, and many others.
The neural architecture of language: Integrative modeling converges on predictive processing
The neuroscience of perception has recently been revolutionized with an integrative modeling approach in which computation, brain function, and behavior are linked across many datasets and many computational models. By revealing trends across models, this approach yields novel insights into cognitive and neural mechanisms in the target domain. We here present a systematic study taking this approach to higher-level cognition: human language processing, our species’ signature cognitive skill. We find that the most powerful “transformer” models predict nearly 100% of explainable variance in neural responses to sentences and generalize across different datasets and imaging modalities (functional MRI and electrocorticography). Models’ neural fits (“brain score”) and fits to behavioral responses are both strongly correlated with model accuracy on the next-word prediction task (but not other language tasks). Model architecture appears to substantially contribute to neural fit. These results provide computationally explicit evidence that predictive processing fundamentally shapes the language comprehension mechanisms in the human brain.
Unique Features of Octopus Create an Entirely New Way of Designing a Nervous System
Summary: Researchers discovered a structure within the octopus nervous system by which the intramuscular nerve cords, which help the cephalopod to sense its arm movements, connect arms on the opposite side of the animal.
Source: University of Chicago.
Octopuses are not much like humans — they are invertebrates with eight arms, and more closely related to clams and snails. Still, they have evolved complex nervous systems with as many neurons as in the brains of dogs, and are capable of a wide array of complicated behaviors.