{"id":146212,"date":"2022-09-12T21:22:18","date_gmt":"2022-09-13T02:22:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/how-ai-transformers-mimic-parts-of-the-brain"},"modified":"2022-09-12T21:22:18","modified_gmt":"2022-09-13T02:22:18","slug":"how-ai-transformers-mimic-parts-of-the-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/how-ai-transformers-mimic-parts-of-the-brain","title":{"rendered":"How AI Transformers Mimic Parts of the Brain"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Understanding how the brain organizes and accesses spatial information \u2014 where we are, what\u2019s around the corner, how to get there \u2014 remains an exquisite challenge. The process involves recalling an entire network of memories and stored spatial data from tens of billions of neurons, each connected to thousands of others. Neuroscientists have identified key elements such as grid cells<\/a>, neurons that map locations. But going deeper will prove tricky: It\u2019s not as though researchers can remove and study slices of human gray matter to watch how location-based memories of images, sounds and smells flow through and connect to each other.<\/p>\n

Artificial intelligence offers another way in. For years, neuroscientists have harnessed many types of neural networks \u2014 the engines that power most deep learning applications \u2014 to model the firing of neurons in the brain. In recent work, researchers have shown that the hippocampus, a structure of the brain critical to memory, is basically a special kind of neural net, known as a transformer<\/a>, in disguise. Their new model tracks spatial information in a way that parallels the inner workings of the brain. They\u2019ve seen remarkable success.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that we know these models of the brain are equivalent to the transformer means that our models perform much better and are easier to train,\u201d said James Whittington<\/a>, a cognitive neuroscientist who splits his time between Stanford University and the lab of Tim Behrens<\/a> at the University of Oxford.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Understanding how the brain organizes and accesses spatial information \u2014 where we are, what\u2019s around the corner, how to get there \u2014 remains an exquisite challenge. The process involves recalling an entire network of memories and stored spatial data from tens of billions of neurons, each connected to thousands of others. Neuroscientists have identified key [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":359,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-146212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/359"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}