the rarer a symbol’s use, the more information it contains.

According to behaviourism, psychology should not be defined as the study of the mind, but rather, as the study of behaviour. Behaviourists therefore prefer descriptions of observable external activity to any theorising about internal mental activity like thoughts, beliefs or emotions. To them, the behaviour of humans and animals can be understood

We now know that granule cell inputs cause a receptor in the membrane of the Purkinje cell to respond, effectively tagging which granule cell inputs were active at a given time.

it imbues neurons with the ability to identify sequences.

It’s not the association of a cue with a reward – not directly at least. Instead it’s more of a signal telling you the path to reward, should you follow the right steps in between.

At the height of synapse building in the human brain – during the third trimester of pregnancy – 40,000 such connections are constructed every second.

‘This ability to describe the data accurately comes at the cost of falsifiability.’

The ‘convolutional neural network’ – the name given to this style of model – was born.

By repeatedly reactivating the same group of neurons elsewhere in the brain, the hippocampus gives those neurons the chance to undergo Hebbian learning themselves.