Saved by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Somewhere over the brainbow
Those beautiful color-dappled images are actually representations of particular areas in the brain that are working the hardest—as measured by increased oxygen consumption—when a subject performs a task such as reading a passage or reacting to stimuli, such as pictures of faces.
Sally Satel • Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience
If you want to understand what a part of a brain does, you have to answer:- What connections does that brain are make (inputs, outputs)?- Where was it early in childhood development?- When and why did it evolve?
Andrew Huberman • The Science of Emotions & Relationships
Nicolay Gerold added
Marvin Minsky, co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, thinks of the brain as a society—a society of subassemblies cooperating to learn about the world.251 The image can easily be reversed. A society is a brain, a learning device that works according to the principles that drive a neural net.
Howard Bloom • The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
A neuron is really good at one thing: summing up the stimulation coming into its dendrites to “decide” whether to fire a pulse along its axon. A neuron by itself isn’t very smart. But if you put neurons together in the right way you get a brain; you get an emergent system that is much smarter and more flexible than a single neuron.
Jonathan Haidt • The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
A more controversial application than this scanning-the-brain-to-understand-it scenario is scanning-the-brain-to-download-it. When an entire network of neurons receives input (from the outside world or from other networks of neurons), the signaling amongst them appears at first to be frenzied and random. So the question addressed by the San Diego r... See more
Ray Kurzweil • The Law of Accelerating Returns « the Kurzweil Library + collections
Juan Orbea added
In 1964, neuropsychologist Roger Sperry drew an analogy between neurons and ideas: Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains.
The Marginalian • Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity
Keely Adler added
Chart by Lloyd WattsCochlea: Sense organ of hearing. Detection of spectral edges and calibrating for noise levels. VNTB: Ventral Nucleus of the Trapezoid Body. Computing inter-aural time difference (difference in time of arrival between the two ears, used to tell where a sound is coming from).LSO: Lateral Superior Olive. The brain is not one huge “... See more
Ray Kurzweil • The Law of Accelerating Returns « the Kurzweil Library + collections
Juan Orbea added
These observations refute the myth that consciousness simply arises from neurons doing their thing. Here are billions of cerebellar cells doing what comes naturally to them, firing action potentials and releasing little squirts of neurotransmitter, yet without any feelings. What matters is not the constitution of brain tissue but the way it is wire
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