Saved by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Somewhere over the brainbow
If a neuron was very active in response to a particular image, for example, the connections from its very active inputs would be strengthened. As a result, that neuron would respond strongly to that and similar images in the future. This makes neurons responsive to specific shapes and different neurons diverge to have different responses. The netwo
... See moreGrace Lindsay • Models of the Mind
The mechanisms of our intelligence are impossible to understand as long as you try to locate them in a specific place in our brain. Intelligence is what is called an emergent property: individually our neurons are primitive and limited, but vast assemblies of neurons make incredibly sophisticated behaviors “emerge” that can’t be attributed to any n
... See moreDavid Bessis • Mathematica
neurons tend to be heavily interconnected. With all their talking back and forth with each other, it’s unlikely that any one of them can remain very independent. Instead, their activity becomes correlated the same way that the opinions of people in the same social circles start to converge. For these reasons, neural populations are ripe for applyin
... See moreGrace Lindsay • Models of the Mind
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
To illustrate, he uses the example of a tiny jellyfish-like animal called a sea squirt: Born with a simple spinal cord and a three hundred–neuron “brain,” the larva motors around in the shallows until it finds a nice patch of coral on which to put down its roots. It has about twelve hours to do so, or it will die. Once safely attached, however, the
... See moreEric Hagerman • Spark!: How exercise will improve the performance of your brain
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
In sum, experience creates the repeated neural firing that can lead to gene expression, protein production, and changes in both the genetic regulation of neurons and the structural connections in the brain.
Daniel J. Siegel • Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation
Spanish Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, “it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality they are channeling and strengthening them.”