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Matvey Ezhov

Technology Review: Intelligence Explained (!) - 0 views

  • "Scientists are now able to switch the focus from particular regions of the brain to the connections between those regions," says Sherif Karama, a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist at McGill University's Montreal Neurological Institute.
  • A quantifiable "general intelligence factor," known as g, can be statistically extracted from scores on a battery of intelligence tests.
  • In 2001, Thompson showed that it is correlated with volume in the frontal cortex, a result consistent with a number of studies that have linked intelligence to overall brain size.
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  • In 2007, Jung and Richard Haier, now professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Irvine, developed the first comprehensive theory drawn from neuroimaging of how the brain gives rise to intelligence.
    • Matvey Ezhov
       
      Attention! To Research.
  • As we "evolved from worms to humans," says George Bartzokis, a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, the number of non-neural cells in the brain increased 50 times more than the number of neurons. He adds, "My hypothesis has always been that what gives us our cognitive capacity is not actually the number of neurons, which can vary tremendously between human individuals, but rather the quality of our connections."
  • The type of MRI typically used for medical scans does not show the finer details of the brain's white matter. But with a technique called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which uses the scanner's magnet to track the movement of water molecules in the brain, scientists have developed ways to map out neural wiring in detail. While water moves randomly within most brain tissue, it flows along the insulated neural fibers like current through a wire.
Matvey Ezhov

The AI Revolution Is On | Magazine - 11 views

  • But they represent a new forefront in the field of artificial intelligence. Today’s AI doesn’t try to re-create the brain. Instead, it uses machine learning, massive data sets, sophisticated sensors, and clever algorithms to master discrete tasks.
Matvey Ezhov

Is this a unified theory of the brain? (Bayesian theory in New Scientist) - 1 views

  • Neuroscientist Karl Friston and his colleagues have proposed a mathematical law that some are claiming is the nearest thing yet to a grand unified theory of the brain. From this single law, Friston’s group claims to be able to explain almost everything about our grey matter.
  • Friston’s ideas build on an existing theory known as the “Bayesian brain”, which conceptualises the brain as a probability machine that constantly makes predictions about the world and then updates them based on what it senses.
  • A crucial element of the approach is that the probabilities are based on experience, but they change when relevant new information, such as visual information about the object’s location, becomes available. “The brain is an inferential agent, optimising its models of what’s going on at this moment and in the future,” says Friston. In other words, the brain runs on Bayesian probability.
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  • “In short, everything that can change in the brain will change to suppress prediction errors, from the firing of neurons to the wiring between them, and from the movements of our eyes to the choices we make in daily life,” he says.
  • Friston created a computer simulation of the cortex with layers of “neurons” passing signals back and forth. Signals going from higher to lower levels represent the brain’s internal predictions, while signals going the other way represent sensory input. As new information comes in, the higher neurons adjust their predictions according to Bayesian theory.
  • Volunteers watched two sets of moving dots, which sometimes moved in synchrony and at others more randomly, to change the predictability of the stimulus. The patterns of brain activity matched Friston’s model of the visual cortex reasonably well.
  • Friston’s results have earned praise for bringing together so many disparate strands of neuroscience. “It is quite certainly the most advanced conceptual framework regarding an application of these ideas to brain function in general,” says Wennekers. Marsel Mesulam, a cognitive neurologist from Northwestern University in Chicago, adds: “Friston’s work is pivotal. It resonates entirely with the sort of model that I would like to see emerge.”
  • “The final equation you write on a T-shirt will be quite simple,” Friston predicts.
  • There’s work still to be done, but for now Friston’s is the most promising approach we’ve got. “It will take time to spin off all of the consequences of the theory – but I take that property as a sure sign that this is a very important theory,” says Dehaene. “Most other models, including mine, are just models of one small aspect of the brain, very limited in their scope. This one falls much closer to a grand theory.”
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