Voices from the Neuroscience Community, Take 1
Voices from the Neuroscience Community, Take 1:
“So how can a brain perform difficult tasks in one hundred
steps that the largest parallel computer imaginable can't solve in a million or
a billion steps? The answer is the brain doesn't "compute" the
answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory. In essence, the
answers were stored in memory a long time ago. It only takes a few steps to
retrieve something from memory. Slow neurons are not only fast enough to do
this, but they constitute the memory themselves. The entire cortex is a memory
system. It isn't a computer at all… the cortex creates what are called invariant
representations, which handle variations in the world automatically…the problem
of understanding how your cortex forms invariant representations remains one of
the biggest mysteries in all of science.” –J.
Hawkins [6]
“…Learning and memory, as well as synaptic and neuronal
plasticity, represent a family of processes that share a common logic and some
key components but vary in the details of their molecular mechanisms…In the
study of memory storage, we are now at the foothills of a great mountain range.
We have some understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory
storage, but we need to move from these mechanisms to the systems properties of
memory: What neural circuits are important for various types of memory? How are
internal representations of a face, a scene, a melody, or an experience encoded
in the brain?…I would like to understand how the
unconscious processing of sensory information occurs and how conscious
attention guides the mechanisms in the brain that stabilize memory.” –E. Kandel
[5]
“The ability to use special brain circuits to create
metarepresentations of sensory and motor representations – partly to
facilitate language and partly facilitated by language – might have been
critical for the evolution of both full-fledged qualia and a sense of self…it
is impossible to have free-floating qualia without a self experiencing it, nor
a self existing in isolation, devoid of all feelings and sensations.” –V. Ramachandran [5]
References
and Endnotes:
[5] “A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness,”
V.S. Ramachandran, Pi Press, 2004.
“In Search of Memory, The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, E.R. Kandel, W.W. Norton & Co., 2007.
[6] “On Intelligence,” Jeff Hawkins, Owl Books, 2004.