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Neuroscience bits from my research
My biggest breakthrough: Recognition is a by-product of perception.
Over the many years that I've researched the human brain, I've had a number of minor breakthroughs in my understanding. Most of them had to do with the architecture and function of the retina. I've had only one breakthrough that I consider to be the biggest one of them all.
In the beginning, like everyone else who researches intelligence, I had assumed that the brain learned to recognize patterns. I spent many years looking for a plausible cortical mechanism that would support the assumption. I failed miserably.
Then one day, a question popped into my consciousness. What if I was wrong? What if everyone was wrong? What if it is not true that the brain learns to recognize patterns? I knew from my studies that most of the innate synaptic connections of the neocortex completely disappeared early in infancy. I reasoned that this could not possibly have anything to do with pattern learning.
At that point, the rebel in me took over. The brain is learning something but it is not pattern recognition. What then? Then I remembered thinking about something peculiar that I had observed before.
Unlike deep learning systems, the brain can perceive anything in the world, whether it recognizes it or not. By contrast, a deep neural net cannot perceive anything unless it has been previously trained to recognize it. This is a fatal flaw imo, one of the many reasons that the AI community cannot solve AGI. (note: I've written about this many times, but it's so important, it bears repeating over and over.)
I had a flash of insight. The brain doesn't learn to recognize the world. It learns to perceive it. Recognition is a mere by-product of perception. Indeed, we forget almost everything we perceive. When we perceive an object, the brain activates short-lived memory "traces". This is what psychologists call short term memory (STM).
In order to remember or later recognize a pattern, the STM traces must be reactivated a number of times. Otherwise they fade away and self-delete. With enough reactivations, the traces can become permanent. That is, they become part of long term memory (LTM).
Work in progress. I love the brain. 😍
My biggest breakthrough: Recognition is a by-product of perception.
Over the many years that I've researched the human brain, I've had a number of minor breakthroughs in my understanding. Most of them had to do with the architecture and function of the retina. I've had only one breakthrough that I consider to be the biggest one of them all.
In the beginning, like everyone else who researches intelligence, I had assumed that the brain learned to recognize patterns. I spent many years looking for a plausible cortical mechanism that would support the assumption. I failed miserably.
Then one day, a question popped into my consciousness. What if I was wrong? What if everyone was wrong? What if it is not true that the brain learns to recognize patterns? I knew from my studies that most of the innate synaptic connections of the neocortex completely disappeared early in infancy. I reasoned that this could not possibly have anything to do with pattern learning.
At that point, the rebel in me took over. The brain is learning something but it is not pattern recognition. What then? Then I remembered thinking about something peculiar that I had observed before.
Unlike deep learning systems, the brain can perceive anything in the world, whether it recognizes it or not. By contrast, a deep neural net cannot perceive anything unless it has been previously trained to recognize it. This is a fatal flaw imo, one of the many reasons that the AI community cannot solve AGI. (note: I've written about this many times, but it's so important, it bears repeating over and over.)
I had a flash of insight. The brain doesn't learn to recognize the world. It learns to perceive it. Recognition is a mere by-product of perception. Indeed, we forget almost everything we perceive. When we perceive an object, the brain activates short-lived memory "traces". This is what psychologists call short term memory (STM).
In order to remember or later recognize a pattern, the STM traces must be reactivated a number of times. Otherwise they fade away and self-delete. With enough reactivations, the traces can become permanent. That is, they become part of long term memory (LTM).
Work in progress. I love the brain. 😍
Neuroscience bits from my research: Recognition is a by-product of perception.
Nothing can move in more than one direction at the same time.
Don't let its simplicity fool you. I believe this is the most powerful principle of perception in the visual cortex. It is used for both learning and on-the-fly perception.
While researching the visual system of the human brain, I came to understand that, unlike deep neural nets, the visual cortex doesn't learn to recognize patterns, scenes or objects. Rather, it learns to perceive the world instantly, i.e., to use the world as its own model.
Recognition is a by-product of perception. When a perceptual representation is built in memory, it has a short life and, unless rehearsed (recalled) repeatedly, it slowly decays and disappears.
The advantage of universal and instantaneous perception is that the brain is not blind to patterns or scenes it has not encountered before. Humans learn to achieve universal perception during the first few years after birth. During this time, most of the initial connections in the cortex disappear.
Instant perception solves the edge case problem, the bane of the self-driving car industry. This is an absolutely essential ability that deep learning systems do not have. It is one of the many reasons that DL will not be part of the AGI solution.
I believe there are maybe 2 or 3 additional principles that govern visual perception. I have a couple of partly baked ideas percolating in my brain. Hopefully, something will come out of it soon.
My thesis is that all the sensory modalities are analogous. The main difference is in the architecture and function of the various sensors. This is exciting because it means that solving one cortical functionality amounts to solving all the others.
Concept formation, including language learning, is a separate process that uses recognized percepts from all the regions of the cortex to form associations. It's an essential part of intelligence but I think it's a trivial problem compared to sensory perception.
I could be wrong but I still believe that the mystery of intelligence will likely be solved before the end of this decade. It will be a neuroscience solution. Work in progress.
I love the brain. 🧠😍View quoted post on X
