A conversation on the train
This past Saturday I got to use the absolute nerdiest opening to a conversation that has ever crossed my lips. I was on the train, which had been stuck the station before so it was packed sardine-like with all the people who had built up waiting on the platform. Standing next to me were a group of people who I overheard talking, and then I suddenly turned and asked, "Excuse me, but I couldn't help overhearing. Were you talking about modeling the thalamo-cortical loop?"
It seriously made my day. Particularly because I had a paper about that in my hands at the moment. I mean really, what are the odds?
What was particularly encouraging is that I generally held my own in the ensuing conversation, despite the fact that they were studying it actively, and I'm just trying to pick it up on my own enough to study it. We started talking about neuron and cortical column models, and before they got off a couple stops later, one guy suggested I look into something called the max model, which apparently compares the maximum input to the neuron's threshold level, rather than summing them. The obvious question in my mind is how such a system could handle inhibition, other than resorting to summation or perhaps taking the input of the greatest magnitude, which would allow a high-magnitude negative input to prevent firing. Anyway, I'm going to look into it.
Recently I've been reading a lot from UT Austin, trying to size up their program there. Some of my favorites have been:
Yoonsuck Choe's Analogical Cascade: A Theory on the Role of the Thalamo-Cortical Loop in Brain Function, from 2002
Srinivasa V. Chakravarthy and Joydeep Gosh's Studies on a network of complex neurons, a paper on the role of chaos in a more complex variant on a hopfield model
And I've also been enjoying Eytan Ruppin's Neural Modeling of Psychiatric Disorders, from 1995. It's probably a bit out of date, but it provides a nice overview of attempts to model various disorders such as alzheimers and schizophrenia, which is a very interesting area to me, because it should provide a good test in the future to see if we're close to the way human brains work. (Damage them in the same way, and see if the same effects occur)
It seriously made my day. Particularly because I had a paper about that in my hands at the moment. I mean really, what are the odds?
What was particularly encouraging is that I generally held my own in the ensuing conversation, despite the fact that they were studying it actively, and I'm just trying to pick it up on my own enough to study it. We started talking about neuron and cortical column models, and before they got off a couple stops later, one guy suggested I look into something called the max model, which apparently compares the maximum input to the neuron's threshold level, rather than summing them. The obvious question in my mind is how such a system could handle inhibition, other than resorting to summation or perhaps taking the input of the greatest magnitude, which would allow a high-magnitude negative input to prevent firing. Anyway, I'm going to look into it.
Recently I've been reading a lot from UT Austin, trying to size up their program there. Some of my favorites have been:
Yoonsuck Choe's Analogical Cascade: A Theory on the Role of the Thalamo-Cortical Loop in Brain Function, from 2002
Srinivasa V. Chakravarthy and Joydeep Gosh's Studies on a network of complex neurons, a paper on the role of chaos in a more complex variant on a hopfield model
And I've also been enjoying Eytan Ruppin's Neural Modeling of Psychiatric Disorders, from 1995. It's probably a bit out of date, but it provides a nice overview of attempts to model various disorders such as alzheimers and schizophrenia, which is a very interesting area to me, because it should provide a good test in the future to see if we're close to the way human brains work. (Damage them in the same way, and see if the same effects occur)
posted by PredictionsOfMemory | 9:15 PM
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