<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">New piece in Science, reevaluating the “canonical cortical computation” hypothesis: <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6209/551.short" class="">http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6209/551.short</a> (First paragraph pasted in below)<div class=""><br class=""><div class="">And lot of further detail didn’t fit: <a href="http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/10/31/010983" class="">http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/10/31/010983</a></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I love a discussion here on the group, especially re: the Table of possible computation and their neural realizations, in the Supplement. We plan to crowd-source a more detailed version of that table; please contact me if you are interested in contributing.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Cheers,</div><div class="">Gary</div></div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 'Lucida Grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">The human cerebral cortex is central to a wide array of cognitive functions, from vision to language, reasoning, decision-making, and motor control. Yet, nearly a century after the neuroanatomical organization of the cortex was first defined, its basic logic remains unknown. One hypothesis is that cortical neurons form a single, massively repeated “canonical” circuit, characterized as a kind of a “nonlinear spatiotemporal filter with adaptive properties” (</span><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline-style: none; font-size: 13px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="">1</em><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 'Lucida Grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">). In this classic view, it was “assumed that these…properties are identical for all neocortical areas.” Nearly four decades later, there is still no consensus about whether such a canonical circuit exists, either in terms of its anatomical basis or its function. Likewise, there is little evidence that such uniform architectures can capture the diversity of cortical function in simple mammals, let alone characteristically human processes such as language and abstract thinking (</span><em style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline-style: none; font-size: 13px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);" class="">2</em><span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: 'Lucida Grande', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" class="">). Analogous software implementations in artificial intelligence (e.g., deep learning networks) have proven effective in certain pattern classification tasks, such as speech and image recognition, but likewise have made little inroads in areas such as reasoning and natural language understanding. Is the search for a single canonical cortical circuit misguided?</span></div><br class=""><br class=""><div apple-content-edited="true" class="">
<div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: auto; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class=""><div class=""><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;" class=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;" class="">Gary Marcus</span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;" class=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;" class="">Professor of Psychology and Neural Science</span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;" class=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;" class="">New York University</span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;" class=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;" class="">Visiting Cognitive Scientist</span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;" class=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;" class="">Allen Institute for Brain Science</span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;" class=""><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;" class=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;" class=""></span></span></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;" class=""><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Helvetica;">Editor, </span><a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10306.html" class="">The Future of the Brain (2014)</a></div></div><div style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;" class=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;" class=""><a href="http://garymarcus.com/" class="">http://garymarcus.com/</a></span></div></div><div class=""><div style="orphans: 2; widows: 2; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;" class=""><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/gary-marcus" class="">New Yorker essays</a></div></div></div><div style="orphans: 2; widows: 2; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman', serif;" class=""><a href="http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/?action=click&contentCollection=Opinion®ion=TopBar&WT.nav=searchWidget&module=SearchSubmit&pgtype=article#/%22gary+marcus%22/since1851/articles/1/allauthors/relevance/opinion/" class="">New York Times op-eds</a></div><div class=""><span style="font-family: Helvetica, sans-serif;" class=""><br class=""></span></div></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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