Connectionists: how the brain works?

[Juyang Weng]

Mike,

Yes, they are very different in the signals they receive and process 
after at least several months' development prenatally, but this is
not a sufficiently deep causality for us to truly understand how the 
brain works.  Cerebral cortex, hippocampus and cerebellum are all very 
similar in the mechanisms that enable them to develop into what they 
are, prenatally and postnatally.

An intuitive way to think of this deeper causality is: Development is 
cell-based.  The same set of cell properties enables cells to migrate, 
connect and form cerebral cortex, hippocampus and cerebellum while each 
cell taking signals from other cells.

-John

On 3/14/14 3:40 PM, Michael Arbib wrote:
> At 11:17 AM 3/14/2014, Juyang Weng wrote:
>> The brain uses a single architecture to do all brain functions we are 
>> aware of!  It uses the same architecture to do vision, audition, 
>> motor, reasoning, decision making, motivation (including pain 
>> avoidance and pleasure seeking, novelty seeking, higher emotion, etc.).
>
> Gosh -- and I thought cerebral cortex, hippocampus and cerebellum were 
> very different from each other.
>

-- 
--
Juyang (John) Weng, Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
MSU Cognitive Science Program and MSU Neuroscience Program
428 S Shaw Ln Rm 3115
Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI 48824 USA
Tel: 517-353-4388
Fax: 517-432-1061
Email: weng at cse.msu.edu
URL: http://www.cse.msu.edu/~weng/
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