Connectionists: How the brain works

[Levine, Daniel S]

John,

I agree about the need for cultural change.  But I'm glad you said ONLY by government funds.  Government funds can contribute to the necessary cultural change IF they are used in the right way.  And the right way is to encourage risk taking and cross-disciplinary thinking, not merely to entrench a few groups who are recognized experts.  The size of the overall funding pie also needs to be sufficient that both recognized experts and imaginative novices can get more freedom to pursue their ideas.

Dan

________________________________________
From: Connectionists [connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of Juyang Weng [weng at cse.msu.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 10:33 PM
To: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Re: Connectionists: How the brain works

 From what I understand preliminarily about how the brain works, a cure
for epilepsy can come only after we know how the brain works, not before.

With great respect to Terry, I guess that the Obama's BRAIN project
should not be like the moon project.  The moon project is an engineering
problem.  An engineering problem can be solved mainly by government funds.

But most goals of the BRAIN project (e.g., cure brain diseases) cannot
be reached without theoretically understanding how the brain works.
In this regard, sorry, Obama was wrong.

However, theoretically understanding how the brain works is also a
cultural problem.
The most fundamental problem of the BRAIN project is the research
environment in the U.S., i.e., the division of walls between disciplines.
It is a problem of culture.

Why?

Suppose that one gave all in this connectionists list a largely correct
model about how the brain works, few on this list would be able to
understand it let alone agree with it!

Still remember the problem with Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory?
The problem of how the brain works is like that and more, because
it is further highly cross-disciplinary.   Charles Darwin's evolutionary
theory was largely of a single disciplinary, if I understand it correctly.

Such cultural problems cannot be solved only by government funds. They
require advance of culture in our research community. Unfortunately,
advances of culture take many decades.  How long does it takes for the
human culture to accept Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory?

-John

On 5/22/14 6:21 AM, Martin Spacek wrote:
> Somewhat off-topic, Stephen Colbert interviewed Steven Pinker on the
> Colbert Report in 2007, and asked him to describe, on the spot, how
> the brain works in 5 words or less. His reply:
>
> "Brain cells fire in patterns."
>
> http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/n36pgb/steven-pinker
> (I think that's the link, but I'm outside the US so I can't view it.)
>
>> Terry Sejnowski told us that the new Obama initiative is like the moon
>> project. When this program was initiated we had no idea how to
>> accomplish
>> this, but dreams (and money) can be very motivating.
>>
>> This is a nice point, but I don't understand what a connection plan
>> would
>> give us. I think without knowing precisely where and how strong
>> connections
>> are made, and how each connection would influence a postsynaptic or
>> glia etc
>> cells, such information is useless. So why not having the goal of
>> finding a
>> cure for epilepsy?
>
> Why not have the goal of finding a cure for epilepsy? I propose that
> neuroscience today is mostly a study of how the brain breaks.
> Unfortunately, for those of us that aren't so interested in a specific
> disease, or disease at all, grant proposals often still need to be
> couched in those terms.
>
> Studying how a thing breaks can only get you so far. At some point, to
> really make progress, you need to figure out how the darn thing works
> when it ain't broke. That's what makes the Human Brain Project and the
> Brain Initiative worthwhile ventures, even if they aren't hypothesis
> driven.
>
> Martin Spacek
> PhD candidate, Graduate Program in Neuroscience
> Swindale Lab
> Dept. of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences
> University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
> http://mspacek.github.io
>

--
--
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/
----------------------------------------------