Connectionists: How the brain works

[Janet Wiles]

When does a model escape from a research lab? Or in other words, when do researchers beyond the in-group investigate, test, or extend a model?

I have asked many colleagues this question over the years. Well-written papers help, open source code helps, tutorials help. But the most critical feature seems to be that it can be communicated in a single equation. Think about backprop, reinforcement learning, Bayes theorem.

Janet Wiles
Professor of  Complex and Intelligent Systems,
School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
The University of Queensland


-----Original Message-----
From: Connectionists [mailto:connectionists-bounces at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu] On Behalf Of Yu Shan
Sent: Friday, 23 May 2014 7:37 AM
To: Juyang Weng
Cc: connectionists at mailman.srv.cs.cmu.edu
Subject: Re: Connectionists: How the brain works

> 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!
>

Let's look at a recent example. Nikolic proposed his theory
(http://www.danko-nikolic.com/practopoiesis/) about how the brain works a few weeks ago to the Connectionists. Upon finishing reading this paper, I was quite exited. The theory is elegantly simple and yet has great explanatory power. It is also consistent with what we know about evolution as well as the brain's organization and development.
Of course, we don't know yet if it is a "largely correct model about how the brain works". But, to my opinion, it has a great potential.
Actually I am thinking how to implement those ideas in my own future research.

However, the author's efforts of introducing this work to the Connectionists received little attention. Connectionists reach 5000+ people, who are probably the most interested and capable audience for such a topic. This makes the silence particularly intriguing. Of course, one possible reason is that lots of people here already studied this theory and deemed it irrelevant.

But a more likely reason, I think, is most people did not give it much thought. If that is the case, it raises an interesting question: what is the barrier that a theory of how the brain works need to overcome in order to be treated seriously? In other words, what do we really want to know?

Shan Yu, Ph.D
Brainnetome Center and National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing 100190, P. R. China http://www.brainnetome.org/en/shanyu