Connectionists: The Atoms of Neural Computation: A reply to Gary Marcus

[Juyang Weng]

Terry, we should get more phenomena from experimental biologists and 
neuroscientists.
However, we must also provide a computational model about how the brain 
wires itself and develops its functions from activities.
You may be right in terms of "settled", but almost nothing can be 
settled in science.  One example is Newtonian physics which has been 
replaced with more accurate model of relativity.

-John

On 11/3/14 5:13 PM, Terry Sejnowski wrote:
> The debate between lumpers and splitters on cortical areas will not be settled
> until we have the right tools to probe them anatomically and functionally.
>
> We don't even know how many types of neurons there are in the cortex.
> Estimates range from 100 to 1000.
>
> One of the goals of the BRAIN Initiative is to find out how many
> there are and how they vary between different parts of the cortex:
>
> http://www.braininitiative.nih.gov/2025/index.htm
>
> An important source of variability between neurons is differential patterns
> of gene methylation, which is uniquely different in neurons compared
> with other cell types in the body:
>
> Lister, R. Mukamel, et al.  Global epigenomic reconfiguration
> during mammalian brain development, Science, 341, 629, 2013
>
> http://directorsblog.nih.gov/2013/08/27/charting-the-chemical-choreography-of-brain-development/#more-1983
>
> http://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Global%20epigenomic%20reconfiguration%20during%20mammalian%20brain%20development%202013-4331.pdf
>
> We now have optical techniques to record from 1000 cortical neurons
> simultaneously and that will increase by a factor of 100-1000x
> over the next decade.
>
> This will create a big data problem for neuroscience that readers of
> this list could help solve:
>
> Sejnowski, T. J. Churchland, P.S. Movshon, J.A.
> Putting big data to good use in neuroscience,
> Nature Neuroscience, 17, 1440-1441, 2014
>
> http://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/Putting%20big%20data%20to%20good%20use%20in%20neuroscience%202014-4397.pdf
>
> Terry
>
> -----

-- 
--
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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