MDMA makes octopuses cuddle
neurodudes | at the intersection of neuroscience and AI.
by Bayle Shanks
3y ago
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/20/648788149/octopuses-get-strangely-cuddly-on-the-mood-drug-ecstasy Eric Edsinger, Gül Dölen. A Conserved Role for Serotonergic Neurotransmission in Mediating Social Behavior in Octopus. Current Biology, September 20, 2018 ..read more
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Neural CGI
neurodudes | at the intersection of neuroscience and AI.
by Bayle Shanks
3y ago
“In this work, published in Science (Open Access version), we introduce the Generative Query Network (GQN), a framework within which machines learn to perceive their surroundings by training only on data obtained by themselves as they move around scenes…The GQN model is composed of two parts: a representation network and a generation network. The representation network takes the agent’s observations as its input and produces a representation (a vector) which describes the underlying scene. The generation network then predicts (‘imagines’) the scene from a previously unobserved viewp ..read more
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Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?
neurodudes | at the intersection of neuroscience and AI.
by Bayle Shanks
3y ago
Great article where the authors take a microprocessor chip and subject it to the kinds of analyses that we do on brains, to see when they discover true things and when they ‘discover’ misleading results: http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 ..read more
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Stochastic computing
neurodudes | at the intersection of neuroscience and AI.
by Bayle Shanks
3y ago
One method of computing is to require that all numbers be real values between 0 and 1, and then instead of encoding these numbers into bit streams using binary, represent them with a long stream of random bits which are 1 with probability x, where x is the number being encoded. An advantage is that computations which require many logic gates to implement can implemented more simply (assuming that the randomness in the input bit streams are uncorrelated); eg x*y can be implemented by ANDing the bit streams together, and (x+y)/2 can be implemented by evenly sampling both of the inputs (select&nb ..read more
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Memory improvement via stimulation of temporal cortex
neurodudes | at the intersection of neuroscience and AI.
by Bayle Shanks
3y ago
Stimulation of temporal cortex with electrodes at memory encoding time boosted recall by 15%, in humans. In the first phase, researchers listened to brain activity while subjects were memorizing nouns. They trained a model to try to predict, based on the brain activity at encoding time, if that word would be remembered or not. In the second phase, researchers ran the model while subjects were memorizing words, and if the model predicted that the word was more than 50% likely to be forgotten, they zapped the brain for 0.5 seconds (through a single pair of adjacent electrodes in the lateral temp ..read more
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Gene ‘Arc’ transports mRNA across cells and is required for some forms of plasticity
neurodudes | at the intersection of neuroscience and AI.
by Bayle Shanks
3y ago
Also it appears to have evolved from viruses. Elissa D. Pastuzyn, Cameron E. Day, Rachel B. Kearns, Madeleine Kyrke-Smith, Andrew V. Taibi, John McCormick, Nathan Yoder, David M. Belnap, Simon Erlendsson, Dustin R. Morado, John A.G. Briggs, Cédric Feschotte, Jason D. Shepherd. The Neuronal Gene Arc Encodes a Repurposed Retrotransposon Gag Protein that Mediates Intercellular RNA Transfer James Ashley, Benjamin Cordy, Diandra Luci, Lee G. Fradkin, Vivian Budnik, Travis Thomson. Retrovirus-like Gag Protein Arc1 Binds RNA and Traffics across Synaptic Boutons   ..read more
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Neural Engineering System Design programme (DARPA funding award announced)
neurodudes | at the intersection of neuroscience and AI.
by Bayle Shanks
3y ago
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2017-07-10   “The NESD program looks ahead to a future in which advanced neural devices offer improved fidelity, resolution, and precision sensory interface for therapeutic applications,” said Phillip Alvelda, the founding NESD Program Manager. “By increasing the capacity of advanced neural interfaces to engage more than one million neurons in parallel…”   ” A Brown University team led by Dr. Arto Nurmikko will seek to decode neural processing of speech, focusing on the tone and vocalization aspects of auditory perception. The team’s proposed interf ..read more
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Google/Deepmind/Silver and Huang’s new Go-playing program
neurodudes | at the intersection of neuroscience and AI.
by Bayle Shanks
3y ago
There’s some buzz around recent improvements in Go-playing programs. Google made a program that is pretty good against human opponents but it uses 170GPUs and 1200CPUs! paper: Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search by David Silver, Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, George van deniessche, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Veda Panneershelvam, Marc Lanctot,nder Dieleman, Dominik Grewe, John Nham, Nal Kalchbrenner, Ilya Sutskever, Timothy Lillicrap, Madeleine Leach, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Thore Graepel, Demis Hassabis summary: they create a ..read more
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Emerald Therapeutics: they do your experiments for you
neurodudes | at the intersection of neuroscience and AI.
by Bayle Shanks
3y ago
They bought a bunch of machines to automate common experimental techniques and wrote software allowing the machines to be remotely programmed over the web. They plan to charge on a per-experiment basis. They are soliciting beta testers for 2015. Here’s the techniques that they can run. Here’s (slightly) more detail ..read more
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Computing with microtubules (Craddock, Tuszynski, Hameroff 2012)
neurodudes | at the intersection of neuroscience and AI.
by Bayle Shanks
3y ago
This paper hypothesizes that postsynaptic CaMKII (calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II) receives synaptic input and then interacts with via phosphorylation, suggesting that memories may be encoded in the microtubules in this way. They note that the size and shape of CaMKII appears to be just right to phosphorylate the hexagonal lattices of tubulin proteins in microtubules. The paper also can “demonstrate microtubule-associated protein logic gates, and show how patterns of phosphorylated tubulins in microtubules can control neuronal functions by triggering axonal firings, regulating s ..read more
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