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“New Clues about the Origins of Biological Intelligence ” by Prof. Rafael Yuste  and Michael Levin

AUTHORS

Rafael Yuste is a professor of biological sciences at Columbia University and director of its Neurotechnology Center.

Michael Levin is a biology professor and director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University.

A common solution is emerging in two different fields: developmental biology and neuroscience

The original article can be found https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-clues-about-the-origins-of-biological-intelligence/?amp;text=New

The keywords I want to put into my notes:

modularity; hierarchy; pattern completion

The interesting fact I want to remember:

“when Luis Carrillo-Reid and his colleagues at Columbia University studied how mice respond to visual stimuli, they found that activating as few as two neurons in the middle of a mouse brain—which contains more than 100 million neurons—could artificially trigger visual perceptions that led to particular behaviors

The conclusion I like to think more:

“Like a ratchet, evolution can thus effectively climb the intelligence ladder, stretching all the way from simple molecules to cognition. Hierarchical modularity and pattern completion can help understand the decision-making of cells and neurons during morphogenesis and brain processes, generating well adaptive animals and behavior. Studying how collective intelligence emerges in biology not only can help us better understand the process and products of evolution and design but could also be pertinent for the design of artificial intelligence systems and, more generally for engineering and even the social sciences.”

“Spiking Neural Networks” by Anil Ananthaswamy (Simons Institute Science Communicator in Residence)

Original article: https://simons.berkeley.edu/news/spiking-neural-networks

I love this article because it shows me the historical journey of the development of Spiking Neural Networks (SNN). I keep it in my post to remind me in the future that SNN could be one good idea for building low energy consumption models with task high-performance compared to or even better than deep neural networks.

Researchers have been studying spiking neural networks (SNNs) for decades in hopes of emulating the brain and, more recently, to build better, energy-efficient neural networks