You can't tell how deep a puddle is until you step in it. When I am asked about my profession, I have two ways of answering. If I want a short discussion, I say that I am a mathematician; if I want a long discussion, I say that I try to understand how the human brain works. A long discussion often leads to further questions: What does it mean to understand "how the brain works"? Does it help to be trained in mathematics when you try to understand the brain, and what kind of mathematics can help? What makes a mathematician turn into a neuroscientist? This may lead into a metascientific discussion which I do not like par ticularly because it is usually too far off the ground. In this book I take quite a different approach. I just start explaining how I think the brain works. In the course of this explanation my answers to the above questions will become clear to the reader, and he will perhaps learn some facts about the brain and get some insight into the construc tions of artificial intelligence.
Reihe
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Illustrationen
18 s/w Abbildungen
VIII, 248 p. 18 illus.
Dateigröße
ISBN-13
978-3-642-81792-2 (9783642817922)
DOI
10.1007/978-3-642-81792-2
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Contents, with Outline.- I.- 1 The Flow of Information.- 2 Thinking as Seen from Within and from Without.- 3 How to Build Well-Behaving Machines.- 4 Organizations, Algorithms, and Flow Diagrams.- 5 The Improved Matchbox Algorithm.- 6 The Survival Algorithm as a Model of an Animal.- 7 Specifying the Survival Algorithm.- II.- 8 The Anatomy of the Cortical Connectivity.- 9 The Visual Input to the Cortex.- 10 Changes in the Cortex with Learning.- 11 From Neural Dynamics to Cell Assemblies.- 12 Introspection and the Rules of Threshold Control.- 13 Further Speculations.- 14 Men, Monkeys, and Machines.- 15 Why all These Speculations?.- References.- Digressions.- 1 Electrical Signal Transmission in a Single Neuron.- 2 Basic Information Theory.- 3 Sets and Mappings.- 4 Local Synaptic Rules.- 5 Flow Diagram for a Survival Algorithm.- 6 Suggestions for Further Reading.- Appendices.- 1 On the Storage Capacity of Associative Memories.- 2 Neural Modeling.- 3 Cell Assemblies: the Basic Ideas.- 4 Cell Assemblies and Graph Theory.- Author and Subject Index.
