Looking at Cortical Column Function with Jeff Hawkins

Ever since "On Intelligence", I've been a Jeff Hawkins fanboy. It takes a lot of guts to invest all your wealth into understanding the brain. But what are his recent theories?

Bio-Inspired Robotics for Beginners

Modern "deep" learning approaches have problems. The need for training data. A lack of robustness. Are they doing everything in reverse?

Predicting the Future

The rise of machine learning and developments in neuroscience hint that prediction is key to how brains navigate the world. But how could this work in practice?

Playing Around with Retinal-Cortex Mappings

Here is a little notebook where I play around with converting images from a polar representation to a Cartesian representation. This is similar to the way our bodies map information from the retina onto the early visual areas. Mapping from the visual field (A) to the thalamus (B) to the cortex (C) These ideas are … Continue reading Playing Around with Retinal-Cortex Mappings →

Folding Autoencoders

The one where I perform some autoencoder origami to make sense of the brain.

An Introduction to the Predictive Brain

A short look at theories of the "predictive brain".

Natural Language Processing & The Brain: What Can They Teach Each Other?

This post looks at what recent advances in natural language processing can teach us about the brain and cognition.

Free Will: Do We Have It?

The more we design intelligent systems the more we creep up against the concepts of free will and determinism. These concepts underlie the stories we tell ourselves and underpin our legal systems. But what does free will mean? How does it influence our actions? And can we get rid of it? The approach of this … Continue reading Free Will: Do We Have It? →

How do we remember characters?

I have a question of cognitive science: how do we hold in our minds the combination of characteristics that make up a particular object or character? How do we then keep that specific combination in mind and consistent over the span of a narrative? Consistency is a hard one. Characters may be separated by several … Continue reading How do we remember characters? →

Reflections on “Meaning”

Existential “meaning” is partly the telling of a story featuring ourselves that is available and consistent with our higher-level representations of the world. It is not, generally, rational; it is more a narrative correlated with a feeling of “selfness” and “correctness”.