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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 14 2017, @11:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the like-tiny-living-wires dept.

The brain has more computational capacity than previously thought, according to UCLA researchers:

Dendrites have been considered simple passive conduits of signals. But by working with animals that were moving around freely, the UCLA team showed that dendrites are in fact electrically active — generating nearly 10 times more spikes than the soma (neuron cell body). The finding, reported [DOI: 10.1126/science.aaj1497] [DX] in the March 9 issue of the journal Science, challenges the long-held belief that spikes in the soma are the primary way in which perception, learning and memory formation occur.

"Dendrites make up more than 90 percent of neural tissue," said UCLA neurophysicist Mayank Mehta, the study's senior author. "Knowing they are much more active than the soma fundamentally changes the nature of our understanding of how the brain computes information. This is a major departure from what neuroscientists have believed for about 60 years," said Mehta, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy, of neurology and of neurobiology.

Because the dendrites are nearly 100 times larger in volume than the neuronal centers, Mehta said, the large number of dendritic spikes taking place could mean that the brain has more than 100 times the computational capacity than was previously thought.

Is that your final answer?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by TheLink on Wednesday March 15 2017, @03:31AM

    by TheLink (332) on Wednesday March 15 2017, @03:31AM (#479265) Journal

    there is not a single person that can tell you how the brain actually figures out that 2 plus 2 is 5.

    And that shows we aren't that close to building stuff that replicates what the brain does.

    The AIs that people have built so far make rather different mistakes from the sort humans make. Look at the mistakes Watson makes. Look at the mistakes image recognition algos make: https://www.wired.com/2015/01/simple-pictures-state-art-ai-still-cant-recognize/ [wired.com]

    The mistakes they make prove the AIs don't actually understand stuff yet. Heck a crow with its walnut sized brain probably truly understands more about the world than all the AIs combined: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbSu2PXOTOc [youtube.com]

    And to me that indicates the scientists and engineers trying to build "replicas" don't really understand how brains do what they do either. They are at the "alchemy" stage - they know how to get useful results, but they don't really have a theory that's close to reality.

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