SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Salk researchers and collaborators have achieved critical insight into the size of neural connections, putting the memory capacity of the brain far higher than common estimates. The new work also answers a longstanding question as to how the brain is so energy efficient and could help engineers build computers that are incredibly powerful but also conserve energy.
"This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience," says Terry Sejnowski, Salk professor and co-senior author of the paper, which was published in eLife. "We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power. Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web."
Our memories and thoughts are the result of patterns of electrical and chemical activity in the brain. A key part of the activity happens when branches of neurons, much like electrical wire, interact at certain junctions, known as synapses. An output 'wire' (an axon) from one neuron connects to an input 'wire' (a dendrite) of a second neuron. Signals travel across the synapse as chemicals called neurotransmitters to tell the receiving neuron whether to convey an electrical signal to other neurons. Each neuron can have thousands of these synapses with thousands of other neurons.
Nanoconnectomic upper bound on the variability of synaptic plasticity (10.7554/eLife.10778)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by q.kontinuum on Friday January 22 2016, @07:34AM
I also pride myself in being able to problems with a given set of tools rather than being able to memorize thousands of APIs by heart :-) Like a database with stored procedures.
Sometimes, however, I wonder if this problem solving skill is not just a way to compensate for weak memory. Storing a procedure probably takes considerably less memory than all the data... I wonder, are intelligent people on average more forgetful?
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Friday January 22 2016, @08:03AM
Einstein had a reputation for forgetting things. [google.com].
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Friday January 22 2016, @08:35AM
I know I am...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Friday January 22 2016, @03:45PM
I might humbly suggest that intelligence is making connections where others do not.
Hence, the worry about AI possibly becoming dangerous. With instant recall of any collection of data, machines might make connections that may not be anticipated by humans...