Brain science 脑科学知识总结[1]

This is a note of the book ‘On Intelligence’.

According to the author, most AI passing Turing Test don't have human intellegence even if they behave like they have.  A human doesn't need to "do" anything to understand a story. One could not tell from a reader's quiet behavior whether he understand the story or not.  Understanding cannot be measured by external behavior,  it is instead an internal metric of how the brain remember things and uses its memories to make predictions. 

The human cerebral cortex is a thin sheet of neural tissue that envelops most of the older parts of the brain. Almost everything intelligent – perception, language, imagination, mathematics, art, music, planning – occurs at cerebral-cortex. The cortex is highly interconnected with the old brain regions, and other regions such as brain stem, basal ganglia, amygdala, are important to the functioning of the cerebral cortex.

Cerebral cortex is 2 millimeters thick and has six layers. Stretched flat, the human cortex sheet is roughly the size of a large dinner napkin. It is loaded with nerve cells, or neurons. Some anatomists have estimated that the typical human cerebral cortex contains around thirty billion neurons (30,000,000,000). They contain almost all memories, knowledge, skills, accumulated life experience. There is a large philosophical gulf between a collection of cells and conscious experience, yet it is hypothesized that mind and brain are one and the same.

The cortex is a hierarchical system. The hierarchy has nothing to do with physical arrangement in the brain. There are also lateral connections between areas of separate branches of the hierarchy. The sensory information first arrives in the lowest function regions of the cortex.

Anatomists have found out that the cerebral cortex is largely uniform in appearance and structure. The regions of cortex that handle auditory input, touch, control muscles, Broca’s language area, every other region, all look alike. It is proposed that they use about the same algorithm to process different sensory input. This explains the extreme flexibility of the cerebral cortex. The cortex can change and rewire itself depending on the type of sensory inputs flowing into it. Adults who are born deaf process visual information in areas that normally become auditory regions. It shows that the brain regions develop different functions based on the sensory input they receive during development. It is not hard-wired. It is said that the genes dictate the overall architecture of the cortex, but within the structure the system is highly flexible.

Sense organs receive different sensory input, then the inputs are all converted to electrical signals called “action potentials” or “spikes”. Different sensory input is represented with different action potentials patterns on the axons, these patterns represent spatial and temporal information. The brain is the only part of the body that has no senses itself. If a doctor touches the brain tissue, the patient wouldn’t feel it. All our knowledge of the world is based on patterns. The certainty of the world’s existence is based on the consistency of patterns and how we interpret them. The world may really exist in an absolute form very close to how the brain perceives it. However, the brain couldn’t know about the absolute world directly, it could only know it through a set of senses, which can only detect parts of the absolute world. The senses create patterns that are sent to the cortex, the patterns are processed by the same cortical algorithm to create a model of the world. Then the model of the world is hold in memory.

A neuron collects inputs from its synapses, combines these inputs to decide when to output a spike to other neurons. This takes about 5ms (around two hundred times per second). A modern silicon-based computer can do one billion operations in a second. The basic operation of computer is five million times faster than the basic operation in brain. The brain doesn’t “compute” the answers to problems; it retrieves the answers from memory. The entire cortex is a memory system. It isn’t a computer at all. To the brain, the world is spatial temporal patterns constantly changing. However, the cortex creates invariant representations, which handle variations in the world automatically. The attributes of cerebral cortex memory are:

• The cerebral cortex stores sequences of patterns.
• The cerebral cortex recalls patterns auto-associatively.
• The cerebral cortex stores patterns in an invariant form.
• The cerebral cortex stores patterns in a hierarchy.

When telling a story, one can’t remember the entire story at once. It must be recalled sequentially. The memory of the story is stored sequentially in the brain. When recalling one’s home in detail, one couldn’t think of them all at once. They are related memories. Even if one has a thorough memory, one must recall it through sequential segments. One pattern evokes the next pattern, which evoke the next pattern, and so on. Truly random thoughts don’t exist. Memory recall almost always follows a pathway of association. For example, the memory of the alphabet is a sequence of patterns. It couldn’t be said backward easily. It isn’t stored in an instant or in an arbitrary order. At any moment in time, only a tiny fraction of the stored memories is retrieved, which indicates only a limited number of synapses and neurons are active at any one time.

An auto-associative memory system is one that can recall complete patterns when given only partial or distorted inputs. It’s proved that during conversation we often don’t hear all the words we perceive. We fill in what’s not heard with what we expect to hear.  The brain is constantly completing patterns. The visual information is not complete with each eye’s blind spot, the brain fills in the information.

The cerebral cortex stores patterns in an invariant form. For example, the brain forms invariant representation of a person through the person’s different angles of face, the person’s voice, etc. Change the tone of the music, the sequence is identified as the same. The signature is slightly different every time but invariant in brain. Written language and spoken language represent the same meaning.

The author proposed that a main function of the brain is prediction. The brain uses stored memories to constantly make predictions about everything it sees, feels, and hears. Prediction is pervasive – what the world appears to one does not come solely from sensory inputs. What one perceives is a combination of sensory inputs and the brain’s memory-derived prediction. Prediction is the primary function of the cerebral cortex, and the foundation of intelligence. Intelligence is measured by the capacity to remember and predict patterns in the world, including language, mathematics, physical properties of objects, and social situations. The brain receives patterns from outside world, store them as memories, and makes predictions by combining what it has seen before and what is happening now.

Reference:

On Intelligence -- Jeff Hawkins