highly recommend owning a cat because it makes dealing with every negative emotion a little bit easier. it's difficult to feel the full weight of crushing reality when a little freak is doing olympic laps around your home after taking a loud shit
Excited to share our new paper on parallel computation and zero-shot composition in the recurrent network!
This was an amazing collaboration with @TAsabuki and Aineias!
https://t.co/AWi2GRLD9A
Excited to share this from my lab. Aging brains are an untapped resource for the AI community: biology has been stress-testing neural circuits since time began. What breaks, what holds & why? The answers could reshape how we build robust AI. 🧠
Born June 18, 1962: Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall. "I think the weird thing about being a scientist, or an academic in general, is you have to believe really strongly in what you do, while questioning it all the time and that's a hard balance to have"
https://t.co/4tAvgJhcIA
What is the difference between excitatory and inhibitory neurons?
Beyond the obvious difference of neurotransmitter effect on postsynaptic cell, another remarkable difference is the fact that excitatory neurons have lots of spines, while inhibitory neurons have less spines. 1/13
Apparently June is scoliosis awareness month as well as pride month, so it's just a great month for people like me who are not straight in any way, shape, or form
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Backprop is the engine of deep learning, but neuroscientists have insisted for decades that the brain can't do it. There are no dedicated "error" neurons or backward wiring.
What if the brain doesn't compute error in space, but in time? 🧵
In a new @NeuroCellPress article, members of the Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience (SCENE) outline their plans to investigate how the brain links perception, cognition and action by encoding environmental affordances: https://t.co/jgcGTqW4rj #science#neuroscience
🚨 New Preprint!
🧠 We gave an AI model one simple rule: rearrange your neurons so that nearby ones respond alike. We never told it what a face, a voice, or a sentence was.
It grew brain-like maps for all three anyway. 🧵👇
🌐 Website: https://t.co/1A4gccTbK2
The idea that prosocial behavior repurposes parenting circuits has been around for a while & was deeply explored in @pschurchland (my mum!)'s book Conscience. Now @TheHongLab has the mechanistic proof in a stunning new Nature paper. The right idea finally meets the right tools.🧠
The hardest problems are rarely solved by adding more complexity to the solution -- they are solved by reframing the question until a simpler, clearer answer reveals itself.
A strong predictor of who does extraordinary work is being terrible with everyday life; they get people’s names wrong, forget meetings, constantly lose things or don’t remember to eat because all their mental bandwidth is going elsewhere.
We met a researcher with 87000+ unread emails and a passport that expired the day before an AI conference he was speaking at, and a founder who had worn pretty much the same outfit every day for 10yrs because choosing took up way too much mental effort.
Maintaining a well run life is a part-time job hours-wise. For someone who is juggling a hard problem in their head 24-7, there is no spare capacity to run these background processes. Society treats this as a flaw to coach out (the command is “be more present”), but this level of absorption is necessary to solve a problem nobody else has.
"Learning the Geometry of Data: A Mathematical Review of Shape Space Analysis" (by Gary P. T. Choi, Khanh Dao Duc, Shira Faigenbaum-Golovin, Karen Habermann, Emmanuel Hartman, Christoph von Tycowicz, Chi Zhang, Wenjun Zhao, Felix Zhou): https://t.co/KcgBxisyqR