The brain is not like a neural network where the only thing that is “learned” or “updated” is the weights between neurons. At least some learning evidently happens within individual neurons.
That’s bad news for anyone hoping to simulate a brain digitally. It means there’s a lot more relevant stuff to simulate (like the learning that goes on within cells) than the connectionist paradigm of treating each biological neuron like a neural-net “neuron” would imply, and thus the computational requirements of simulating a brain are higher — maybe vastly higher — than connectionists hope.
I had heard this as well close to ten years ago on some NPR radio show: That researchers had reasons to suspect that a whole lot more processing happens within the synapses themselves.
The brain is not like a neural network where the only thing that is “learned” or “updated” is the weights between neurons. At least some learning evidently happens within individual neurons.
That’s bad news for anyone hoping to simulate a brain digitally. It means there’s a lot more relevant stuff to simulate (like the learning that goes on within cells) than the connectionist paradigm of treating each biological neuron like a neural-net “neuron” would imply, and thus the computational requirements of simulating a brain are higher — maybe vastly higher — than connectionists hope.
I had heard this as well close to ten years ago on some NPR radio show: That researchers had reasons to suspect that a whole lot more processing happens within the synapses themselves.