Cracking the Brain’s Codes

There is probably not going to be any singular common code for all brains, this is pattern recognition in a fatty sponge that grew from a single cell. There will be families of similar neural networks in roughly the same locations according to where the input&#x2F;outputs are. My best intuition is for some people who have &quot;savant&quot;-like powers are they were fortunate to grow exceptionally useful networks for their needs.<p>If you&#x27;re a bio-hacker with a penchant for hardware upgrades, I think that you don&#x27;t need to wait for anyone to discover &quot;the encoding&quot; to install an interface to your mind. Just do it, and like everything else in your brain, you&#x27;ll spend a few weeks training your mind to use the new sense and digital motor skills. Bio-feedback technology is already here.

Starts with the assumption that brain &#x2F; brain activity = conscious self.<p>I am not aware of any evidence that this is the case. (That is not to say that I think the two are unrelated, I just think this assumption ought to be challenged, rather than taken for granted).

If you wan&#x27;t a good intuitive understanding of the neocortex then I seriously suggest reading up on Sparse Distributed Representations. A theory refined by Gerard Rinkus and Jeff Hawkins.

I liked this article after reading it. Before I read it, I thought it would be yet another <i>Technology Review</i> article by a staff writer, a superficial look at unreplicated research, but I find as I reach the end of the article that the two co-authors are both leading researchers on the topic and the second co-author is Gary Marcus, a psychology professor who is a diligent author of popular books about psychology to explain the latest findings from neuroscience-based psychology to the public. This is worth a read. It&#x27;s not the last word on the subject, as the title alone should make clear, but it&#x27;s a good introduction to the current research program and the complications it is discovering as scientists seek to develop a deeper understanding of the function of the human brain.

&gt; <i>What matters most is not precisely when a particular neuron spikes but how often it does; the rate of firing is the main currency.</i><p>I&#x27;m not too sure about that.<p>My gut feeling is that at least half of the information in the brain is encoded in the exact timing of the spikes. In a model that takes time into account, certain neurons function as a &quot;coincidence detector&quot; sensitive to certain events.<p>e.g. your brain deduces which direction a sound is coming from by analyzing the delay difference for the sound input from each ear to arrive to the brain. Specifically, sound-orientation detector neurons read from neurons of different lengths to each ear. You know the sound is coming from front-and-left if the coincidence-detector neuron that has a short lead to the left ear and a long lead to the right ear fires.