This would probably be a good James Bond movie, but to me the point of a game is to have fun and this is... not (at least it is a bit too realistic and twisted for my gamers' taste)
- Yann Abraham
uuh.. too much reading and not enough sleep. switching to manual labour and the gillmor gang.
Abstract: Cortical neurons show irregular but structured spike trains. This has been interpreted as evidence for 'temporal coding', whereby stimuli are represented by precise spike-timing patterns. Here, we suggest an alternative interpretation based on the older concept of the cell assembly. The dynamic evolution of assembly sequences, which are steered but not deterministically controlled by sensory input, is the proposed substrate of psychological processes beyond simple stimulus–response associations. Accordingly, spike trains show a temporal structure that is stimulus-dependent and more variable than would be predicted by strict sensory control. We propose four signatures of assembly organization that can be experimentally tested. We argue that many observations that have been interpreted as evidence for temporal coding might instead reflect an underlying assembly structure.
- Christopher Harris
Jeff Lichtman once claimed that learning after birth consists only of synaptic pruning :-)
- Björn Brembs
So we "lose" 9.0*10^15 (~9000000000000000) synapses somehow? What's the number of synapses that are being killed by binge drinking for example? I doubt such activities could account for it though?
- Alexander Kruel
Chris, that number seems off by a factor of ten. I thought that I have typically seen 10^14 as the estimate for adults...?
- Noah Gray
@Björn A lot of work conducting longitudinal microscopy of dendritic spines (putative synapses) in rodents suggests exactly that: major pruning. In fact, although learning or experience can induce more spines in the short term, over long periods, most are subsequently loss; i.e., there is no net gain.
- Noah Gray
For the non-experts like me it sounds like a child has at least 9 times more synapses than an adult. This may help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... (Heard about it for the first time.)
- Alexander Kruel
@Noah I got those numbers from some lecture notes, very recent notes but probably just lifted out of a textbook, and I guess everyone's counting method is different. I was just struck by the 10-fold difference. No surprise kids can learn 3 languages simultaneously to the point of fluency. Wonder what else they learn..
- Christopher Harris
I suppose as long as you're not entering a different universe for everything else you'll have to learn, the residual synapses and the knowledge they represent are enough to build on for prevailing similarities of artifacts, actions and frameworks of the intermediate world in which we reside? Maybe that's why it is so hard to learn about quantum phenomena, grasp relativistic circumstances and make sense of probabilistic behavior within artificial frameworks and of quantum/cosmologic scales?
- Alexander Kruel