Human brain is one of the most complex structures with hundreds
of billions of neurons and hundreds of trillions of synapses. By looking at
these numbers we can say that studying how our brain functions is not an easy
task. It is a mystery since our evolution. Scientists and neurobiologists have
been trying to study and understand the brain functions for decades (Well, they
are able to find many details but there is still more to discover.) This field
of study, as you might have guessed by now is called Computational
neuroscience.
Computational neuroscience is not a single man army (by
which I mean, it is not a stand-alone field.) In fact, it is an interdisciplinary science that uses computer
science (mathematics, physics and electric engineering) programs and models to
construct biophysically detailed simulations of various parts of brain to study
in detail and understand each part/section of brain. The study results and
understanding from computational neuroscience can be used in other fields such
as machine learning to create artificial neural networks (ANN’s.) These ANN’s
can then be trained to perform functions that human brain can do such as identifying
patterns, numbers, objects, face recognition, etc. Although it does not seem to
be realistic to design and train an ANN which exactly mimics the human brain,
but with more advancements in computational neuroscience we may see ANN’s that
perform some major functions of brain like show emotions, react to various
situations, etc.
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Hello Usha,
ReplyDeleteI like how you made your introduction for this post by describing how the brain is so complex and filled with so much mystery. You described computational neuroscience in an informative way. I myself don’t have any knowledge about computational neuroscience before reading this post, but can tell how complex and time consuming it must be to study the brain and to try to imitate the human brain functions. Overall good job on writing about this topic.
Hi Usha, I agree with you that human brain is among the most complicated thing ever existed and for years people have been spending a lot of money trying to understand how it works. Like you mention, if these work can be done with computational methods such as modeling and simulation, it would save a lot of time and money. I don't have much knowledge about computational neuroscience but thanks to your post, I understand more about this topic now. Nice job!!
ReplyDeleteHi Usha
ReplyDeleteYou raised some interesting points. One of the ideas I did not really think about when writing my own article was how complex computational neuroscience is. The complexity alone requires that many minds of different backgrounds work together and shore each other's weaknesses. It would appear that as powerful as computers have gotten in recent years, they are still no match for the average human brain. I do think that there will come a time when they meet or even surpass us in terms of intelligence. However I don't think they can be taught morality. It's something that is learned by experience, not really taught.