Neuroscience and artificial intelligence work better together. Brain inspired is a celebration and exploration of the ideas driving our progress to understand intelligence. I interview experts about their work at the interface of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, and more: the symbiosis of these overlapping fields, how they inform each other, where they differ, what the past brought us, and what the future brings. Topics include computational neuroscience, supervised machine learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, convolutional and recurrent neural networks, decision-making science, AI agents, backpropagation, credit assignment, neuroengineering, neuromorphics, emergence, philosophy of mind, consciousness, general AI, spiking neural networks, data science, and a lot more. The podcast is not produced for a general audience. Instead, it aims to educate, challenge, inspire, and hopefully entertain those interested in learning more about neuroscience and AI.
https://braininspired.co/series/brain-inspired/
BI 066 Paul Cisek: Forward Through Evolution
In this first part of our conversation, Paul and I discuss his approach to understanding how the brain (and intelligence) works. Namely, he believes we are fundamentally action and movement oriented - all of our behavior and cognition is based on controlling ourselves and our environment through feedback control mechanisms, and basically all neural activity should be understood through that lens. This contrasts with the view that we serially perceive the environment, make internal representations of what we perceive, do some cognition on those representations, and transform that cognition into decisions about how to move. From that premise, Paul also believes the best (and perhaps only) way to understand our current brains is by tracing out the evolutionary steps that took us from our single celled first organisms all the way to us - a process he calls phylogenetic refinement.
- Paul's lab website.
- (A few of) his papers we discuss or mention:
- Resynthesizing behavior through phylogenetic refinement.
- Navigating the affordance landscape: Feedback control as a process model of behavior and cognition.
- Neural Mechanisms for Interacting with a World Full of Action Choices.
- Books Paul recommends about these topics:
- The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception by Gibson.
- Brains Through Time: A Natural History of Vertebrates by Striedter and Northcutt.
- The Neurobiology of the Prefrontal Cortex: Anatomy, Evolution, And The Origin Of Insight by Passingham and Wise.
- The Evolution of Memory Systems: Ancestors, Anatomy, and Adaptations by Murray, Wise, and Graham.
- The ancient origins of consciousness:How the brain created experience by Feinberg and Mallatt.
- Catching Ourselves in the Act: Situated Activity, Interactive Emergence, Evolution, and Human Thought by Hendriks-Jansen.
- In case, like me, you didn’t know what an amphioxus is… here you go.