About

This site is devoted to musing about how the brain works. As the millennium turns over, we really don’t have a good idea of what mechanisms are used by nerve cells to think and learn. There is some kind of neural code that must run the wet computer in our skulls, but we don’t know much about it.

Resonant memory is a theory about neural circuits forming resonant loops that can make information retrieval virtually instantaneous. If true, it would help to get us much closer to the real neural code and might help us with problems in Artificial Intelligence. If it is possible to recreate these resonant loops in hardware, we might expect computers that can store more information with faster access — and with built-in backup. That is always welcome.

Any theory of the brain needs to explain these strange but significant facts:

  • Information is stored redundantly across the cortex.
  • If you know something, you realize it immediately, even before you retrieve it. Even if you can’t retrieve it.
  • If you don’t know something, you realize it immediately as well.
  • Metaphor, simile, cognates, anthropomorphism and analogy are all powerful learning tools.

All these features are foreign to silicon computers, but common to brains. I hope to demonstrate a possible mechanism for information storage and retrieval that satisfies these unusual specs.

I’m doing this in an informal blog style, because the idea could benefit from input. Please use the comments to tell me where I’ve gone wrong. You don’t need to be tactful, but try not to malign my parents.

I’m also doing it because, even though I have run commercial laboratories and worked as a scientist, I don’t have a PhD. That means, I think, that I’m not a certified scientist. And so, there is really no where else for me to go.

As a science writer, I know how to present facts (with references) as separable from speculation. So if you feel like learning about the brain or are interested in playing along, just start here.

2 thoughts on “About

  1. Rodrigo Siqueira

    Hello ,

    I am a computer programmer interested in AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and I get inspiration from intelligence found in nature to create algorithms.

    The brain stores information in sequence. One memory activates next memory (next part of the sequence). This explain why the brain is a prediction machine, it is always retrieving the next probable term of the learned sequence, for any activity.
    I’m thinking if harmonic resonance also exploited by nature as a computational and representational principle in the brain.
    My goal is to implement a machine cognitive architecture using distributed memory model in artificial neural networks that contains some of those ideas (redundance, sequence learning, fault tolerant, predictive, predictive capabilities, genetic algorithms to provide evolution, Hebbian learning, dynamical system…)
    Please keep writing and publishing references for Resonant Memory Theory.
    Thanks.

    Reply
    1. scottcha Post author

      Rodrigo, it has been a while since I started this page, but I will be adding some new stuff soon. Good luck on your studies — I think you’re going in the right direction!

      Reply

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