Max Versace invited talk - Plastic Synapses in a stable brain - Part 1

Invited talk, 6 January 2009. The talk is titled "Plastic Synapses in a stable brain".
How can the cerebral cortex develop stable memories while at the same time incorporating new information through an organism lifetime? How does the brain coordinate multiple levels of thalamocortical and corticocortical processing to rapidly learn, and stably remember, important information about a changing world?

The Synchronous Matching Adaptive Resonance Theory (SMART) model begins to clarify how bottom-up and top-down processes work together to realize this goal, notably how processes of learning, expectation, attention, resonance, and synchrony are coordinated in laminar circuits of spiking neurons obeying realistic membrane equations. The model also predicts how the generality of learned rcategories may be controlled by neuromodulation, and how the same circuit may explain challenging visual perceptual grouping experiments.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• neural networks
• plasticity
• brain
• neuroscience
• artificial intelligence
• spiking neurons
• neurons