Sunday, June 03, 2007

Learning, Memory, and Progress toward a Living Chip

A new experiment has shown that it's possible to store multiple rudimentary memories in an artificial culture of live neurons. The ability to record information in a manmade network of neurons is a step toward a cyborg-like integration of living material into memory chips. The advance also may help neurologists to understand how our brains learn and store information.

(Via Communist Robot.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

They claim that these new firing patterns essentially represent simple memories stored in the neuron network.

They claim. How would you know an electrical pattern in an artificial network of neurons constitutes a "memory"? Not, certainly, from the mere fact that it is a certain type of electical pattern. Memory is as memory DOES. More mind-brain misidentification fallacy!

--WMB as Anon

Anonymous said...

They claim

How do they know? Answer: They don't and are almost certainly wrong.

BUT, this is because they're jumping to conclusions, not because mind-brain identification is a fallacy.

- razorsmile anonypost