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In Motor Learning, New Brain Connections Form Rapidly
Science Daily has a report on research demonstrating directly that new connections begin to form between brain cells almost immediately as animals learn a new task. A team lead by researchers at UC Santa Cruz performed "...detailed observations of the rewiring processes that take place in the brain during motor learning. The researchers studied mice as they were trained to reach through a slot to get a seed. They observed rapid growth of... synapses between nerve cells in the motor cortex... The study used mice that had been genetically altered to make a fluorescent protein within certain neurons in the brain. The researchers were then able to use a special microscopy technique (two-photon microscopy) to obtain clear images of those neurons near the surface of the brain. The noninvasive imaging technique enabled them to view changes in individual brain cells of the mice before, during, and after the mice were trained in the seed-reaching task."
Not many if its an automatic, that's why stick-shift drivers are more intelligent.
but live shorter because makeuping your self while phoning while driving is more difficult on stick cars
God's gift to chicks
Oh, come on. Women don't know how to drive stick, much less drive at all. They'd never get licensed if it weren't for their tits.
Nothing is more frightening than a soccer-mom behind the wheel of an Escalade or Expedition with a cell phone in one hand, Starbucks grande in the other, steering with her knees while her frightened kids cling to their back seats.
* The laws of physics work on more than 2 dimensions. From this:
... and that, kids, is why I proudly drive my M1 Abrams. With a track width of more than 3.5 metres, it won't flip over sideways, and it has that stalk extending forward to stop it from flipping over it's front when braking sharply.
On a more serious note, though, this is quite probably the most awesome news I've heard today. Well, anything that'll increase mortality in SUV drivers is a good thing. Let's hope this sells a few extra Priuses or even Del Sols.
I think you mean artificial neural networks (ANNs). Yes, they are supposed to be similar to biological brains but the devil is in the details. There is some question, at least among computer scientists, about _exactly_ how the biobrain does it. Gerald Edelman put forward some interesting ideas in the book _Neural_Darwinism_. Ken Stanley has been working on something called NEAT for many years, building on it with Compositional Pattern Producing Networks.
Refining our observations of how nature does it may help produce better artificial neural networks, among other things...
They flip on a dime. True story: saw an accident between a Honda Del Sol [swaqvalley.com] and a Ford Expedition* at an intersection. The Del Sol was dented but able to drive away from the scene while the Expedition was flipped, turned upside down...
And I'd like to take a second just sit right there, I'll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air.
Current student of Ken Stanley in Neuroevolution and Generative Development this semester.
Parent is correct: The devil is in the details. A Neural Network is a _model_ of what actually happens in the brain. It is an approximation. There are a number of things that the model does not account for, such as the growth of new connections (somewhat accounted for in the GA-NN NEAT), and the exponential response nature (accounted for in CRTNN networks).
CPPNs are a model to account for generative development, rather than Neural Networks. The hope is to get a full system without going through the actual step-by-step constructive development of it. To this end, it is successful.
You can find more information about the subject, or implement your own CPPN network here: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/neat.html
The article presents a good argument that the ANN model is at least partially incorrect on its approximation of brain development. ANNs do not add connections after the topology is created. This could provide interesting new developments to the AI crowd.
I just learned kung-fu.
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Dogma has been that the brain does two kinds of learning - short term and long term. Short term learning happens within a few (or even a single) depolarization, lasts for a few hours, and is perfect for learning that the path is wet today. Long term learning has been seen as a separate, but related process, where repeated neural activity triggers new protein synthesis, and that synthesis results in new synapse formation. That process is thought to require repetition over minutes to hours, results in learning that lasts for days to weeks, and is well suited for learning that this path goes to grandma's house.
To find synaptic remodeling after a single training trial would require some revamping of that model. It seems reasonable enough, especially in more complex brains. A lot of what we know about the biochemistry of learning comes from invertebrates with fewer than 1e5 neurons. Even a mouse brain has ~1e8 neurons, which means there are a lot more opportunities for reinforcing signals, internal repetition, and god knows what else that might accelerate the long-term learning process we see in invertebrates.
Seems like another unnecessary piece of legislation. In my opinion, just jacking gas up to reasonable rates (say, $6 to $6 per gallon, somewhere in the vicinity of the rest of the world) and using the tax brought in with that measure for roads and public transit would help a great deal more, while allowing those 30% of station wagon drivers who actually require the space to choose for themselves if they want or don't want to pay up.
Fair enough. Public transit only really works in dense urban areas though, and since America has a lot more land available (LA County would cover all of London and out to the coast to the east and south) its public transportation systems tend to likewise suck. I actually like public transportation, but even when I lived in the Bay Area, which has one of the most developed public transit systems, it would take 3.5 hours on the BART to get somewhere that was about 45 minutes by car, with traffic. LA public transportation is even worse, and they've been investing heavily in public transportatio instead of highways for the last 30 years. All they got out of it was a road system that was hopelessly snarled compared with the contiguous Orange County, which took the opposite approach. The transition from LA to OC on the interstate is like waking up from a nightmare.
In places like downtown Manhattan, though, public transit works quite fine, because it is dense enough to make sense.
If we're concerned with CO2 emissions, we can halve our national CO2 output in America simply by switching to nuclear power. The outlay on this (I've run the numbers myself) would range between $400B and $4T at current prices (though when building plants en masse and providing liability protection would likely put the cost around $300B), and would allow us to meet all conceivable CO2 goals without making the utterly impractical approach of trying to get people to stop driving. People won't change their habits.
I'm giving a guest lecture on global warming tomorrow at a local college, and the students know this, so I'm going to poll them how many drove to the school vs. biked or walked, as well as how many think global warming is a serious problem. If my experience is right, about 75% will think it's a problem, and yet all of them will have driven anyway.
>>Being European, I'm also not that familiar with the Clean Air Act, but seeing how the DMCA, CAN-SPAM or the Various Wars on Stuff are working out, I can imagine expense and results.
Similar measures were taken in England, to get rid of the killer smog that was killing thousands of people every year. Not saying that was bad (nobody wants to live next to a dirty smokestack), but all the particulate matter we were throwing into the year wasn't just stopping the global warming from the CO2, but was actually causing a decrease in global temperatures. When filters were put on, you can measure the corresponding decrease in atmospheric particulate count, and global temperatures started rising quite swiftly after that. I can provide references if you'd like, I have them all on hand for the lecture I'm prepping right now.