slimvictor
Bluelight Crew
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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a better way to simulate the processing that goes on in the human brain, and you hardware enthusiasts out there will appreciate this one.
Rather than simulate the firing and spiking of a bunch of neurons in software on massive clusters of computer chips, MIT researchers have created a digital chip with analog properties that emulates the flow of ions between connected brain cells and therefore can directly simulate how neurons actually fire across their synapses.
In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, boffins describe a chip consisting of 400 transistors that mimics the ion flows in synapse between two real-world neurons and – they hope – will allow electronic circuits to mimic the "plasticity" that human brains have the ability to process, store, and adapt to new information. (Particularly when you concuss them or when their owners allow them to say something really stupid.)
Guy Rachmuth, a former postdoc Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, is lead author of the paper, with Chi-Sang Poon, a principal research scientist at the lab, Mark Bear, a professor of neuroscience at MIT, and Harel Shouval of the University of Texas Medical School as co-authors.
The human brain has about 100 billion neurons, more or less (more for El Reg readers, and less for El Reg hacks), and each neuron has multiple synapses between them oozing neurotransmitters as the brain responds to stimuli from the outside world, creating an ion channel of flowing and charged sodium, potassium, and calcium ions in the synapse and eventually allowing an electric signal, called an action potential, to fire from one neuron to the other. When this happens, your brain remembers to do things, like duck a punch or keep your heart beating. (Often at the same time.)
(...)
Interestingly, there is a whole class of researchers who think that endo-cannabinoids, which have a structure similar to THC – the active ingredient in the pot you never inhaled – and which are involved in many brain functions including appetite, pain suppression, and memory, are affiliated with LTD. First, I knew my brain made its own opiates, but I did not know it made its own pot. And second, of course these endo-cannabinoids make you hungry and forget stuff – like the fact that you already knew that before you started designing the chip.
cont at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/17/mit_synaptic_chip/
Rather than simulate the firing and spiking of a bunch of neurons in software on massive clusters of computer chips, MIT researchers have created a digital chip with analog properties that emulates the flow of ions between connected brain cells and therefore can directly simulate how neurons actually fire across their synapses.
In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, boffins describe a chip consisting of 400 transistors that mimics the ion flows in synapse between two real-world neurons and – they hope – will allow electronic circuits to mimic the "plasticity" that human brains have the ability to process, store, and adapt to new information. (Particularly when you concuss them or when their owners allow them to say something really stupid.)
Guy Rachmuth, a former postdoc Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, is lead author of the paper, with Chi-Sang Poon, a principal research scientist at the lab, Mark Bear, a professor of neuroscience at MIT, and Harel Shouval of the University of Texas Medical School as co-authors.
The human brain has about 100 billion neurons, more or less (more for El Reg readers, and less for El Reg hacks), and each neuron has multiple synapses between them oozing neurotransmitters as the brain responds to stimuli from the outside world, creating an ion channel of flowing and charged sodium, potassium, and calcium ions in the synapse and eventually allowing an electric signal, called an action potential, to fire from one neuron to the other. When this happens, your brain remembers to do things, like duck a punch or keep your heart beating. (Often at the same time.)
(...)
Interestingly, there is a whole class of researchers who think that endo-cannabinoids, which have a structure similar to THC – the active ingredient in the pot you never inhaled – and which are involved in many brain functions including appetite, pain suppression, and memory, are affiliated with LTD. First, I knew my brain made its own opiates, but I did not know it made its own pot. And second, of course these endo-cannabinoids make you hungry and forget stuff – like the fact that you already knew that before you started designing the chip.
cont at
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/17/mit_synaptic_chip/
