A Theory of How the Brain Might Work
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
Excerpt
I wish to propose a quite speculative new version of the grandmother cell theory to explain how the brain, or parts of it, may work. In particular, I discuss how the visual system may learn to recognize three-dimensional objects. The model would apply directly to the cortical cells involved in visual face recognition. I also outline the relationship of our theory to existing models of the cerebellum and of motor control. Specific biophysical mechanisms can be readily suggested as part of a basic type of neural circuitry that can learn to approximate multidimensional input/output mappings from sets of examples and that is expected to be replicated in different regions of the brain and across modalities. The main points of the theory are:
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The brain uses modules for multivariate function approximation as basic components of several of its information processing subsystems.
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These modules are realized as HyperBF networks (Poggio and Girosi
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