Feeds the computer

Usage examples of inputs.

By the mid-1970s, it was clear that neither sensory inputs nor motor outputs had properties which corresponded to the behavioural habituation, as neither showed such decrements in electrical response.

All that is needed is machinery, or mathematical models of such machinery, which will respond to particular inputs with outputs which resemble those that brains might have.

Indeed it is even possible to produce a form of associative learning in which behavioural and neurophysiological inputs are mixed.

Perhaps their hippocampal cognitive mapping capacity is simply desperately starved of use in a lab, and so responds almost greedily to the novel inputs offered by neurophysiological stimulation of input paths.

I have already hinted, in my account of the reductive steps the group employed, that a variety of experimentally or theoretically inconvenient processes that also occurred during the behaviour, such as a contribution of the peripheral nervous system, and some of the polysynaptic inputs onto the motor neuron, were dissected away and no longer taken into consideration.

Although they could seemingly learn - that is, change their output properties in response to different inputs, so as, for example, to recognize and classify simple patterns - they failed at anything that was much more complex or even remotely resembled real-life problems.

Appropriately connected sets of such cells can be made to show learning- and memory-like behaviour in that they will sort and classify inputs and slowly change their output properties in response to novel input patterns.

The holistic approach would instead ask: how can we construct a servo-mechanism which receives inputs as to the position and motion of the ducks and then directs output accordingly?

The units of which the computer is composed are determinate, with a small number of inputs and outputs, and the processes that they carry out with such impressive regularity are linear and error-free.

Sure, one can devise a program that can calculate the odds of drawing a flush against three of a kind, but poker involves a type of competitive psychology, of bluff, and it requires the appreciation and assessment of non-cognitive inputs for which, I believe, there can be no effective machine analogy.

But, equally, the insistence on treating the brain as a sort of black box whose internal biological mechanisms and processes are irrelevant, and all that matters is to match inputs to outputs, is reminiscent of the behaviourist programme in psychology, about which there will be much more to say in Chapter 6.

The criteria by which we filter inputs are themselves learned during our own development.

In learning experiments, animals are stressed or hungry, they receive sensory inputs, they perform motor tasks.

With this degree of isolation, Kandel could ignore any other sources of inputs to the system being studied -other peripheral nerves, circulating neuromodulators and so forth.

Asked to predict the most likely site of synaptic plasticity, theoreticians would probably have opted for the inter-neurons, as these can clearly receive and modulate signals from many different inputs before dispatching them to varied outputs.