A System Architecture Approach to the Brain PDF Download

Author: L. Andrew Coward
Publisher: Nova Publishers
ISBN: 9781594544330
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
This book is the integrated presentation of a large body of work on understanding the operation of biological brains as systems. The work has been carried out by the author over the last 22 years, and leads to a claim that it is relatively straightforward to understand how human cognition results from and is supported by physiological processes in the brain. This claim has roots in the technology for designing and manufacturing electronic systems which manage extremely complex telecommunications networks with high reliability, in real time and with no human intervention. Such systems perform very large numbers of interacting control features. Although there is little direct resemblance between such systems and biological brains, the ways in which these practical considerations force system architectures within some specific bounds leads to an understanding of how different but analogous practical considerations constrain the architectures of brains within different bounds called the Recommendation Architecture. These architectural bounds make it possible to relate cognitive phenomena to physiological processes.

Author: Sarah Williams Goldhagen
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062199188
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
One of the nation’s chief architecture critics reveals how the environments we build profoundly shape our feelings, memories, and well-being, and argues that we must harness this knowledge to construct a world better suited to human experience Taking us on a fascinating journey through some of the world’s best and worst landscapes, buildings, and cityscapes, Sarah Williams Goldhagen draws from recent research in cognitive neuroscience and psychology to demonstrate how people’s experiences of the places they build are central to their well-being, their physical health, their communal and social lives, and even their very sense of themselves. From this foundation, Goldhagen presents a powerful case that societies must use this knowledge to rethink what and how they build: the world needs better-designed, healthier environments that address the complex range of human individual and social needs. By 2050 America’s population is projected to increase by nearly seventy million people. This will necessitate a vast amount of new construction—almost all in urban areas—that will dramatically transform our existing landscapes, infrastructure, and urban areas. Going forward, we must do everything we can to prevent the construction of exhausting, overstimulating environments and enervating, understimulating ones. Buildings, landscapes, and cities must both contain and spark associations of natural light, greenery, and other ways of being in landscapes that humans have evolved to need and expect. Fancy exteriors and dramatic forms are never enough, and may not even be necessary; authentic textures and surfaces, and careful, well-executed construction details are just as important. Erudite, wise, lucidly written, and beautifully illustrated with more than one hundred color photographs, Welcome to Your World is a vital, eye-opening guide to the spaces we inhabit, physically and mentally, and a clarion call to design for human experience.

Author: Chris Eliasmith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199794693
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
How to Build a Brain provides a detailed exploration of a new cognitive architecture - the Semantic Pointer Architecture - that takes biological detail seriously, while addressing cognitive phenomena. Topics ranging from semantics and syntax, to neural coding and spike-timing-dependent plasticity are integrated to develop the world's largest functional brain model.

Author: and Director NIBS Neuroscience Program University of Southern California Larry W. Swanson Milo Don and Lucille Appleman Professor of Biological Sciences
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198026463
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
Depending on your point of view the brain is an organ, a machine, a biological computer, or simply the most important component of the nervous system. How does it work as a whole? What are its major parts and how are they interconnected to generate thinking, feelings, and behavior? This book surveys 2,500 years of scientific thinking about these profoundly important questions from the perspective of fundamental architectural principles, and then proposes a new model for the basic plan of neural systems organization based on an explosion of structural data emerging from the neuroanatomy revolution of the 1970's. The importance of a balance between theoretical and experimental morphology is stressed throughout the book. Great advances in understanding the brain's basic plan have come especially from two traditional lines of biological thought-- evolution and embryology, because each begins with the simple and progresses to the more complex. Understanding the organization of brain circuits, which contain thousands of links or pathways, is much more difficult. It is argued here that a four-system network model can explain the structure-function organization of the brain. Possible relationships between neural networks and gene networks revealed by the human genome project are explored in the final chapter. The book is written in clear and sparkling prose, and it is profusely illustrated. It is designed to be read by anyone with an interest in the basic organization of the brain, from neuroscience to philosophy to computer science to molecular biology. It is suitable for use in neuroscience core courses because it presents basic principles of the structure of the nervous system in a systematic way.

Author: L Andrew Coward
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 940077107X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 526

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Book Description
The book explains how to understand cognition in terms of brain anatomy, physiology and chemistry, using an approach adapted from techniques for understanding complex electronic systems. These techniques create hierarchies of information process based descriptions on different levels of detail, where higher levels contain less information and can therefore describe complete cognitive phenomena, but are more approximate. The nature of the approximations are well understood, and more approximate higher level descriptions can therefore be mapped to more precise detailed descriptions of any part of a phenomenon as required. Cognitive phenomena, the anatomy and connectivity of major brain structures, neuron physiology, and cellular chemistry are reviewed. Various cognitive tasks are described in terms of information processes performed by different major anatomical structures. These higher level descriptions are selectively mapped to more detailed physiological and chemical levels.

Author: John P. Eberhard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195331729
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Brain Landscape: The Coexistence of Neuroscience and Architecture is the first book to serve as an intellectual bridge between architectural practice and neuroscience research. John P. Eberhard, founding President of the non-profit Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, argues that increased funding, and the ability to think beyond the norm, will lead to a better understanding of how scientific research can change how we design, illuminate, and build spaces. Inversely, he posits that by better understanding the effects that buildings and places have on us, and our mental state, the better we may be able to understand how the human brain works. This book is devoted to describing architectural design criteria for schools, offices, laboratories, memorials, churches, and facilities for the aging, and then posing hypotheses about human experiences in such settings.

Author: BICA Society. Annual Meeting
Publisher: IOS Press
ISBN: 1607506602
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
"This book presents the proceedings of the First International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures (BICA 2010), which is also the First Annual Meeting of the BICA Society. A cognitive architecture is a computational framework for the design of intelligent, even conscious, agents. It may draw inspiration from many sources, such as pure mathematics, physics or abstract theories of cognition. A biologically inspired cognitive architecture (BICA) is one which incorporates formal mechanisms from computational models of human and animal cognition, which currently provide the only physical examples with the robustness, flexibility, scalability and consciousness that artificial intelligence aspires to achieve. The BICA approach has several different goals: the broad aim of creating intelligent software systems without focusing on any one area of application; attempting to accurately simulate human behavior or gain an understanding of how the human mind works, either for purely scientific reasons or for applications in a variety of domains; understanding how the brain works at a neuronal and sub-neuronal level; or designing artificial systems which can perform the cognitive tasks important to practical applications in human society, and which at present only humans are capable of. The papers presented in this volume reflect the cross-disciplinarity and integrative nature of the BICA approach and will be of interest to anyone developing their own approach to cognitive architectures. Many insights can be found here for inspiration or to import into one's own architecture, directly or in modified form."--Publisher description.

Author: Olaf Sporns
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262528983
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
An integrative overview of network approaches to neuroscience explores the origins of brain complexity and the link between brain structure and function. Over the last decade, the study of complex networks has expanded across diverse scientific fields. Increasingly, science is concerned with the structure, behavior, and evolution of complex systems ranging from cells to ecosystems. In Networks of the Brain, Olaf Sporns describes how the integrative nature of brain function can be illuminated from a complex network perspective. Highlighting the many emerging points of contact between neuroscience and network science, the book serves to introduce network theory to neuroscientists and neuroscience to those working on theoretical network models. Sporns emphasizes how networks connect levels of organization in the brain and how they link structure to function, offering an informal and nonmathematical treatment of the subject. Networks of the Brain provides a synthesis of the sciences of complex networks and the brain that will be an essential foundation for future research.

Author: Vassilis Cutsuridis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1441914528
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 785

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Book Description
The perception-action cycle is the circular flow of information that takes place between the organism and its environment in the course of a sensory-guided sequence of behaviour towards a goal. Each action causes changes in the environment that are analyzed bottom-up through the perceptual hierarchy and lead to the processing of further action, top-down through the executive hierarchy, toward motor effectors. These actions cause new changes that are analyzed and lead to new action, and so the cycle continues. The Perception-action cycle: Models, architectures and hardware book provides focused and easily accessible reviews of various aspects of the perception-action cycle. It is an unparalleled resource of information that will be an invaluable companion to anyone in constructing and developing models, algorithms and hardware implementations of autonomous machines empowered with cognitive capabilities. The book is divided into three main parts. In the first part, leading computational neuroscientists present brain-inspired models of perception, attention, cognitive control, decision making, conflict resolution and monitoring, knowledge representation and reasoning, learning and memory, planning and action, and consciousness grounded on experimental data. In the second part, architectures, algorithms, and systems with cognitive capabilities and minimal guidance from the brain, are discussed. These architectures, algorithms, and systems are inspired from the areas of cognitive science, computer vision, robotics, information theory, machine learning, computer agents and artificial intelligence. In the third part, the analysis, design and implementation of hardware systems with robust cognitive abilities from the areas of mechatronics, sensing technology, sensor fusion, smart sensor networks, control rules, controllability, stability, model/knowledge representation, and reasoning are discussed.

Author: Barrett Williams
Publisher: Barrett Williams
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 119

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Book Description
Unlock the mysteries of computer systems architecture with "Navigating Computer Systems Architecture," an essential eBook for anyone eager to delve into the intricacies of computing. This comprehensive guide offers a detailed roadmap through the dynamic landscape of computer architecture, making complex concepts accessible and engaging. Start your journey with a foundational understanding in Chapter 1, where the historical evolution of system architectures unfolds, setting the stage for what’s to come. From there, dive into the core components of computer organization, uncovering the interplay between processor, memory, and I/O systems. As you progress, the essentials of digital logic and datapath design come to life, complete with a practical case study on ALU design. Explore the fundamental principles of Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and gain a deep appreciation for its role in computing. Discover the fascinating world of x86 ISA and RISC architecture, analyzing their distinctive features and benefits. Get equipped to understand pipeline architecture and the challenges of superscalar and VLIW designs, laying the groundwork for mastering advanced performance technologies. Memory management moves into the spotlight in subsequent chapters, revealing the intricacies of cache design, virtual memory systems, and cutting-edge trends in cache architecture. Investigate the evolution and mechanics of multiprocessor and multicore systems, and learn the core principles of secure system design. As the world moves toward energy efficiency and green computing, explore strategies for low-power design and the integration of GPUs into modern systems. Finally, peer into the future with emerging trends like quantum and neuromorphic computing. Concluding with reflections on bridging theory with real-world applications, this eBook empowers readers with the knowledge to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of computer systems architecture. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or an enthusiastic learner, this guide is your gateway to mastering the art and science of computer systems.