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Neuroscience Discoveries
MIT Press.
ISBN 9780262057721
doi: 10.7551/mitpress/18504.001.0001
Enormous
progress has been made in understanding how the brain works in the last
50 years. This book has the aim of showing how discoveries have been
and are being made in understanding the brain. That is, the book aims
to show the thought processes, collaborations, and the developments of
this area of science in this golden era for making advances in
understanding the brain processes that underlie behavior.
I hope that this book will help to show not only some of the thinking
behind research discoveries, but will also be valuable to others, by
encouraging others to see how some ideas in neuroscience have been
generated, and to try the same processes themselves.
When providing insight to others on how discoveries in at least this
area of science are made, it is important to be able to provide a
first-person account of how some of the discoveries have been and are
being made, for that will illuminate some of the thought processes
involved, and is not the type of material that appears in scientific
papers or in textbooks.
For this reason, many of the discoveries highlighted in this book by a
first-hand description are the discoveries made by Edmund Rolls, often
in collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines such as
theoretical physics and mathematics. Indeed, an aim of this book is to
highlight the importance of multidisciplinary collaboration when making
discoveries about the brain, for to understand the brain and how it
computes, evidence from a very wide range of disciplines is needed,
including from neuronal neurophysiology during behavior, functional
neuroimaging, neuroanatomy, neuropharmacology, psychology, clinical
neuropsychology, neuropsychiatry, theoretical physics, mathematics, and
computer science, all of which feature in the discoveries described
here.
In Chapter 1, background information is provided about the approach being taken to understanding What each part of the brain does, and about How it implements these functions.
Chapter 2 describes how some early discoveries on reward systems in the brain were made, and of the role of serendipity in them.
That research led to the research described in Chapter 3, in which
brain reward systems such as the orbitofrontal cortex are being
analysed during behavior, and how this is leading to theories of
emotion, and motivation, and to some of their disorders such as
depression.
Chapter 4 describes how we wished to find how visual stimuli reach some
of these brain regions involved in emotion, so we recorded in the
inferior temporal visual cortex, and discovered not only face cells
that encode face identity, but also face expression cells. It also
describes how we went on to develop a biologically plausible theory of
how the cortex builds these transform-invariant object, face and person
representations for visual perception.
Chapter 5 describes how a revolution is taking place in our
understanding of the hippocampal episodic memory system in our brains,
in that the spatial representation in the brains of humans and other
primates is typically the location in visual space at which we are
looking. The discovery has major implication for what humans and other
primates store and can later recall in our episodic memory systems that
can associate what happened with where it happened as encoded by where
we are looking. Our discovery also has major implications for how we
navigate in the world using visual stimuli such as landmarks, instead
of relying on place to place self-motion in the dark, which was the
model of navigation developed for rodents. These discoveries are
complemented by discoveries about how these systems work using analytic
computational models that show how the memory systems in our brains
could work computationally.
Chapter 6 describes how a foundation is being built for how the human
brain functions. The foundation involves measuring the connectivity
between the smallest cortical regions that can be anatomically and
functionally delineated, and analysing the computations performed in
each of these cortical regions.
Chapter 7 describes how computational neuroscience is helping us to
understand how the brain works probabilistically with 'noise' or
randomness generated by the close to random spike firing times of
individual neurons for a given mean firing rate; and how this
stochastic cortical neurodynamics has major applications to
understanding human decision-making, psychiatric disorders, and even
creativity.
Chapter 8 describes how we have made progress in understanding the
computations of many brain systems for sensory processing, memory, and
emotion using biologically plausible computations. The book finishes by
pointing to key questions that need to be addressed in future about how
the human brain computes for language and reasoning, and what the
relations are between the algorithms used for computations in the
brain, and the algorithms used for AI, which may well be quite
different. These are key issues for the future in neuroscience.
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