How the brain works and the reason we dream
I just learnt something I thought I we would never know
I have recently been reading an amazing book called “From Bacteria to Bach and Back” by Daniel Dennett, and in it he presented an idea from neuroscience that I found simply astonishing. So interesting that I feel the need to talk it over with someone to better understand it, and it turns out, that someone is you!
Have you ever wondered why it is so difficult for a computer to do things like read handwriting, interpret a picture or follow a conversation? A more interesting question might be, why are these same tasks so easy for humans. The models used by computers to attempt these tasks are called artificial neural networks, which modelled on the way the human brain was thought to work.
The neural networks commonly used in computers are typically feed forward networks. These networks take in an input (say an image of a cat) and then pass the data through a series of computations until at the end it spits out an answer (hopefully the label “cat”). This is how people used to think the brain worked, where our eyeball would receive an image and then the image is processed and passed on to deeper and deeper regions of the brain until we get to a neuron that our brain uses to represent the idea of “cat”.
