Building better brains with iron

Building brains with Iqr

The brain is organized at many different levels, from sub-cellular processes to the overall system. A key challenge in studying and developing technology based on the brain is rooted in the question of how the organ can most effectively be described and studied. Another compelling reason for tackling the brain’s organization lies in the fact that its different levels are not independent but int...

Illustrations by Kate Francis Special Report Education Building Better Brains

Are Bigger Brains Better?

Attempts to relate brain size to behaviour and cognition have rarely integrated information from insects with that from vertebrates. Many insects, however, demonstrate that highly differentiated motor repertoires, extensive social structures and cognition are possible with very small brains, emphasising that we need to understand the neural circuits, not just the size of brain regions, which un...

Building brains for bodies

We describe a project to capitalize on newly available levels of computational resources in order to understand human cognition. We are building an integrated physical system including vision, sound input and output, and dextrous manipulation, all controlled by a continuously operating large scale parallel MIMD computer. The resulting system will learn to "think" by building on its bodily exper...

Building Civilized Societies with Better Cultures

In this paper, I put forward the concept of culture space, and highlight its three principal axes for referencing values which are the ultimate causes behind all social and individual activities as well as behaviors. And, these three references for gauging values are: people-centric reference for values, familycentric reference for values, and customer-centric reference for values. The culture ...