Category: Cognitive Science

  • Numbers without a Zero — Representation in the Brain

    Numbers without a Zero — Representation in the Brain

    There is a mystery at the heart of computational neuroscience. It concerns the nature of representation and raises questions from abstract algebra. This post is about the brain, but it has implications for how we think about ML. You probably know that “neural networks” originally took inspiration from biological networks of actual wet, squishy neurons,…

  • Willpower

    What is willpower? Why does it feel limited? Why do some people seem to have more of it?  The answer, I think, is that much of our behavior is driven by reward seeking decisions calculated deep within the brain. The reward driven part of our mind is integral to action taking, where actions are defined…