Category Archives: Neurosciences

Brains, Minds and Machines Summer Course

The field of Artificial Intelligence has produced impressive machines, such as Deep Blue, Watson, and Siri, that can beat a world chess champion, win the game of Jeopardy, and communicate in natural language. Yet few would view their behavior as brain-like or human intelligence. Computers still fare poorly on tasks that even young infants can perform, such as answering simple questions about a visual scene, Who is there? What are they doing? What happened previously? What will happen next? In this short introduction, Tomaso Poggio talks about how the synergy of recent advances in neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI, will enable us to understand the processes underlying human intelligence, from the neural circuits of the brain to the level of cognitive behavior.

Complete Course

Tomaso Poggio, and Gabriel Kreiman. RES.9-003 Brains, Minds and Machines Summer Course. Summer 2015. Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare, https://ocw.mit.edu. License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.

La biologie de l’attachement

La théorie de l’attachement est un champ de la psychologie qui traite des relations entre êtres humains. Boris Cyrulnik tente dans cette conférence une approche pluridisciplinaire de cette théorie, qui intègre des données biologiques, affectives, psychologiques, sociales et culturelles. Nous verrons comment est née la théorie de l’attachement au XXème siècle et l’état des recherches actuelles.

How Brain See

At the micro scale the brain is a mess; a thick tangle of nerve cells connected at synapses. Mapping just a tiny portion of this mess, a few hundred cells, is a huge challenge. You have to wonder if it’s worth the effort. But seeing exactly how brain cells are wired together is giving us new insights into brain function. The researchers who made the 3D maps in this video discovered a new type of cell and worked out how insects see movement. If you’ve ever tried to swat a fly you’ll know how good they are at sensing motion!

Read the related News & Views article: Neuroscience: Accurate maps of visual circuitry.