Re: Thanks

Thanks for a really enjoyable conversation and your hospitality tonight. Look forward to connecting again and receiving you at the Media Lab on my turf. ;-)

Yes, it was great chatting about all the ways neuroengineering is going to go in the coming years, revealing both fundamental mechanistic brain maps, and providing the control knobs for fixing brain disorders and understanding complex phenomena like consciousness. Would be great to talk about how then to make mathematical sense of these maps and control knobs... arguably the big stumbling block to date is the lack of good data, but that's about to change, thanks to our current and future efforts! Then we will have many things that require deep mathematics to understand!

i think you need a top down as well as bottom up. as looking at my piano while being played, i can go string by string ( not string theory strings). hammer by hammer, material of string , molecular interaction naturalvibration, harmonics, sympathtice vibration but i would not hear or understand the melody or music being played. I believe that each individual has its own encrpytion algorithm, as the neural net grows it encrypts some input signals. some are hard wired. so instead of emotion , movement, speech, etc, I think a proitable area of initail inquiry should be the hard wired aversive stuff only. smell of dead meat. . reaction to fire. i tihnk that aesthectics will be the greatest ration of output to input. . or the least energy to decode. . dissonance, cannot be easily resolved so the energy to decode the information, is too high and becomes painful. Does a dream state come upon us, or do we dream all the time and concious state relegates the dreams to behind the screen. When sleep deprived the dreams begin to pop through the screen, as hallucinations. a breakdown of the screen , results in a form of schizphrenia, where they cann no longer distiguish between voices. dream produced while awake or the awake state angel on the shoulder whispering. . I am an avid funder of the bleeding edge in many fields. keep me up to date on what you are doing, and hope to see you in your own habitat.

I agree we need a top-down! Two thoughts:

-- Yes, developing mapping circuit technology and then applying it to simple behaviors -- hard wired aversive stuff -- is indeed a way to go. As we plan out these mapping technologies, we're actually beginning experiments to map out these aversive things too. We are collaborating with many groups along these lines. We need to finish the fundamental technology building so that we can obtain maps at the right level, and then we can acquire datasets that are compatible with top-down theory, to be sure.

-- Another way to think top-down is to work our way inwards, from the observables. We know that behavior -- movement, speech, other action

-- is observable; if a feeling or thought is prominent enough, it will be manifest through these channels as an observable.

Thus we can also try to infer internal states by their effects on observables, and then to associate neural activity with these internal states and observables. In theory this should scale to arbitrarily complex internal states, not just simple aversive states.

Best,

Ed