Brain Theorizing for the Reverse Engineer

Understanding the brain has been characterized as a problem in reverse engineering in that we have an enormous amount of data available and the problem is to assemble it into a functional whole. Rather than the experimental biologist’s dominantly bottom-up approach, reverse engineering takes a  computational perspective starting from functional problems brain might be solving. I will illustrate the approach with three examples:

• The limbic system’s coding of the sense of self,
• The basal ganglia’s role in Deep Learning,
• The thalamus’s role in (visual ) routines.

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