Neural Assemblies: An Alternative Approach to Classical Artificial Intelligence

You can't tell how deep a puddle is until you step in it. When I am asked about my profession, I have two ways of answering. If I want a short discussion, I say that I am a mathematician; if I want a long discussion, I say that I try to understand how the human brain works. A long discussion often leads to further questions: What does it mean to understand "how the brain works"? Does it help to be trained in mathematics when you try to understand the brain, and what kind of mathematics can help? What makes a mathematician turn into a neuroscientist? This may lead into a metascientific discussion which I do not like par- ticularly because it is usually too far off the ground. In this book I take quite a different approach. I just start explaining how I think the brain works. In the course of this explanation my answers to the above questions will become clear to the reader, and he will perhaps learn some facts about the brain and get some insight into the construc- tions of artificial intelligence.

Author: Günther Palm
Publisher: Springer
Published: 07/29/2023
Pages: 259
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.88lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9783031003134

About the Author

Prof Dr Günther Palm

Professor Palm began his studies of mathematics at the University of Hamburg and graduated at the Eberhard-Karls-University of Tübingen with a PhD thesis on "Entropie und Generatoren in dynamischen Verbänden" supervised by Prof. Dr. Rainer Nagel in 1975. He then worked as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, on topics of quantitative neuroanatomy, information theory, nonlinear systems theory, associative memory and brain theory from 1975 to 1988. During that time he spent one year (1983/1984) in Berlin as a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg. In 1988 he became professor for theoretical brain research at the University of Düsseldorf. Since 1991 he is director of the Institute of Neural Information Processing at Ulm University. He retired in 2016 and is working part-time on neural data analysis at the Forschungszentrum Jülich since 2017.

Professor Palm's research focus is on information theory, neural networks, associative memory, and specifically on Hebbian cell assemblies. By 2015, he has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles in international journals, 60 invited contributions, and (co-)edited 8 books. He is author of the monographs "Neural Assemblies. An Alternative Approach to Artificial Intelligence" (1982), and "Novelty, Information and Surprise" (2012).