Overview of Brain Structure

- Telencephalon neocortex
- Diencephalon limbic system
- Mesencephalon midbrain
- Metencephelon brainstem, cerebellum
- Myelencephalon spinal cord
Neocortex
- Cerebrum 2 hemispheres
o Corpus callosum
- Lobes
o Occipital
o Temporal
o Parietal
o Frontal
- Matter
o White axons of neurons, tracts
o Gray cell bodies
Lobes
- Occipital
o Visual cortex
- Parietal
o Somatosensory
o Spatial orientation
- Temporal
o Auditory cortex
o Speech understanding
o Visual, object/face recognition
o Autobiographical memory
- Frontal, prefrontal
o Working memory
o Planning
o Cognitive assessment of emotion
o Personality
o Judgment and decision making
o Motor, pre-motor etc
o Most recently evolved part of the brain
Limbic system Mammalian Brain
- Hippocampus memory
- Cingulate gyrus brain wrapped around the corpus colosum
- Entorhinal cortex
- Thalamus sensory relay
- Amygdala emotion detection/response (esp. fear)
Midbrain and Brain Stem Reptilian Brain
- Oldest part of the brain
o Reptilian > 500 million years old
- Of note for this course
o See a number of subcortical sensory systems
Superior colliculus, optic tectum
Inferior colliculus
Midbrain structures in the auditory system
Cerebellum the little brain
- Function??
o Balance and rhythm (and a lot others, see Reading 5 for more information)
Generic Neuron
- Everything is done in approximately 10^11 in the human brain
- Over 10,000 different kinds of neurons
Parts of a generic neuron
- Soma cell body
- Axon up to a meter long
- Dendrites many (receivers of the electrical current)
- Transmit information from one point in the brain to another, can be close or far.
Action Potentials
- Signal must be continuously amplified to travel without losing signal.
Nerve impulse Action Potential
- Resting potential 70 millivolts
o Sodium Potassium outside of the neuron
o Na+ K+ protein on the inside
o Na+ constantly being pumped out to maintain -70mv
Sodium pump
Synapse
- End of axon
o Synaptic vesicles filled with neurotransmitter
o Fuse with the side of the membrane
o Spill contents into synaptic cleft
Time Course of Action Potential
- Refractory period
o 1 millisecond
o Can fire 800-900 times per second
Properties of Soma and Dendrites
- Graded potential
- Decremental conduction(unlike axons)
- Temporal and spatial summation
Properties of axons
- Non-graded petoential (fires all or none)
o Threshold
- Non-decremental conduction(gets to the end in the same form that it started)
- More intense firing -> more spikes per second
Summary of the Generic Neuron
- Parts
o Soma, dendrties, axon
- Statistics
o 10 to the eleventh of them
o 10,000 different kinds
- Physiology
o Conduction of nerve impulses, action potential, fire
- Function
o Transmits a signal
o Intensity of signal related to firing rate
Receptive field
- Definition part or aspect of the world that can cause a change in the firing rate of a neuron
Levels of the Receptive Fields in the Brain
- Most peripheral
o Receptor connected to a neuron
- Higher up
o Neuron in a brain region that receives a reasonably direct projection from the outside
o Takes only one firing of neuron. Meets up with spinal cord.
- Higher still
o No direct link to sensory world
Face cells..? Hand cells.? (some neurons in monkeys only respond to hands)
Invariance to retinal input?
Modalities of Receptive Fields in the Brain(neurons firing at certain things)
- Vision
o Hues
o Special quality, line orientations
o Motion direction, speed
- Audition
o Frequency
o Spatial location?
- Touch
o Temperature
o Pain
o pressure
- Chemical senses
3 Practical Questions
- What can a neuron do? (Fire signals)
- What can a neuron know?
- How can a neuron learn?
What can a neuron do?
- Compute a threshold function of a spatial and temporal integration(add together information
spatially and temporally, compares integration to a certain number(threshold) and fires
depending on outcome)
- Spatial
o Which dendrites
o Extent and direction of dentrites
- Temporal time window of refractory period
o Time window of refractory period(has to have enough firing to happen within a time
period)
How can this be useful?
- Theoretical model of a neuron (McCulloch & Pitts, 1943)
o A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity
- 1. Neuron = binary device with (binary) input (not exactly true)
o Excitatory inputs add linearly
o Inhibitory inputs prevent the neuron from firing
- 2. Neuron has fixed threshold
- 3. Neuron has binary output (somewhat true, it either fires or doesnt, but has to have a certain
amount of activation to fire.)
Results and Implications
- By combining logical propositions into networks
o Any finite logical expression can be realized
- Paper had little effect in neuroscience literature
- Paper had enormous effect in computer science
o Binary operations, logic gates, computationetc
What can a neuron know?
- How is one neuron different than another?
- Anatomically hardware
o Number and extent of dendrites
o Spatial outlay of the dendrites (receptive field)
- Physiologically software
o Physically identical --- how can they differ?
Lateral inhibition
- Hartline, Wagner, & Ratliff (1956
- Horseshoe crab
- Physiology
- Did a lot of research about them because their axons are so big
o Light on cell A(in eye), recorded cell, lots of activity
o Same with cell B
o Light on both, record from A, As firing rate goes down a lot.
What can a neuron learn?
- Hebb (1949) Organization of Behavior
- Modification of the synaptic efficacy of dendrites are the neurons ability to learn
- Changes in the values of the w1 values of the model
Simple Operation Rules
- Set all weights to random values
- A set of input patterns to classify (train one to detect A, but not other letters)
- A set of targets goals or categories of output
- Apply first input pattern and compute output
- O = Ewx
- If it exceeds threshold, it fires, if it doesnt, it doesnt fire
- If correct do nothing
- If incorrect
o If too high w <= w-cx (change weight)
o If too low w <= w+ cx (boost weight)(if you put letter up and it did not fire)
(Neurons will fire for certain things, and if they fire for something they arent supposed to fire for, they
turn the weights down on those certain neurons. This repeats until the neurons that are supposed to
fire, fire.)
Results
- Neural network/perceptron
o Categorizes input
o i.e., detects instances of a category
o limits
linearly separable
Summary
- parallel computation
o time steps
- distributed and non-rule-governed
o emergent order
- analysis of the weights
o statistics