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Audiobook Release August 8 and Pre-Order Promotion

Book Review in Mathemafrica

April 16, 2023

originally published here by Jonathan Shock on April 9, 2023 Science so often lives in silos, or perhaps more accurately silos of Babel. We sit in our offices, ignoring a great deal of what is happening down the corridor from us, let alone in the building next door or the one on the other side of the campus.  A lot…

New Biography of Mike Gaze

March 27, 2023

Michael Gaze (1927-2012) was a contemporary of Roger Sperry who went in search of the rules of brain wiring. Inspired by Sperry, Gaze tested the core ideas of the field using electrophysiology to map connectivity – and described just how relative positioning, as opposed to Sperry’s rigid code, can lead to synaptic specificity in the visual system. Never as famous…

The Self-Assembling Brain Audiobook is coming!

March 27, 2023

Since Princeton University Press has announced the release of the Paperback of The Self-Assembling Brain for Dec. 13, 2022, we are glad to announce that the audio rights have been licensed to Recorded Books! This is going to be interesting, especially for the 10 dialogues of our favorite geneticist, robotics engineer, Artificial Intelligence Researcher and Neuroscientist. We’ll post the release…

Book Review: Who is the smartest of all of us?

February 18, 2023

Originally published Jan 11, 2023 on breathwork-science.org and Science of Psychotherapy by Gunnel Minett How the brain works and how the neurones link up and develop is something that has intrigued science throughout history. What makes a neural network intelligent? Is it genes behind this process (connectivity) or is it the environment (learning)? Today science is busy trying to create…

Mortal Computing, Geoffrey Hinton’s Forward-Forward Algorithm and The Self-Assembling Brain

January 6, 2023

Geoffrey Hinton is both a founding father and visionary critic of current approaches to AI.  He has repeatedly been thoughtful about the lessons the field may learn from biology.  He has also clearly spelled out fundamental limits to the currently most successful approaches of software-based learning methods that do not require prior information in the hardware.  In his new preprint…

Growing Your Brain!

September 21, 2022

A Review of Peter Robin Hiesinger’s Self-Assembling Brain by Robert Thibadeau on medium.com This is a very intertesting take on The Self-Assembling Brain by a senior expert on natural language processing. Robert Thibadeau trained with Roger Schank, is an emeritus of Carnegie Mellon University, and writes and teaches about cognitive science, AI, machine learning, and is one of the founding…

Peter Rupprecht’s Intuition about the Brain – a Book Review

July 5, 2022

On December 31, 2021, the neuroscientist Peter Rupprecht from the Brain Research Institute at the University of Zürich published a book review of The Self-Assembling Brain as the topic of his annual end-of-the-year report on intuitions about the brain. This is such a thoughtful review, both in its praise and critique, that I asked Peter for permission to post it…

Paperback Release on Dec. 13, 2022

June 10, 2022

Princeton University Press will release the Paperback of The Self-Assembling Brain in December! Check out reviews in Science, TechTalks, on goodreads & amazon, …and a series of podcasts. How does a neural network become a brain? While developmental neurobiologists investigate how genes encode the growth of intricate connectivity as a basis for learning, computer scientists design artificial neural networks with…

100.000 views of the Royal Society Lecture

March 8, 2022

The June 2021 Lecture ‘The Self-Assembling Brain’ has now been watched more than 100.000 times on youtube, with 3.600 likes. Well, maybe not much in a world of internet celebrities, but remember, this is only a lecture on the brain and AI, with very little in the direction of self-help and zero pictures of cute cats… Thank you again to…