Peter Robin Hiesinger – The Self-Assembling Brain

From the author’s lab: New research paper on self-organization of brain wiring in the journal Science

May 5, 2024

Axonal self-sorting without target guidance in Drosophila visual map formation Agi et al., 2024, Science. PMID: 38452066, DOI: 10.1126/science.adk3043 Abstract The idea of guidance toward a target is central to axon pathfinding and brain wiring in general. In this work, we show how several thousand axonal growth cones self-pattern without target-dependent guidance during neural superposition wiring in Drosophila. Ablation of…

Audiobook Release August 8 and Pre-Order Promotion

July 31, 2023

News

The audiobook (read by Joel Richards) is about to be released – and the publisher has initiated a preorder promotion (and some new cover art :). Check it out on audiobooks.com!

Book Review in Mathemafrica

April 16, 2023

Appraisals

Reviews

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

Algorithmic Growth

Brain Wiring

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

News

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

Reviews

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

Algorithmic Growth

Artificial Neural Network

Brain Wiring

Intelligent System

Interviews

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

Appraisals

Reviews

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

Appraisals

Reviews

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

News

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…