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Appraisals 14
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InnoVirtuoso Review: How Neural Networks Grow Smarter, According to Peter Robin Hiesinger

September 1, 2025
Appraisals Reviews

Review from August 16, 2025, originally published here: https://innovirtuoso.com/artificial-intelligence/the-self-assembling-brain-kindle-edition-review-how-neural-networks-grow-smarter-according-to-peter-robin-hiesinger/ Table of Contents What would it take to build a brain from scratch—and could artificial intelligence skip the long, messy process nature uses? If those questions make your neurons fire, Peter Robin Hiesinger’s The Self-Assembling Brain: How Neural Networks Grow Smarter will feel like a guided lab tour through the deepest…

Berlin Radio Interview on the ‘Neurobiology of Artficial Intelligence’ (in German)

July 16, 2025
Brain Wiring Interviews News Podcasts

Berlin Radio (RBB) interview about the research in the Hiesinger lab and its connection to understanding information encoding in biological and artificial neural networks – the topic of The Self-Assembling Brain. The interview ‘Die Neurobiologie der Künstlichen Intelligenz’ (in German) is available here. A related online lecture ‘Neurobiology of Artificial Intelligence’ (recorded by IEEE Computational Intellgence Society, Dec. 2024, in…

Hiesinger Lab Grant Award: The Information Content of Brain Wiring

July 2, 2025
Algorithmic Growth Brain Wiring Information Theory News

The information content of the brain, i.e. the size of a hard drive it would take for lossless up- anddownloading of information stored in biological neural networks of any size, is unknown. Bycontrast, the information content of artificial neural networks that underlie virtually allcontemporary artificial intelligence, is well defined and can be saved on a hard drive in a precisenumber…

Book Review by Chris Shayan

May 23, 2025
Appraisals Reviews

originally published here: https://www.chrisshayan.com/blog-posts/the-self-assembling-brain Book Review The Self-Assembling Brain Peter Robin Hiesinger’s The Self-Assembling Brain offers a fascinating exploration of how neural networks grow smarter. The book delves into the intricate process of brain development, drawing parallels between biological and artificial neural networks. Hiesinger’s engaging writing style makes complex scientific concepts accessible to a wide audience.One of the book’s key…

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

May 5, 2024
Algorithmic Growth Brain Wiring News

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…

Book Review by Aaron Prather

October 23, 2023
Appraisals Reviews

originally published on linkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/amprather_ai-activity-7109242104911941632-vBmy Aaron Prather Director, Robotics & Autonomous Systems Program at ASTM International As we continue to ponder where #AI is going, it is probably a good idea to look at our own brains and how we developed our own intelligence. This was one of the reasons I picked up a copy of “𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐞𝐥𝐟-𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐁𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧: 𝐇𝐨𝐰…

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…

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…