Neuroscience for AI: Insights from the hippocampal complex
Biological intelligence appears to differ from artificial intelligence in several striking ways: we accumulate knowledge across a lifetime without new learning wiping out the old, we can generalize from a handful of examples rather than millions, and we do it all on roughly the power budget of a dim lightbulb.
Neuroscientists have spent decades trying to understand how the brain pulls this off.
In this talk, Sarthak will take a case study of a single brain region, the hippocampal complex, which serves as the seat of memory and spatial navigation, and will ask what AI might learn from it.
Sarthak will lay out how the brain's remarkably structured representations of space, built from grid cells, can act as a fixed internal scaffold that arbitrary memories are hung onto, and how a memory system built this way stores far more than conventional ones, forgets gracefully instead of catastrophically, and even reproduces the familiar tip-of-the-tongue feeling of recognising something before you can recall it.
He will then turn to where such structure comes from in the first place, showing how smooth biological gradients across the brain can spontaneously organise into discrete functional modules, a kind of self-organization that is quite different from how modularity is currently hand-designed into AI systems.
Throughout, I will try to demonstrate the remarkable solutions biological neural networks have arrived at and ask which of these ideas may be worth borrowing.
About the speakers:
Sarthak Chandra completed his undergraduate degree in Physics at IIT Kanpur and his PhD in Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. After his PhD, he decided to switch fields and move into neuroscience, joining the Brain and Cognitive Science department at MIT first as a postdoctoral researcher and then as a Research Scientist.
He moved back to India, where he is now a Murty Science Fellow, a faculty member at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, and a faculty associate at the National Centre for Biological Sciences.
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