CS Degree Day 96

What I did today?

• Lecture 4: Sensory systems - visual processing, retina, LGN, V1
• Lecture 5: Motor systems - cortex, cerebellum, basal ganglia
• Lecture 6: Learning and memory - LTP, hippocampus, declarative vs procedural memory

Interesting things I came across

Long-term potentiation and Hebb’s rule

“Neurons that fire together wire together.” Hebb’s rule, formalized in 1949. Long-term potentiation (LTP) is the synaptic mechanism - repeated activation strengthens the synapse. This is the biological substrate of learning and memory. When I read the description of gradient descent and now read about LTP, the structural similarity is unmistakable. Backpropagation is a cartoon of what brains do, and yet the cartoon has produced remarkable things.