Cognitive neuroscience: emergence of mind from brain an introduction to the cognitive neuroscience series

Published on January 31, 2013 Updated on July 8, 2020   68 min

A selection of talks on Neurology

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0:00
Hello and welcome to Cognitive Neuroscience: Emergence of Mind from Brain. I'm Jay McClelland, and I'm the director of the Stanford Center for Mind, Brain and Computation. This lecture is intended as an introduction to the cognitive neuroscience series of Henry Stewart talks.
0:20
In this lecture, we'll ask the question: how does the brain give rise to experience, thought, and behavior? One perspective on this question is the view that the brain consists of a large number of separate modules, each essentially doing its own thing, for example, there might be a module for object recognition, another module for the appreciation of music, and yet another for understanding language. The perspective that I'll take in this lecture is different. Our perspective is that our cognitive abilities emerge from interactions of neurons within and across brain areas. Neurons may be specialized to contribute certain special things to particular aspects of our mental functions, but in general, they work in concert with many other neurons in a large and diverse range of brain areas to give rise to functions such as the ones that I mentioned before.
1:16
Here is an outline for the lecture. After the introduction that we've just concluded, we'll turn to building blocks and basic principles of neural computation. Next, we will consider how neural activity represents information. Then we'll consider the macrostructure of mind and brain, how functions are organized across different brain areas. In the last substantive section of the lecture we'll consider how neurons learn to represent and to process information. Finally, I'll have some concluding comments about what we know, and what we don't know about mind and brain.

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