• ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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    22 years ago

    There absolutely has to be redundancy as the case of the guy with 90% of the brain missing shows. Note that his brain ended up wiring itself differently from a regular brain. So, the fact that most of the brain is missing doesn’t translate to saying that a regular person uses only 10% of the brain. Most of the brain tends to be active, but it’s just not wired as efficiently.

    There are also cases where people get entire hemisphere removed due to epilepsy or injury and are still able to function fine. This is again indication that brain can adapt itself to work with severely reduced resources.

    Crows obviously don’t have the same capacity as human brain, but if their architecture was scaled up to a comparably sized network then it could potentially outpace what the human brain is capable of.

    I think all of this has interesting implications for AI. If we only need to create a network the size of a crow brain to achieve basic intelligence, that’s far more achievable than having to implement one the size of a regular human brain. And we could potentially create human level intelligence or even surpass it with a much smaller neural network.

    I suspect the topology of the network is key, and as we continue to get better scanning techniques we’ll eventually learn enough about biological brains to emulate them in sufficient detail which may be a path towards real AI.

    • @Zerush@lemmy.ml
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      12 years ago

      Maybe, but I don’t believe that redundance is the reason of the bigger volumen. Certainly there is no need of the whole brain for a relative normal life (a lot of people prove this, some of them became even presidents). I think in another simil, if you have a holographic photo and you cut it in pieces, every piece has the full picture informacion, but in a very lower resolution each one. As I say before, in the nature no exist the redundance, it’s a question of energy which guide the evolution. They don’t give more resources as needed for the good life in it’s environment.

      • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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        22 years ago

        I’d argue that the brain volume alone is not nearly as important as how it’s wired. There are lots of animals with high brain volumes that aren’t terribly intelligent. While there is evolutionary pressure to optimize energy use, there is also a competing pressure to make the system more robust. Having redundancy means that the brain can survive more severe trauma creating an evolutionary advantage. Meanwhile, birds have a stronger selection for optimization since they have to be able to fly and hence why I think we see more efficient brain architecture emerge.

        • @Zerush@lemmy.ml
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          02 years ago

          Yes, whales have a bigger brain, but not in relation to their boddy mass. They are also animals with considerable intelligence, although not as much as those of the Delfinoid family, such as Dolphins and Orcas, whose brains in relation to their body mass is much higher and also much more complex.