Numenta turns attention to The Thalamus!

[Paul_Lamb]

@keghn_feem

That is daisy chain logic based on my theories.

I don’t see the connection myself. From what I can tell, your daisy chain concept is about holding onto a (presumably unmodified) signal for an extended period of time by passing it around in a loop of connections like the game “hot potato”.

@keghn_feem

I am liked the concept of using a daisy chain of nerves in a
loop to hold a pules. Just like mercury memory delay lines like in the days of old.

@keghn_feem

There are a couple of ways making a memory device with ANN. One way is to daisy
chain of neurons in a loop. Also known as a delay line, that feed back in. Like a
RNN. But it is a pure transmission line and data is not changed.

But that isn’t how I interpret the image in Numenta’s article:

Now granted I am no neuroscientist, but this doesn’t look like it is designed for holding onto a signal to me. The thalamus section looks more like a two-level hierarchy which is driven by activity in cortical layer 6 combined with neighboring activity in the thalamus.

Assuming this circuit is related to attention (I recall from previous conversations that cortical layer 6 and the thalamus are involved in attention), my naive interpretation of this circuit is that layer 6 is informing the thalamus what its region is currently attending to, and that input gets combined and abstracted with other activity outside of the region (from this diagram can’t really tell if that is activity from other cortical regions or from subcortical structures) in order to ultimately provide more weight to some subset of the input, thus influencing what is being attended to.

I should point out that I haven’t had a chance to read and absorb the materials on the thalamus that @Bitking has posed on previous threads, so above is a very uninformed interpretation. I’m mainly making the point that there isn’t any obvious correlation between this and the daisy chain concept.