Thoughts about topology

[Bitking]

I think we may be on the same page.

Jeff Hawkin’s papers have consistently repeated the theme of understanding what the cortex does. The brain goes to considerable effort to maintain topology in the various maps throughout the brain[1]. The patterns that flow through the maps are processed spatially in the brain. I would assume that such an obvious organization feature should not be casually discarded. This may be a key feature that should be understood.

I have been thinking about this and an obvious thing that falls out of this organization is that for a feature transition in input space - it will be sampled by the dendrites of cells around this feature. The cell bodies “around” this transition will learn this feature. The net effect is to distribute memory of this feature in a fuzzy halo of cell activation around the feature transition.

I suggest an efficient method to perform spatial dendrite sampling here:

Path based SDRs (Dendrite Trees)

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I have been trying to work out how to form the cortical.io retina using HTMs. This effort has led me to work through what operations are being performed by HTMs and how to compute with these primitives. The basic task of the conversion between a stream of data and a spatial distribution of the semantically related SDRs requires that the somewhere in the computations there is a sense of location in the cell bodies. I also wanted to work within the restrictio…

[1] http://hubel.med.harvard.edu/book/bcontex.htm