10:15AM Pacific Monday Oct 21 with @FFiebig. This is part two of a series.
Supporting papers:
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Won’t miss it for the world. The first part was really interesting. (Danke Dr Fiebig).
Here is another article about STP.
Synapses with short-term plasticity are optimal
estimators of presynaptic membrane potentials
Jean-Pascal Pfister, Peter Dayan & Máté Lengyel
doi:10.1038/nn.2640
ABSTRACT: The trajectory of the somatic membrane potential of a cortical neuron exactly reflects the computations performed on its afferent inputs. However, the spikes of such a neuron are a very low-dimensional and discrete projection of this continually evolving signal. We explored the possibility that the neuron′s efferent synapses perform the critical computational step of estimating the membrane potential trajectory from the spikes. We found that short-term changes in synaptic efficacy can be interpreted as implementing an optimal estimator of this trajectory. Short-term depression arose when presynaptic spiking was sufficiently intense as to reduce the uncertainty associated with the estimate; short-term facilitation reflected structural features of the statistics of the presynaptic neuron such as up and down states. Our analysis provides a unifying account of a powerful, but puzzling, form of plasticity.
I added some papers to the post above.
Live now
We are going to have part 2 of this series live this morning at 10:15AM Pacific:
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Woah, another massive piece of the puzzle! It blows my mind how much work must have been put into this research to get to this model.
I’m looking forward to how @FFiebig would tie this in with the unions in Numenta’s model. (The suspense is killing me). But it feels (indeed) that this mechanism could have effect on many area’s and functions.
Is there any information how prevalent this effect is? Does it happen everywhere in the neocortex, or is it restricted or more common in some layers? And does it happen all the time, or is it somewhat restricted to levels of attention? (Although, if it relies purely on physiology, that shouldn’t have an impact I guess).
It’s also again a recurring problem that there is often confusion in terms. Working memory can have many meanings, especially if we sneek in consciousness.here and there. :-).
Thank’s so much for this stream.
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I thought this was a good meeting, too. Obviously Florian is here for a reason. 
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Isn’t the described mechanism a candidate to support rapid switching between object contexts which is mentioned in “A Framework for Intelligence” paper, section on attention? It is likely that within a timeframe of 2-3 seconds similar sequences of sensoric patterns would be caused by same object, so it could be useful to have a shortcut that’ll reduce the number of sensations needed to re-recognize them
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