[geeks] New Tech Schools: Digital Harbor in Baltimore

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 13 Apr 2007 @ 12:54 -0400, Sandwich Maker said:

> " From: Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
> " 
> " adh at an.bradford.ma.us (Sandwich Maker) wrote:
> " 
> " 
> " > brain scans have shown that people who grew up polyglot use the same
> " > language center for all their languages, but people who learn
> " > languages when older use a different part of the brain for the new
> " > tongue.  i wonder if this takes learning method into account...
> " 
> " I thought that over time, people who learned languages as adults also saw
> " this information move to the older language centers?
> " 
> " That's what they told us in cognitive psychology anyway.
> 
> not sure if the research i read mentioned that, but it would make a
> certain sense - perhaps something else strongly affected by individual
> variations?

Maybe.

One thing I should explain though: cognitive psychology at my alma
mater was a class in neural networking and AI. We studied the brain's
functional units, and the transfer of data between them.

It wasn't a class on known theory or pragmatic application, it was
supposed to help us think of ways to solve problems in parallel
processing and neural network computation.

We've come a long way, but only on relatively tiny neural networks, and
so far only fairly fixed problem domains.

There are some huge problems to solve, particularly in the migration and
organization of "learned" data, and self optimization so that we don't
have to specifically configure the networks for a given problem.

If we could figure out more about how the brain does it, we'd be a lot
better at the computer applications of neural computation.


-- 
shannon           |    Tara is grass, and behold how Troy lieth 
                  |    low--And even the English, perchance their 
                  |    hour will come!