New Brain Learning Mechanism Calls for Revision of Long-Held Neuroscience Hypothesis - Neuroscience News

The new experimental observations suggest that learning is mainly performed in neuronal dendritic trees, where the trunk and branches of the tree modify their strength, as opposed to modifying solely the strength of the synapses (dendritic leaves), as was previously thought.

These observations indicate that the neuron is a much more complex, dynamic and computational element than a binary element that can fire or not.

Just one single neuron can realize deep learning algorithms, which previously required an artificial complex network consisting of thousands of connected neurons and synapses.

“We’ve shown that efficient learning on dendritic trees of a single neuron can artificially achieve success rates approaching unity for handwritten digit recognition. This finding paves the way for an efficient biologically inspired new type of AI hardware and algorithms,” said Prof. Ido Kanter, of Bar-Ilan’s Department of Physics and Gonda (Goldschmied) Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center, who led the research.

“This simplified learning mechanism represents a step towards a plausible biological realization of backpropagation algorithms, which are currently the central technique in AI,” added Shiri Hodassman, a Ph.D. student and one of the key contributors to this work.

The efficient learning on dendritic trees is based on Kanter and his research team’s experimental evidence for sub-dendritic adaptation using neuronal cultures, together with other anisotropic properties of neurons, like different spike waveforms, refractory periods and maximal transmission rates.

The brain’s clock is a billion times slower than existing parallel GPUs, but with comparable success rates in many perceptual tasks.

The new demonstration of efficient learning on dendritic trees calls for new approaches in brain research, as well as for the generation of counterpart hardware aiming to implement advanced AI algorithms. If one can implement slow brain dynamics on ultrafast computers, the sky is the limit.

About this neuroscience and learning research news

Author: Press Office

Source: Bar-Ilan University

Contact: Press Office – Bar-Ilan University

Image: The image is credited to Bar-Ilan University

Original Research: Open access.

“Efficient dendritic learning as an alternative to synaptic plasticity hypothesis” by Shiri Hodassman et al. Scientific Report