[HN Gopher] Concept Cells Help Your Brain Abstract Information a...
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       Concept Cells Help Your Brain Abstract Information and Build
       Memories
        
       Author : headalgorithm
       Score  : 61 points
       Date   : 2025-01-21 16:20 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
        
       | Ezku wrote:
       | An interesting piece featured in the article: "Concept and
       | Location Neurons in the Human Brain Provide the 'What' and
       | 'Where' in Memory Formation", Nature Communications 2024
       | (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-52295-5)
       | 
       | This wasn't in the article, but I feel it makes for good
       | background reading: "Universal Principles Justify the Existence
       | of Concept Cells", Scientific Reports 2020
       | (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-64466-7)
        
       | westurner wrote:
       | skos:Concept RDFS Class: https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-
       | reference/#concepts
       | 
       | schema:Thing: https://schema.org/Thing
       | 
       | atomspace:ConceptNode: https://wiki.opencog.org/w/Atom_types ..
       | https://github.com/opencog/atomspace#examples-documentation-...
       | 
       | SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System > Concepts,
       | ConceptScheme:
       | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Knowledge_Organization_...
       | 
       | But temporal instability observed in repeat functional imaging
       | studies indicates that functional localization constant: the
       | regions of the brain that activate for a given cue vary over
       | time.
       | 
       | From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42091934 :
       | 
       | > _" Representational drift: Emerging theories for continual
       | learning and experimental future directions" (2022)
       | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095943882... _
       | :
       | 
       | >> _Future work should characterize drift across brain regions,
       | cell types, and learning._
        
         | svnt wrote:
         | The important part about the statements in the drift paper are
         | the qualifiers:
         | 
         | > Cells whose activity was previously correlated with
         | environmental and behavioral variables are most frequently no
         | longer active in response to the same variables weeks later. At
         | the same time, a mostly new pool of neurons develops activity
         | patterns correlated with these variables.
         | 
         | "Most frequently" and "mostly new" --- this means that some
         | neurons still fire across the weeks-long periods for the same
         | activities, leaving plenty of potential space for concept
         | cells.
         | 
         | This doesn't necessarily mean concept cells exist, but it does
         | allow for the possibility of their existence.
         | 
         | I also didn't check which regions of the brain were evaluated
         | in each concept, as it is likely they have some different
         | characteristics at the neuron level.
        
       | AIorNot wrote:
       | Same concept in LLMs as referenced in this video by Chris Olah at
       | Anthropic:
       | 
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1grxo1c/anthropics_...
       | 
       | also see: https://distill.pub/2021/multimodal-neurons/
        
         | aithrowawaycomm wrote:
         | The authors of the second piece specifically said this was not
         | the same thing: the fact that they weakly fire for loosely-
         | associated concepts is very different from (and ultimately
         | shallower than) concept neurons:                 Looking to
         | neuroscience, they might sound like "grandmother neurons," but
         | their associative nature distinguishes them from how many
         | neuroscientists interpret that term. The term "concept neurons"
         | has sometimes been used to describe biological neurons with
         | similar properties, but this framing might encourage people to
         | overinterpret these artificial neurons. Instead, the authors
         | generally think of these neurons as being something like the
         | visual version of a topic feature, activating for features we
         | might expect to be similar in a word embedding.
         | 
         | The "turtle+PhD" artificial neuron is a good example of this
         | distinction: it is just pulling together loosely-related
         | concepts of turtles and academia into one loose neuron, without
         | actually being a coherent concept.
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-21 23:01 UTC)