Talking Heads

In this talk, Greg will discuss how the mind deals with words that have multiple interpretations (e.g., “river/money bank”) which constitute the vast majority of our repertoire of vocabulary. I will demonstrate that although language comprehension is, in principle, a difficult and time-consuming task, there are different cues that our mind uses to make rapid best guesses as to what words mean.

Cells do their thing: they manage to stay alive and chatter with other cells through electrical and chemical means. Under a microscope this look messy and a bit random. Zoom out, and you will find that 10 billion cells form a computer architecture that works nothing like a desktop. We are slowly starting to understand how the brain can act like a computer, but is nothing like one. The current state of technique means that we have to make educated guesses about how the brain can do this, ironically, in the form of computer simulations, performed as part of the Human Brain Project.