The computer inside your head

From the outside, brains and computers appear to have a lot in common, but under the lid they operate completely differently. Computers code things in ones and zeros, brains signal in trains of electrical pulses. Computers are designed to be 100% reliable, while brains are sloppy. And we know exactly how computers work, but evolution’s design scheme for the brain remains almost entirely mysterious. In this talk I will highlight recent research on how ideas from computer science might help us understand the brain, and how insights from biology might help us design smarter computers.

Languages satisfy rules that are both surprisingly specific - it is a "big yellow taxi" not a "yellow big taxi" - as well as surprisingly diverse: English uses the verb "to have" to form the past tense whereas Irish has no verb "to have" at all. Is structure of language constrained by the architecture of the neuronal circuits that decode it, or by the nature of the world it described? I will discuss this question and describe on-going work on the earliest stage of language processing.