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The human brain isn’t much to look at. In the hand, it is a jelly-like mass, easily deformed by touch. But its unassuming appearance belies complex inner workings, many of which are still a mystery to scientists.
Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentation.
The brain is the quintessential complex system, boasting incredible feats of cognition and supporting a wide range of behaviours. Physics has much to offer in the quest to distil the brain’s complexity to a number of cogent organizing principles.
The development of implantable electrode arrays that broadly and seamlessly integrate with brain tissue will require innovation that responsibly considers clinically relevant neuroethical concerns.
Difficult questions will be raised as models of the human brain get closer to replicating its functions, explain Nita A. Farahany, Henry T. Greely and 15 colleagues.
Long-term episodic memory storage has been proposed to require a reorganization of neural circuits and networks in a process known as systems consolidation. Tonegawa and colleagues discuss recent advances in our understanding of the contribution of engram cells to this process.
This Perspective evaluates the state of the art in memristor-based electronics and explores the future development of such devices in on-chip memory, biologically inspired computing and general-purpose in-memory computing.
Research on reinforcement learning in artificial agents focuses on a single complex problem within a static environment. In biological agents, research focuses on simple learning problems embedded in flexible, dynamic environments. The authors review the literature on these topics and suggest areas of synergy between them.