Computer and Brain

While working on a computer model intended to study how the brain deals with certain kinds of visual information, the researchers at Tomaso Poggio’s lab at MIT were amazed to see that the computer model which was not even developed for this purpose, was able to interpret as good as a human brain and at certain instances could do more rapidly than many existing computer systems specially designed for this purpose.

They were using the model computer to study a series of photographs. It was supposed to give a theoretical analysis of how the brain interprets these pictures and how the various pathways work in a brain.

This gave a turning point not only to the research but brought a complete change in the approach. There were running two independent lines of research at Tomaso Poggio’s lab at MIT. On the one hand, the researchers were working to understand how the brain works using advanced computer models. On the other hand, another research was focused on improving the abilities of computer to perform complex tasks like interpreting images as easily as a brain. However later when they found that the two tasks have been overlapping each other, they decided to combine them.

He said that for the first time, he has found a computer model reproducing such a remarkable interpretation on such kind of task. This has added a new angle to the existing viewpoint. Poggio says,” It meant that we may be closer to understanding how the visual cortex recognizes objects and scenes than I ever thought possible.”

The study was conducted to know how the visual cortex works in a brain. Visual cortex is a large part of a brain and one of the most complicated systems. So understanding it could be a major leap towards understanding the functioning of a brain. In order to do this, a series of experiments were done which involved certain tasks which were very hard for a computer model to perform however the researchers were surprised at the results.

The computer vision of the system was able to respond intelligently to a series of photographs. These photographs contained pictures of different animals in different backgrounds. Photographs were shown to people only for a fraction of a second. This task involved the use of a particular part of the human visual cortex, known as the Ventral 1 pathway.

Poggio says that with these results new insights into cortex which is the key problem could be seen. In spite of these amazing results, they are still not able to understand how this model works. The researchers are now working on finding out the reasons which could account for these results and other recent results from the lab.

“Our visual abilities are computationally amazing, and we are still far from imitating them with computers,” Poggio says. This study encourages paying close attention to the latest developments in neuroscience.

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