Disclaimer: I am not a neuro-scientist nor a qualified AI researcher. I'm simply wondering if any established labs or computer scientists are looking into the following?
I was listening to a lecture on the perceptron this evening and they talked about how modern artificial neural networks mimic the behavior of biological brain neural networks. Specifically, the artificial networks have neurons that behave in a binary, on-off fashion. However, the lecturer pointed out biological neurons can exhibit other behaviors:
- They can fire in coordinated groups, together.
- They can modify the rate of their firing.
- And there may be other modes of behavior I'm not aware of...
It seems reasonable to me that at a minimum, each of these behaviors would be the physical signs of information transmission, storage or processing. In other words, there has to be a reason for these behaviors and the reason is likely to do with how the brain manages information.
My question is - are there any areas of neural network or AI architecture research that are looking for ways to algorithmically integrate these behaviors into our models? Is there a possibility that we could use behaviors like this to amplify the value or performance of each individual neuron in the network? If we linked these behaviors to information processing, how much more effective or performant would our models be?
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