Human Memory Modeled with Standard Analog and Digital Circuits: Inspiration for Man-made Computers

CHAPTER 1

BRAIN BEHAVIOR POINTS THE WAY

INTRODUCTION

The mysterious brain, underneath its understated facade, is just another computer, only with unimaginable parallelism and efficiency. It is a memory-based associative computer that works not with addresses, such as street numbers, but with features such as shape and shade. The end result is a sequence of mental pictures to light our way through life.

This book takes a fresh new look at artificial intelligence from the perspective of modeling human memory as a system, an all-digital system based on current knowledge about memory and cognition. At the bottom, neurons and their membranes are modeled with analog circuits to create arbitrary Boolean logic. At the top, memory system operations, including memorization, memory search, cognition, and learning, are modeled using digital circuits. The process of modeling is grounded in basic physics as expressed using standard analog and digital circuits. Standard analog and digital circuits offer a special advantage over the more abstract forms of modeling. Circuits may be integrated into silicon or simulated in software for systems that require some degree of artificial intelligence. Equally significant, brain models are a wellspring for new ideas and inventions.

For example, presented later in this book is a novel computer taken from brain memory models. As in neural circuits, signals switch in the kilohertz range, which is relatively slow, but logic is massively parallel, and therefore ...