Pattern ThinkingIn a significant contribution to the study of the brain and behavior, Coward develops a system model for the human brain based on a new physiologically based theory of learning and memory. The work is primarily intended for neuropsychologists, but will be of interest to anyone concerned with understanding the brain as a functioning system. The author has twenty years' experience in most of the different aspects of designing complex electronic systems. Such a system today has up to several billion hardware components such as individual transistors, and millions of lines of software. Coward argues that the methodology used to handle the design of such systems can be modified and adapted to understand the brain. In the design of electronic systems, the concept instruction makes it possible to rigorously translate from high level operational descriptions to detailed descriptions in terms of machine code and transistor structures. In the brain, the concept pattern can make it possible to translate between the descriptions of psychology and physiology and make functional understanding possible. Any change in the state of a neuron can be interpreted on a system level as the recognition of a pattern. Pattern is precisely defined and includes both objects and changes to objects. Based on these observations, Coward designs a model called the cascaded pattern extraction hierarchy to explain the functioning of the brain, showing that the brain can be visualized as a pattern extraction template, in which successive layers are able to extract increasingly complex patterns from relatively simple input. |