To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future
Published in Brain/Neurology.
A controversial theory suggests that perception, motor control, memory and other brain functions all depend on comparisons between ongoing actual experiences and the brain’s modeled expectations.
Some neuroscientists favor a predictive coding explanation for how the brain works, in which perception may be thought of as a “controlled hallucination.” This theory emphasizes the brain’s expectations and predictions about reality rather than the direct sensory evidence that the brain receives. Credit: Zolloc for Quanta Magazine.
In mid-2018, the artificial intelligence company DeepMind introduced new software that can take a single image of a few objects in a virtual room and, without human guidance, infer what the three-dimensional scene looks like from entirely new vantage points. Given just a handful of such pictures, the system, dubbed the Generative Query Network, or GQN, can successfully model the layout of a simple, video game-style maze.