[ExI] New Study Finds a Single Neuron Is a Surprisingly Complex Little Computer

John Grigg possiblepaths2050 at gmail.com
Mon Sep 13 16:37:09 UTC 2021


"In a fascinating paper
<https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627321005018?dgcid=author>
published
recently in the journal *Neuron*, a team of researchers from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem tried to get us a little closer to an answer. While
they expected the results would show biological neurons are more
complex—they were surprised at just how much more complex they actually are.

In the study, the team found it took a five- to eight-layer neural network,
or nearly 1,000 artificial neurons, to mimic the behavior of a single
biological neuron from the brain’s cortex.

Though the researchers caution the results are an *upper* bound for
complexity—as opposed to an exact measurement of it—they also believe their
findings might help scientists further zero in on what exactly makes
biological neurons so complex. And that knowledge, perhaps, can help
engineers design even more capable neural networks and AI.

“[The result] forms a bridge from biological neurons to artificial
neurons,” Andreas Tolias, a computational neuroscientist at Baylor College
of Medicine, told *Quanta*
<https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/>
last
week."

https://singularityhub.com/2021/09/12/new-study-finds-a-single-neuron-is-a-surprisingly-complex-little-computer/
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