<div dir="ltr"><p style="box-sizing:border-box;font-family:proxima-nova,sans-serif;font-size:20px;line-height:26px;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:26px">"In a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627321005018?dgcid=author" style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:transparent;color:rgb(237,102,41);text-decoration-line:none">fascinating paper</a> published recently in the journal <em style="box-sizing:border-box">Neuron</em>, 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.</p><p style="box-sizing:border-box;font-family:proxima-nova,sans-serif;font-size:20px;line-height:26px;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:26px">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.</p><p style="box-sizing:border-box;font-family:proxima-nova,sans-serif;font-size:20px;line-height:26px;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:26px">Though the researchers caution the results are an <em style="box-sizing:border-box">upper</em> 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.</p><p style="box-sizing:border-box;font-family:proxima-nova,sans-serif;font-size:20px;line-height:26px;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:26px">“[The result] forms a bridge from biological neurons to artificial neurons,” Andreas Tolias, a computational neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/" style="box-sizing:border-box;background-color:transparent;color:rgb(237,102,41);text-decoration-line:none">told <em style="box-sizing:border-box">Quanta</em></a> last week."</p><p style="box-sizing:border-box;font-family:proxima-nova,sans-serif;font-size:20px;line-height:26px;margin-top:0px;margin-bottom:26px"><a href="https://singularityhub.com/2021/09/12/new-study-finds-a-single-neuron-is-a-surprisingly-complex-little-computer/">https://singularityhub.com/2021/09/12/new-study-finds-a-single-neuron-is-a-surprisingly-complex-little-computer/</a><br></p></div>