Brain complexity: rapid pattern recognition (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 19, 2015, 01:13 (3043 days ago) @ David Turell

We can see a tiny portion of an object ( i.e., a bed post) and recognize what the picture refers to. Our brain stores all sorts of patterns to help us. It no appears that this mechanism can act very quickly:-http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/12/151215160649.htm-"Humans learn to very quickly identify complex objects and variations of them. We generally recognize an "A" no matter what the font, texture or background, for example, or the face of a coworker even if she puts on a hat or changes her hairstyle. We also can identify an object when just a portion is visible, such as the corner of a bed or the hinge of a door. But how?-***-"We hypothesized that random projection could be one way humans learn," Arriaga, a senior research scientist and developmental psychologist, explains. "The short story is, the prediction was right. Just 0.15 percent of the total data is enough for humans."-***-"To test their theory, researchers created three families of abstract images at 150 x 150 pixels, then very small ``random sketches" of those images. Test subjects were shown the whole image for 10 seconds, then randomly shown 16 sketches of each. Using abstract images ensured that neither humans nor machines had any prior knowledge of what the objects were.-"'We were surprised by how close the performance was between extremely simple neural networks and humans," Vempala said. "The design of neural networks was inspired by how we think humans learn, but it's a weak inspiration. To find that it matches human performance is quite a surprise.'"-Comment: The research folks are not looking at the brain strictly from my viewpoint, but their study demonstrates my contention. Our brain is built to help us.