Neuroscience Discoveries

A first-person account of neuroscience discoveries, including their relevance to AI and to the development of better treatments for brain and mental disorders. Neuroscientist Edmund Rolls’ research interests include computational neuroscience, emotion, memory, vision, decision-making, and mental disorders. In Neuroscience Discoveries, he describes how our brains implement emotion, decision-making, memory, and vision, showing how one research idea and discovery can provide the foundation for the next insight. He explains the systems-level organization of the brain and introduces some of the key brain systems involved in these types of human behavior. Understanding our brains better, he says, is important not only for a deeper understanding of our behavior, but also for our ability to treat brain and mental disorders. The author shows how scientific ideas have been generated in these areas of neuroscience, in part to encourage other researchers about ways in which to make discoveries in science. He also cautions that we need to be careful about our assumptions with respect to the human brain and AI, given how the two differ in the ways in which they compute—though they can learn much from each other.