Form 5495 Opinions 2017-2024

Now as I've listened to the talks and as I look out into the audience and actually see some good morning some rather famous psychiatrists it recalled my somewhat failed medical school career for I went to medical school and I wanted to become a psychiatrist but during my first clinical rotation in medical school my clinical incompetence was immediately recognized and I was called in by the Dean who offered to allow me to graduate from medical school if I promised never ever to practice medicine on live patients and I agreed happily and I did an internship in pathology to keep my promise and the chair of pathology came to me after a year of autopsies and offered to certify me in pathology if I promise never ever to practice medicine on dead patients and so I stand before you to talk to you about a problem in neuroscience a rather elusive problem the problem of how the sensory world is represented in the brain now I'd like you to think about this problem because it's an utterly astonishing problem because the sensory world can consists of a set of physical properties wavelengths of light that encompass vision frequencies of sound chemical structures that make for smell and taste but how can you possibly represent these quantifiable physical parameters in a brain that simply has one thing in it neurons and these neurons can only do one meaningful thing that is they can fire they elicit an electrical discharge to allow communication among themselves and moreover they can only vary in their firing in their spiking in two parameters time and space so this world out there this rich world that we experience has to be represented by this monotonic array of neurons and in fact as I...