How Active Dendrites Enable Prediction and Context Integration in Neurons - August 18, 2021
Channel: Numenta
Date: 2021-08-23

Subutai Ahmad reviews the biology behind active dendrites and explains how Numenta models them. He first presents an overview of active dendrites in pyramidal neurons by describing various experimental findings. He describes the impact of dendrites on the computation performed by neurons, and some of the learning (plasticity) rules that have been discovered. He shows how all this forms the substrate for the HTM neuron, proposing that dendritic computation is the basis for prediction and very flexible context integration in neural networks.

Papers: 
Bartlett Mel, Neural Computation 1992: https://direct.mit.edu/neco/article/4/4/502/5650/NMDA-Based-Pattern-Discrimination-in-a-Modeled
Poirazi, Brannon & Mel, Neuron, 2003: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12670427/

Numenta Neurons Paper 2016: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncir.2016.00023/full
Numenta Columns Paper 2017: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncir.2017.00081/full

“Predictive Coding of Novel versus Familiar Stimuli in the Primary Visual Cortex”: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/197608v1
“Continuous online sequence learning with an unsupervised neural network model”: https://direct.mit.edu/neco/article/28/11/2474/8502/Continuous-Online-Sequence-Learning-with-an#.WC4U8TKZMUE
‘Unsupervised real-time anomaly detection for streaming data”: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925231217309864
“Active properties of neocortical pyramidal neuron dendrites”: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23841837/

- - - - - 
Numenta is leading the new era of machine intelligence. Our deep experience in theoretical neuroscience research has led to tremendous discoveries on how the brain works. We have developed a framework called the Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence that will be fundamental to advancing the state of artificial intelligence and machine learning. By applying this theory to existing deep learning systems, we are addressing today’s bottlenecks while enabling tomorrow’s applications. 

Subscribe to our News Digest for the latest news about neuroscience and artificial intelligence:
https://numenta.com/news-digest/

Subscribe to our Newsletter for the latest Numenta updates:
https://tinyurl.com/NumentaNewsletter

Our Social Media: 
https://twitter.com/Numenta
https://www.facebook.com/OfficialNumenta
https://www.linkedin.com/company/numenta

Our Open Source Resources:
https://github.com/numenta
https://discourse.numenta.org/

Our Website: 
https://numenta.com/