BI 202 Eli Sennesh: Divide-and-Conquer to Predict

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community. The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists. Read more about our partnership. Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new Brain Inspired episode is released. Eli Sennesh is a postdoc at Vanderbilt University, one of my old stomping grounds, currently in the lab of Andre Bastos. Andre’s lab focuses on understanding brain dynamics within cortical circuits, particularly how communication between brain areas is coordinated in perception, cognition, and behavior. So Eli is busy doing work along those lines, as you'll hear more about. But the original impetus for having him on his recently published proposal for how predictive coding might be implemented in brains. So in that sense, this episode builds on the last episode with Rajesh Rao, where we discussed Raj's "active predictive coding" account of predictive coding.  As a super brief refresher, predictive coding is the proposal that the brain is constantly predicting what's about the happen, then stuff happens, and the brain uses the mismatch between its predictions and the actual stuff that's happening, to learn how to make better predictions moving forward. I refer you to the previous episode for more details. So Eli's account, along with his co-authors of course, which he calls "divide-and-conquer" predictive coding, uses a probabilistic approach in an attempt to account for how brains might implement predictive coding, and you'll learn more about that in our discussion. But we also talk quite a bit about the difference between practicing theoretical and experimental neuroscience, and Eli's experience moving into the experimental side from the theoretical side. Eli's website. Bastos lab. Twitter: @EliSennesh Related papers Divide-and-Conquer Predictive Coding: a Structured Bayesian Inference Algorithm. Related episode: BI 201 Rajesh Rao: Active Predictive Coding. Read the transcript. 0:00 - Intro 3:59 - Eli's worldview 17:56 - NeuroAI is hard 24:38 - Prediction errors vs surprise 55:16 - Divide and conquer 1:13:24 - Challenges 1:18:44 - How to build AI 1:25:56 - Affect 1:31:55 - Abolish the value function