My mother, knowing I might have trouble sleeping, and knowing the power of a metaphor, told me to use this time to watch my scientific ideas grow, and see if I could figure out if they were the one-leaf or two-leaf types of sprout. Monocot or dicot? Yes, she said. She’s remembering a high-school project where I covered our kitchen in bags of damp paper towels and was fascinated by the growing seedlings and the patterns that I saw.
In forty five minutes, I have a video meeting with Dmitriy and Ching. We are trying to figure out how the brain forms ‘one-shot’ memories. Ching is simulating some possible neural network architectures. Standard network architectures can learn one memory well, but blur the memory content with each new memory. We think we can get around that by coupling two architectures. Currently, Ching is doing something we’re calling ‘tangling’, letting some neurons participate in both. I think what you’re telling me is that this idea is a dicot if we have to choose, but maybe it’s actually a hybrid, or something else entirely, and I should expect its next leaves to look strikingly different.