Suddenly… Christ no! A sound and your brain kicks in: identify a snapping sound just behind the head, possibly fingers snapping together. It analyzes practically everything on the fly, without having to set bits, ones, zeros or anything like that. I eat? this is what you read Miguel Sanchez-ValpuestaA 33-year-old Hispanic man working at the Korea Brain Research Institute (KBRI) with the goal of applying brain processes towards improvement in artificial intelligence architecture (AI) and making it faster, more efficient, and more sustainable is ‘copying as much as possible of the innovation hidden inside the human head.
“The goal is not to copy nature as it is, but to learn from something that is already beautiful and try to develop new things. We know very little about how our brains work in general and even how we think, but it’s fascinating. With the vibration of the two membranes in our ears, we can find out where something we cannot see or touch is in three dimensions. instantly The young man from Barcelona told EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA from Daegu, South Korea, where he has worked for two years, in our heads and these are the result of much more advanced processing than existing computers.
For those like him who want to explore the secrets of the brain, the challenge is to understand exactly how procedures developed over millions of years of evolution are articulated and can be applied to improve current technology.
He explains that a variety of AI models will emerge over the next few years, from those who rely on a traditional computing system to those who aspire to replicate the model through so-called neuromorphic computation.
Miguel, one of the international experts at the Hermes Institute and a master’s degree in biomedicine from the University of Barcelona, spent six years doing his doctorate in Japan to study the mechanisms and neural circuits of language learning. From there it jumped to Korea, where this study of the way auditory circuits interact with the motor brain could develop an artificial intelligence revealed in 2022 as one of the technological advances that will mark the next decade.
“As we see with the brain, the image it presents to us is not what our eyes see, so we listen with the brain. The brain ‘invents’ and ‘fills in’ so to speak, most of what we perceive. It is based on guesswork and previous experience and maintains a representation of the outside world that is constantly selectively ‘updated’ by sensory input. Therefore, there are phantom sound pathologies that are not perceived by the ear, but are in our head. This type of knowledge allows us to understand how sound travels through our neurons and therefore to know a little more about how that processing happens,” the expert explains, casting light on why perception is a brain-driven construction rather than a simple echo of reality.
However, the human brain is not limited to ‘filling’, it has an extraordinary adaptability when it comes to sound. For example, if we take a sound at 60 decibels instead of 30, it sounds a little louder in our head, but in reality it has to produce a sound 1000 times stronger. “The same thing happens in our own voice or when we exercise. You don’t hear the sounds you produce very loudly because your brain drowns them out, it’s an involuntary survival mechanism,” he notes.
For example, if these processes can be synthesized, the ability of autonomous vehicles to adapt to new situations and unexpected stimuli could be improved. This is just one instance because the field has already evolved, but previously a car could be trained to recognize a child, an adult, or a dog and not react quickly enough. What if a boar or a scooter appeared? AI must be capable of processing this new element in real time, without waiting for traditional steps.
“Until now, AI has worked with classifiers, so to speak. It gives more or less standard answers for A, B or C, and that’s what we thought was in the brain, but that’s not true, most things aren’t true. Don’t trust the stimulus and the response. About 80% of brain activity, for example, consists in maintaining an internal representation of what is going on around us,” the expert notes.
AI SUSTAINABILITY IS IN THE BRAIN
But even if a way were found to emulate all this via a conventional computer, it would be impractical. “Even supercomputers do step-by-step algorithmic operations that slow down processes and waste enormous energy. quantum computers, on the other hand, don’t perform those exact algorithmic operations, and neither do our brains today, though they face their own limits,” the engineer explains.
In this view, computing is still done “bit by bit,” meaning that even when neural circuits are simulated, they are treated as software on a CPU following rules that are unrelated to actual brain operation. This is where neuromorphic computing steps in, aiming to mirror the organization of human thought in both hardware and processes.
Currently, only a handful of hubs in Asia are producing the most advanced chips in this field, and the development race involves the United States, Europe, and parts of Asia, with strong implications for the global tech landscape.
It is estimated that about 3% of the world’s electricity is consumed by data centers today and that share could rise to 13% by 2030. Optimizing computational models, in the same way the brain has evolved over millions of years, could make artificial intelligence far more energy-efficient and sustainable for everyday use in North America and beyond.