Scientists suggest that the brain works best with 7 senses, not just 5

“Our conclusion is, of course, very speculative in the application of human senses, although you never know: it could happen that people of the future would develop a sense of radiation or magnetic field. But in any case, our discoveries can be of practical importance for the robotics and theory of artificial intelligence,” said the co-author of the Nikola AI study. “It seems that when every concept detained in memory is characterized in terms of seven features – unlike, say, five or eight – the number of different objects held in memory is maximal.”

In accordance with the well -established approach, which was created at the beginning of the 20th century, the team modeled the basic construction blocks of memory: “Egrama” memory. The engram can be viewed as a rare neuron ensemble in multiple regions in the bursting brain. The conceptual content of engrams is the ideal abstract object characterized with regard to multiple features. In the context of human memory, the features correspond to sensory entrances, so that the term banana would coincide with a visual image, aroma, banana taste and so on. This results in a five -dimensional object that exists and develops in a five -dimensional space inhabited by all other concepts retained in the memory.

The evolution of the egram refers to that concepts become more focused or blurred over time, depending on how often the engrams activate the stimulus that acts from the outside world through the senses, which triggers the memory of the appropriate object. This model of learning and oblivion as a result of interaction with the environment.

“We have shown mathematically that engrams in the conceptual space develop according to the stable state, which means that after a passing period, the” mature “distribution of Engrama appears, which then persists on time,” said Brilganov. “As we consider the ultimate capacity of the conceptual space of a certain number of dimensions, we are a bit surprising that the number of different engrams stored in memory in stable states is the largest for the concept space of seven dimensions. Hence the seven senses claim.”

In other words, some objects that exist there in the world are described by the final number of features that correspond to the dimensions of a conceptual space. Suppose we want to maximize the capacity of the conceptual space expressed as the number of different concepts associated with these objects. The higher the capacity of the conceptual space, the deeper the whole understanding of the world is. It turns out that the maximum is achieved when the dimension of the conceptual space is seven. From this researchers conclude that seven are the optimal number of senses.

According to researchers, this number does not depend on the details of the model – the properties of the conceptual space and the stimuli that provide impressions in sensitivity. Number seven seems to be a robust and persistent feature of memory engrams as such. One warning is that more grams of different sizes of existing ones are considered to be similar concepts and therefore treated as one when calculating memory capacity.

The memory of humans and other living beings is a mysterious phenomenon related to the property of consciousness, among other things. The progress of the theoretical models of memory will be crucial to gaining new insights into the human mind and recreation of human memory in AI agents.