Brain & artificial inteligence

The brain is capable of constantly learning new skills, such as playing instruments, or performing surgery. This extraordinary feat reflects the capacity of our brains to reorganize their structure and circuits in response to new demands or changes in the environment. Breaking the code to understand how brain plasticity works can help us address the vulnerability of our brains to aging, damage, and neurodegeneration.

This talk will introduce the ways in which two or more languages co-habit within a single mind, how processing allows languages to compete and co-operate, and the much-debated effects of bilingualism on mind and brain. We will also examine some of the complexities that need to be unpicked in order to understand relationships between aging, cognitive health and language.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) does many things very well. In fact, AI is often better and faster than we (humans) are. However, AI can also mess up real good and we (humans) are specialists at finding very creative ways to make things worse. I have some human-AI collaboration anecdotes which might shed light on what our future might look like.

Why are computers needed to understand life? Challenging the “one gene - one characteristic” explanation in biology.