Engineering the mind: a system engineering approach to modelling the brain
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1
Member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, Independent Researcher, United Kingdom
System engineering techniques, in particular those used for software engineering, have been developing over a number of years to support the design of highly complex Man-made systems. System engineers build a top down hierarchical design of a system that abstracts complexity, allowing engineers working on individual parts of the system to have a common view of how their own elements interact with others. To do this the system is decomposed into subsystems, and the definition of the interfaces between each subsystem is rigorously maintained. This paper proposes the use of the same techniques to reverse engineering a model of the brain. It uses a system engineering approach to develop a theory of the high level functional (as opposed to physical) architecture of the brain, and from this decomposes the system in to a number of specialised subsystems with defined interfaces. Reverse engineering the mind has the added complication that not only is the architecture unknown, but so is the underlying technology used to build the architecture. An expandable framework for these underlying technologies has therefore been defined. This includes a generic model of a spiking neuron, and its specialisations. Neurons can be connected together in networks and the arrangement of the neurons in these networks has also been included in the framework. These have been called design patterns, a term which is used in software engineering to denote a general reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem. As part of the research a first iteration of the model that uses the framework has been developed in C#. This has already provided an interesting insight into the way thoughts could be orchestrated, and may help to explain some of the basic characteristics of the mind.
Keywords:
brain architecture,
neural networks,
system engineering,
brain model,
computational modeling
Conference:
Neuroinformatics 2013, Stockholm, Sweden, 27 Aug - 29 Aug, 2013.
Presentation Type:
Poster
Topic:
Computational neuroscience
Citation:
Haigh
R
(2013). Engineering the mind: a system engineering approach to modelling the brain.
Front. Neuroinform.
Conference Abstract:
Neuroinformatics 2013.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fninf.2013.09.00001
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Received:
05 Jul 2013;
Published Online:
11 Jul 2013.
*
Correspondence:
Mr. Rob Haigh, Member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, Independent Researcher, London, United Kingdom, rob@haighfamily.me.uk