M2M Updates, By Section 

 

Almost all of the corrections appear in the paperback edition, March 2008.

 

Front Matter

p.xi,  line 2: ", said, " ->  "said, "
p. xii, line -5: "principle concern" -> "principal concern"

Acknowledgements  Mary -> Margy Avery, add Colleen Lanick

Section 1. Embodied Information Processing

p.5,  line -5, "appearing to closer"  ->  "appearing closer"

Section 2. How the Brain Computes

p. 38, line -10; add two paragraphs:

 

  Here is an additional important fact about neural computation and learning. Current evidence suggests there is no erasing in the adult brain. As we will see in Chapter 6, long term memory of facts, skills, or situations is captured by structural changes in the connections between neurons. There is no process for selectively reversing these changes. This is why it is so hard to alter your behavior patterns or to change the beliefs of others. The only known neural mechanisms for changing behavior involve inhibiting a pathway or bypassing it with a more active alternative.

  This does not imply that repressed memories are always accurate. My memory of last week is spotty and research has shown that people misremember even important events like their wedding. Some neurons die naturally and trauma or disease can cause massive destruction. But the fact that there is no mechanism for selectively eliminating unwanted neural connections has a fundamental role in our mental life and institutions.

p. 46, pg 4: "...generated in the cell nucleus"

p. 51, pg 2: "... a nucleus, which (carries out) -> (is involved in)  the manufacture of new molecules..."

p52,  Caption for 4.4 should be "Drawing of a receptive channel, shown 
   protruding through a cell wall. On the right,  the channel is open, allowing
   neurotransmitters to enter the cell.

p. 53, line  "whether or not send"

p. 69, color version of Figure 5.2

 

Additional References:

 

Greenspan, R.J. An Introduction to Nervous Systems, Cold Spring Harbor Press, 2007.

  A very well written and informative book on the information processing abilities of simple animals, including

paramecium, which is a single cell. 

 

Spitzer, M. The Mind in the Net. MIT Press, 1999.

  This is an excellent book relating aspects of brain function to a variety of neural net models. It goes well beyond M2M

  on biochemistry and on clinical applications. I should have known about it years ago.

 

Section 3. How the Mind Computes

p.88, There are even stronger timing constraints known for visual tasks. A series of papers from Simon Thorpe and colleagues shows that many visual decisions are so fast that the temporally first spikes must carry the crucial information.

 

p. 90, Caption for Figure 7.2 should be:
 Priming Model. The noun and verb meaning of "rose" compete; semantic activation of flower provides a priming advantage to the noun sense.

p. 94, A paper by Richardson and Matlock, forthcoming in Cognition shows that fictive motion elicits eye movements along trajectories in consistent and predictable ways. 
http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/tmatlock/papers/RichardsonMatlockInPress.pdf

p. 97, Gallese and Lakoff provide a detailed examination of the philosophical notion of concept from the embodied perspective.
Gallese, V., & Lakoff, G. (2005). The Brain's Concepts: The Role of the sensory-motor system in reason and language. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22, 455-479.

p. 112, line 17  "pitch" -> "tone"

p.116, Caption for 9.3 should be " Layered PDP connectionist network. Circles depict nodes and solid arrows are forward connections. The boxes depict training inputs, see text."

p120, line -14  "his point" -> "this point"

Section 4. Learning Concrete Words

p. 134: the section header "Syntactic Cues ..." is misplaced; it belongs before the previous paragraph on p. 133, line 14.

p. 137, line -2 " located in"   -> " identified with"

p. 158, line -1 "if" -> "of"

Section 5. Learning Words for Actions

p176 line -8     double hyphen