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Panayiota Poirazi runs the Poirazi Lab at the FORTH Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology, and Yiota loves dendrites, those branching tree-like structures sticking out of all your neurons, and she thinks you should love dendrites, too, whether you study biological or artificial intelligence. In neuroscience, the old story was that dendrites just reach out and collect incoming signals for the all-important neuron cell body to process. Yiota, and people Like Matthew Larkum, with whom I chatted in episode 138, are continuing to demonstrate that dendrites are themselves computationally complex and powerful, doing many varieties of important signal transformation before signals reach the cell body. For example, in 2003, Yiota showed that because of dendrites, a single neuron can act as a two-layer artificial neural network, and since then others have shown single neurons can act as deeper and deeper multi-layer networks. In Yiota's opinion, an even more important function of dendrites is increased computing efficiency, something evolution favors and something artificial networks need to favor as well moving forward.
0:00 - Intro
3:04 - Yiota's background
6:40 - Artificial networks and dendrites
9:24 - Dendrites special sauce?
14:50 - Where are we in understanding dendrite function?
20:29 - Algorithms, plasticity, and brains
29:00 - Functional unit of the brain
42:43 - Engrams
51:03 - Dendrites and nonlinearity
54:51 - Spiking neural networks
56:02 - Best level of biological detail
57:52 - Dendrify
1:05:41 - Experimental work
1:10:58 - Dendrites across species and development
1:16:50 - Career reflection
1:17:57 - Evolution of Yiota's thinking
