Some ramblings on neurosciences

         Today I was reading an article on some experiment conducted on brain. The objective was to explain why we feel confused at times of sudden refresh like say, when you just woke up after sleeping at a new place, you get confused as to where you are and take some time to understand the situation. They claim that the brain actually has no confusion. From some experiments they carried out on rats, they say that the brain actually was taking time to retrieve memory and swaps between two memory locations, one of your regular sleeping place and other of the new place. They say that the swapping of the two memories happens so fast(125ms per memory) that you take time to process. The main problem I have with this kind of articles is how can they distinguish between "you" and "brain"? Isn't consciousness a product/alias of brain? Are the two not same? If you distinguish 'brain' and 'you' then who are 'you' if no the brain?
 One more thing I don't like about such articles is the comparison to our digital logic. The article says, our brain needs to be as speed as a 100 core processor to distinguish between the swapping of two memories whatever that means! I feel the area of neurosciences is not appreciated by everyone mainly because they feel our brain is just a much better computer than the fastest supercomputer we have. But how can we compare boolean/digital logic with the complexity of brain? Most people say its similar because of the 'all or none'(fire-nofire' behavior of neurons.But this doesn't mean brain works in digital domain! For instance, we remember somethings 'vaguely'. A computer can never remember things vaguely.Sometimes I feel maybe, quantum theory has something to explain our thinking process. If I am not wrong, according to quantum theory, a particle can be in one place with some probability which means, it can be there or not there i.e. it is vaguely there(??). So maybe the probability of the memory being present is low when you say I remember vaguely and it is high when you have all details of the memory. I am just blindly comparing, of course but get the idea.
     I also feel the big companies in Semiconductor and Software industries(as they have some AI fundaes, though I don't think their idea of AI is even remotely connected to real intelligence) should form a group with academia and other neuroscience institutes like Riken institute and start a project to understand the brain like the Human Genome Project. That might at least give one breakthrough in this area.

Inside Intel

                        For a change, I thought I could share my personal life on this blog. As most of you (if there actually are any) know, I recently transformed (had to) from a lazy insti dude to a working engineer, corporate style! Luckily for me I got into a company I have enormous respect for, though I now understand that I don't know much about the company or the industry for that matter. I joined Intel India on august 1st with a very enviable 3-day grand orientation ceremony with 160 lucky others at Leela Palace, Bangalore.

              I have learnt a lot of things about the workings of semi-conductor industry in this one month though not much has been achieved in the work I would be doing. One thing I liked about Intel was the importance given to Ethics and Values though I have my own doubts that this might be because I am a new recruit. All the senior folks seem to be dedicated enough and more importantly were quite approachable. They took a lot of pain to arrange a number of training sessions for us to have a smooth integration into the company. The Open-door policy in which you can schedule appointment with anyone in the company looked like a great idea though I guess it was not Intel's brainchild.

        I also realized that Intel is not an Almighty in semi-conductor industry. For example, AMD makes better client CPUs than Intel. Also, Intel too uses its brand name by over-pricing its products. I didn't think Intel would do it given their values though I am not saying it is un-ethical. Also I see that Intel is a traditional company in its own way, entering new arenas like mobile industry and Graphics almost a bit too late.

  
     I also got to know about Intel history a lot though any of this is available to everyone. I never knew about Andy Grove, the man who turned Intel fortunes and who is considered the most influential man in semi-conductor industry. His character was inspiring and interesting to know about.
    One thing I realized is, though I am a Master of Engg in VLSI from IITM, I knew very little of the industry and its workings. There seems to be a huge gap between industry and college education in Semiconductor industry. We don't even know the flow process properly or half the technical terms used here. I guess this is the case with any other engineering stream in India(This should be the topic for a different post).
    Finally, my first month at Intel is not at all complete without mentioning Foosball! I saw the game on Friends but never thought it to be so awesome! My first two weeks were spent on playing Foosball while attending training sessions in between till the table got damaged.

   Overall, the transition was not as painful as I thought it would be, but I miss IIT-M and my friends a lot. I miss the campus and the lazy life-style there. I miss jogging in the green campus and watching hundreds of  movies and sit-coms. But I think I am utilizing my time a little better now than in campus as I am learning a lot of new things at a much better rate.

  I would like to end with a couple of quotes by two CEOs of Intel:
    " Our business model is one of very high risk. We dig a very big hole in the ground, spend three billion dollars to build a factory in it, which takes three years, to produce technology we haven't invented yet, to run products we have designed yet, for markets which don't yet exist.
      We do that two or three times a year.
       Everything we do has an inherent belief in technology. " - Paul Otellini, present CEO of Intel.
 
    " What we start off with, is sand. Rest all is value added by people." - Andy Grove.