From: on behalf of Ed Boyden < Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 10:55 AM To: Jeffrey Epstein Subject: Re: Thanks The piano itself isn't quite the analogy to the brain, because it has no memory, independent of the human playing it. After the finger lifts, the strings quiets down. So I am assuming that we need to model the human playing the piano? Suppose, say, we want to understand what emotion is generating the music. If we could measure activity in the brain of the person playing the piano, and could predict what melody or sequence of notes the person would play, based on that activity, then we could infer that the internal brain activity was causing the melody. This inference might be convertible into proof, if we were to stimulate the brain and play back an activity pattern into the brain, seeing how that would alter the melody being played. And if we have a molecular map of the brain, which we could simulate on a computer, we could through biophysical simulation begin to see how the molecular interactions between cells, yield dynamics of the network, which then yield the sequence of finger commands that yield the music. Thus, the finger is the interface between two dynamical systems -- the brain and the piano. Each of those dynamical systems has a physical implementation that can be modeled, if we have three things: -- mechanistic maps (piano: string lengths, material properties, etc.) -- dynamics (piano: the finger movements and temporal scuplting) -- control (piano: we can modulate the human and see how the music changes) Ed On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 6:46 AM, Jeffrey Epstein <[email protected]> wrote: > give me a piano music analogy, / watching the strings, ? after key > inputs,? interesting byt not dispositive of anything meaningful > On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 6:40 AM, Ed Boyden <-> wrote: » I agree we need a top-down! Two thoughts: » -- Yes, developing mapping circuit technology and then applying it » to simple behaviors -- hard wi