Memory and forgetting are tools (the second involuntary) of our brain, which serve to store and retrieve information, as well as to stop remembering said information. For its proper functioning, the brain needs both functions.
What if we could get machines to act the same way? In an attempt to give machines this genius flexibility of the human brain (and create the ultimate learning machines), a team of scientists from the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, in collaboration with Brookhaven National Laboratory and Three universities have discovered for the first time that a material exists in nature with the ability to forget in the same way that our brain does.
This material would act in a similar way to the mechanisms that biology uses to retain and process information. To do this, they conducted an experiment that combined supercomputer simulation and X-ray characterization of a material that is gradually “forgotten”, perovskite .
“The brain has a limited capacity, and it can only function efficiently because it is capable of forgetting. It is difficult to create a non-living material that shows a pattern that resembles a type of forgetting , but the specific material we work with can mimic that. kind of behavior “, clarifies Subramanian Sankaranarayanan, leader of the work.
The material, called quantum perovskite, offers us a simpler non-biological model of what the function of “forgetting” would represent at the electronic level. Perovskite, discovered in 1839 at the foot of the Ural Mountains by the Berlin geologist Gustav Rose, shows an adaptive response when protons are repeatedly inserted and removed, which resembles this human brain mechanism to which we refer.
Thus, “when scientists add or remove a proton from the perovskite lattice, the atomic structure of the material expands or contracts dramatically to adapt to a process called ‘lattice respiration, ‘” says study co-author Badri Narayanan.
A fascinating event on a quantum level
Experts explain that as this process is repeated, the material modifies its properties to adapt to its unusual environment, until eventually it seems to “forget” that things were ever different . It is the first known mechanism outside of a biological brain that is capable of mimicking neurological forgetfulness.
Depending on the response of the material when adding or removing protons, we could program it like a computer, to control, for example, whether the perovskite would allow a current or not. Thanks to this discovery, AIs will be able to be much more advanced and possess this ‘neurological’ complexity and flexibility that characterizes the human brain but which is so difficult for us to adapt to the unnatural environment.
How will this material work in a biological brain? It is another of the questions that arise after the interesting finding.
Reference: Habituation based synaptic plasticity and organismic learning in a quantum perovskite. Nature Communications 8, Article number: 240 (2017). doi: 10.1038 / s41467-017-00248-6
