How to Build a Brain

The large-scale model of the brain, Spaun, has undergone significant development. Inthis talk, I describe how it has more than doubled in size, to 6.3 million neurons, 20 billionconnections, and significantly increased in functionality. New functions include the ability toadapt online to changes in motor dynamics, classification of over 1000 categories of images, andperhaps most importantly the ability to perform simple “mental gymnastics”. In this talk Idescribe the semantic pointer architecture (SPA) that is used to construct the model,demonstrate Spaun’s abilities, and discuss future plans for improving on what is currently theworld’s largest functional brain model. I would like there to be efficient large-scale computational platforms for models like Spaun, that run in real time.