Megana Boddam

Computational Neuroscience Seminar

Professor Fairhall
Week 8 Assignment (Thanksgiving)
Popularized Article:
Salk Institute for Biological Studies. "Brain-based algorithms make for better
networks: How the brain prunes back synapses in development." ScienceDaily.
ScienceDaily, 16 July 2015.
<www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150716141937.htm>.
Original Research Paper:
Navlakha S, Barth AL, Bar-Joseph Z (2015) Decreasing-Rate Pruning Optimizes the
Construction of Efficient and Robust Distributed Networks. PLOS Computational
Biology 11(7): e1004347. doi: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004347
Discussion of above article.
This is an appropriately popular website/magazine, and I found that
everything it said was mostly consistent with the research paper. There werent
many overgeneralizations or wild speculations on what this may mean for the future
of mankind. I think one of the reasons this is so is because the research paper itself
was written very clearly and didnt hesitate to explain its short comings.
The article explains how previously engineers/ computer scientists use
networks that start out small and then build up, which makes perfect sense.
Normally, in embarking any endeavor, humans start with small steps and then build

up. However, this research reveals that it may be better to just have lots of
networks first, then reduce them as you start to realize which ones help out the
most in cognitive function, memory formation, sensory information processing, etc.
This is what the brain (the mammalian brain at least, as the study was performed
on Mouses somatosensory cortexes) does: it prunes networks between neurons. I
thought that the use of the word prune is significant in the article because it is one
of the biggest/ most prevalent metaphor I noticed. The author of the article must
have picked up the metaphor from the research paper because when I tried to find
how many times the research paper used the verb prune using ctrl + f, I got
approximately 140 hits. I think the word prune makes the reader think of gardens
and tending to them. In this literature, the brain is metaphorically linked to a
garden, which I think is a little problematic. A garden generally cant maintain/prune
itself; a gardener has to tend to it. This metaphor would imply that there is
something which is metaphorically pruning the brain like someone prunes a garden.
However, the researchers are trying to explain that the brain does this pruning
itself. The brain itself determines the most heavily used neural networks and
eliminates the rest. So, the metaphor use and big argument of this literature clash
pretty significantly.
Some parts of the research paper were not mentioned in the popularized
article of the paper. I think the presence of these parts was intermediately
important for the general public to better understand the knowledge this paper
presented. The presence of pruning was established long before this experiment
was performed. However, as someone who didnt know this, as I read the article, I
got this distinct sense that the concept of pruning was the newly developed
knowledge. However, in reality, the new knowledge is the application of pruning to

computational mathematical models. Moreover, the computational models didnt

consider important neural functions such as connection weights, coincident
activation of multiple neurons, spike-timing dependent plasticity, etc. The quality of
the article would have been improved and it would have more accurately reflected
the research if these small changes were made.