Initiative 1. Processing Bottlenecks
Led by CELEST Board member George Alvarez
Our brains have many capacity limitations: we cannot pay attention to multiple conversations at once; we cannot pay attention to all of the cars on the road simultaneously; we cannot remember a 12-digit telephone number; and so on. We can think of these capacity limitations as bottlenecks, and assume that bottlenecks constrain each learning function, including planning, exploring, communicating, and remembering. By better understanding how the brain copes with these bottlenecks, basic research can inform technological innovation that deals with bottlenecks such as data transfer across computer processors or between computer cores and memory stores. We propose the following meta-question related to processing bottlenecks that drives a portion of our research projects:
How does the brain learn to cope with processing limitations that are imposed simultaneously at two or more brain regions that must dynamically communicate with one another?