Cognitive AI

including brain science

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    AI Improves with Cognitive Science Pt 2

    ByJohn Ball

    How our brain is put together has been known for some time, but how the brain works remains the final frontier in science. Patom theory changes that. Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash Today’s article continues with the analysis of how our brain works. It continues the last article showing what our brain does. Its purpose is to persuade you that the cognitive science behind Patom theory (PT) is the best and only brain model yet. It also explains PT to understand a model of human language in an upcoming article. How brains work There are three sections in this article to make the case: 3.   Pattern-Atoms (The Patom Brain Model) Given what we see happens to our brain from damage and…

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    AI Improves with Better Brain Science

    ByJohn Ball

    Our brain represents the final frontier in science. Is it a computer, or something else? (Hint: it’s not a computer) Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash Today’s article overviews how our brain works. Its purpose is to persuade you that the cognitive science behind Patom theory (PT) is the best and only brain model yet. It also explains PT to understand a model of human language in an upcoming article. A thought experiment today illustrates how our brain works as input to the science of PT. If I say: “Your mother’s face” many of you will have a good idea of what her face looks like. You can choose anyone’s face to do this experiment, and you can choose any modality, too, like hearing, touch,…

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    How To Learn Any Language in Six Months

    ByChris Lonsdale

    How to Learn Any Language in Six Months – Transcript. Welcome to the Transcript page for How to Learn Any Language in Six Months. Content reproduced here with permission. Read on!  Or scroll to the bottom for the pdf download link. Have you ever held a question in mind for so long that it becomes part of how you think? Maybe even part of who you are as a person? Well I’ve had a question in my mind for many, many years and that is: how can you speed up learning? Now, this is an interesting question because if you speed up learning you can spend less time at school. And if you learn really fast, you probably wouldn’t have to go to school at…

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    What is a Language Parent?

    ByChris Lonsdale

    If you’re scratching your head, wondering what on earth a language parent is, don’t worry.  You’re not alone! A language parent is someone, or a role that someone plays, that is ESSENTIAL to how you learn any language, especially if it is very different to the language that you already know like Mandarin Chinese, or Cantonese, or Japanese. A language parent is NOT a teacher. The role of a language parent is to interact with you in a normal relationship rather than to be your teacher.  What does this mean?  A language parent talks with you about the normal things that he or she is interested in, and the things that you are interested in.  The language parent spends time with you because he or she likes you and enjoys…

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    How Long Does it Take to Learn Mandarin?  

    ByChris Lonsdale

    If you’re wondering how long it would take to learn Mandarin Chinese, the answer of course has to be: “it depends”.  If you make a decision to use your brain and your time in the correct way, and put in adequate time, then you could be communicating competently at a basic level within a few months.  You Can Learn To Speak Mandarin in Six Months For me personally, from a completely zero base (i.e. complete beginner) I was very competent at Mandarin speaking within six months and reading and writing within a year.  In my case I was able to do this because I moved to Beijing and although I was doing classes at the Beijing Institute of Foreign Languages (as it was called at the time), I actually…

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    A Thought Experiment to Improve AI

    ByJohn Ball

    Why aren’t artificial neural network systems replacing people? In AI, machines should replicate what we do, not perform statistical calculations. What can we do with a thought experiment to improve our AI? Photo by Kazi Mizan on Unsplash Progress in AI and AGI has had slow enterprise adoption because today’s generative AI don’t work as predicted by big tech CEOs. We’re told fantasy stories about how all of science will soon be solved by machines that gather the statistics from existing scientific papers. But if the scientific papers included the answers to future science, what benefit do we get from AI, since the science is already written? AI today is obviously missing the key piece – how the world works in all its multisensory glory…

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    Upcoming Book: Modern Cognitive AI

    ByJohn Ball

    How to build AI that’s like us and its benefit to society! Language, like our ability to navigate the world with our senses and muscles, comes from our brain. AGI needs better ‘cognitive AI.’ We choose our words carefully, because amazing precision is what our brain does. Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash I’m writing a new book explaining how AGI works with cognitive AI. I will publish the sections for comment before the final book is compiled. You’ll be able to follow in LinkedIn, Speech Genie, Substack and Medium for the series. I invite you to debate and correct me where you disagree with the model. I want to shine the torch on much-needed science, so let’s do some science! My goal is to…

  • How to Learn Mandarin Chinese Online

    ByChris Lonsdale

    If you want to learn Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language — what’s known in Chinese as duìwài Hànyǔ jiàoxué (对外汉语教学）— there has never been more opportunity than right now. Online tools, apps, courses, and communities have made it possible to begin learning from anywhere in the world. But opportunity doesn’t automatically mean effectiveness. And for Mandarin specifically, there are challenges that most online platforms handle poorly. As someone who learned Mandarin in six months and has spent over forty years refining the methodology behind rapid language acquisition, I want to be honest about both the challenges and the solutions. The Unique Challenges of Learning Mandarin Online Tonal Complexity Mandarin has four tones (plus a neutral tone), and word with the same pronunciation will have…

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    5 Principles of Accelerated Language Acquisition

    ByChris Lonsdale

    Most language courses start with a textbook, a vocabulary list, and a grammar table. They’re built around what’s easy to teach, not around how the brain actually learns. After more than forty years of working at the intersection of psychology, linguistics, and learning design — and after learning Mandarin Chinese myself in six months — I’ve identified five principles that underlie rapid language acquisition. These aren’t tips or tricks. They’re the foundations. Get these right, and everything else accelerates. Get them wrong, and no amount of study hours will save you. I laid these out in my TEDx talk, “How to Learn Any Language in 6 Months.” Here, I’ll go deeper into each one, and explain why they matter whether you’re learning Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish,…

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    What’s missing from AI – Part 1

    ByJohn Ball

    Background In the 1930s, the American focus on behaviourism turned the linguistics world from the science of signs (semiotics) to one aligned with one of the great scientists in history, Pāṇini, who lived perhaps as far back as the 7th century BC. The use of Pāṇini’s linguistic model by Leonard Bloomfield led to linguistics excluding meaning, such as in the influential Chomsky monograph, Syntactic Structures, published in 1957. My proposed move back to semiotics is a side effect of the highly influential work of Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., whose development of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) over the past 40+ years creates a clear distinction between the words and phrases in a language (morpho-syntax) and their meaning in context (contextual meaning). RRG views the world’s diverse languages with a…