Risto Miikkulainen

05/09/2011 - Computer simulations of malfunctioning brains may be the key to understanding schizophrenia and other conditions. A research team including computer scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and a professor of psychiatry at Yale have been testing various theories of how schizophrenic brains misfire as they process information. People with schizophrenia often have trouble repeating different stories, for instance, frequently combining elements of separate stories and inserting themselves into the narrative.

05/06/2011 - In a bid to help understand the way that the human brain malfunctions to cause mental illness scientists have caused a computer system to lose its mind and claim responsibilty for a terrorist bombing. The team at the University of Texas and Yale University, including Professor Risto Miikkulainen and grad student Uli Grasemann, were looking to how the human brain is affected with schizophrenia by simulating a hypothesis that excessive dopamine in the brain can cause “exaggerated salience”, whereby the brain is learning from things it shouldn’t.

05/04/2009 - Uli Grasemann and Risto Miikkulainen are using their neural network system, DISCERN, to model what might be going on inside a schizophrenic brain. DISCERN can understand and produce natural language. Working with Ralph Hoffman, a psychiatrist at Yale, they have also been able to pair their neural network results with a study of human schizophrenics, and the similarities have been striking.