Structural Plasticity

• Brains don't just pop into existence. They grow over time from the initial cell in the embryo.
• It's far from clear how this process proceeds.
• However, it can be modelled by the addition of new neurons and new synapses.
• A fair bit of modelling work has been done with synaptic pruning, and neural death. It's not clear how biologically accurate this is.
• Moreover, simulations tend to work for short amounts of simulated time (hours at most).
• The actual growth of connections and neurons takes at least a day.
• Only when the simulation runs that long does this become useful as a cognitive biological model.
• However, simulations for other tasks (e.g. machine learning) can benefit from changing the topology.