"Breathing" quantum material helps mimic aspects of human thought

One of the key tricks the human brain uses to learn new material is to selectively forget unimportant information that it had retained previously. Electrical and computer engineers at Purdue University in Indiana now claim they have developed a system that uses a novel material to mimic this phenomenon, creating an effect they term "organismic learning".

"The human brain is capable of continuous lifelong learning," said research leader Professor Kaushik Roy, "and it does this partially by forgetting some information that is not critical. I learn slowly, but I keep forgetting other things along the way, so there is a graceful degradation in my accuracy of detecting things that are old. What we are trying to do is mimic that behaviour of the brain to a certain extent, to create computers that not only learn new information but that also learn what to forget."

Working with engineers from MIT, Rutgers University, and Brookhaven and Argonne National Laboratories, Roy's team built devices they call "organismoids” using the ceramic material samarium nickelate. "These devices possess certain characteristics of living beings and enable us to advance new learning algorithms that mimic some aspects of the human brain," Roy said. "The results have far reaching implications for the fields of quantum materials as well as brain-inspired computing."