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Comment by danharaj | Hacker News Reader

Ooh, I read about this in a neuroscience text book I've been nibbling at for a few months now. Really cool to see a Nobel prize for something I've just recently studied.

Isn't it cool how gene systems are hybrid digital/analog computers?

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>Isn't it cool how gene systems are hybrid digital/analog >computers?

I think it's more correct to say that computation is an emergent property of living systems, but is by no means the only thing they are capable of.

This is a perspective I wish was echoed in University halls.

Very cool indeed! I'm lately reading a lot about temporal system design and got fascinated with clocks and our notion of time. Interesting how, if I understand it correctly from this article, our own "clock speed" is the rate of degradation of the PEP protein. Also interesting that people who spent a long time in isolation (eg. in cave experiments) had their internal clock drift considerably from our normal 24 hour cycle, which suggests that the environment does affect it.

I would not call gene systems computers. They may be programmable, but they do not generally do computation (that's not to say you can't force a gene systems to do very crude computation).

Which book?

Would you recommend it?

Principles of Neural Science 5th ed. By Kandel et al. It was recommended to me here on HN.

The thing is a serious tome. When I want to work through a chapter I have to make time every day for a week and keep notes. In any case it has a lot of technical detail which is specifically what I was looking for.

Hmm, 1981. Neuroscience has evolved considerably over the last 35 years. Is it still worth reading it now, over more modern texts?

Most recent edition was published in 2012. It's extensively updated between editions, so very much worth reading if you are seriously interested in neuroscience.

Thank you, I will give it a look.

If you have some prior knowledge of neuroscience you can give it a cursory read in a day or so.

You probably do yourself a greater favor reading it and overwriting fragments of knowledge later, than you would by not reading the whole textbook at all.

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