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gerbrand / spreadingactivation.adoc
Last active April 4, 2022 10:11 — forked from jexp/graph_gist_template.adoc
Demonstration spreading activation in Neo4j

Spreading activation in Neo4j

Introduction

How does the human brain work? How do thoughts pop up in our conscience? Just thinking about the question is confusion enough. Maybe our brain works as a semantic network as explained by Carole Yue at Kahn Academy.
Try for yourself: think of a bird? You probably think a sparrow, duck. Think of an extinct animal? Now you might think of the dodo, mammoth or dinosaur. Animal living on the south pole: a penguin? Or polar bear?

Facts, ideas, memories in our brain are interconnected. They’re not structured into tables like in relational databases or hierarchical in directories on a harddrive: if I’d ask you to name all the birds you know, you won’t give me a long list immediately. A better model of human m