[robwwilliams]

First, this work needs work. The English needs to be improved before I would recommend wading into the contents deeply. Second this assertion or citation is wrong:

>for biological neurons e.g. "it is not uncommon for axonal propagation of action potentials to happen in both directions" - suggesting they are optimized to continuously operate in multidirectional way.

What is true is that dendritic spikes can propagate bidirectionally in some neurons (but can also fade or be blocked).

What we often forget is that spikes are a kludge to enable faster INTRAcellular communication (not needed in retinal processing).

The classic action potential connects the axon hillock (the spike initiation zone) to a variable subset of responsive presynaptic sites that may or may not release neurotransmitters that may or may not modulate behaviors of neighboring processes and cells.

[jarekd]

Sure biological NN are much more complicated, but basically action propagation can travel in both directions, and evolution should optimize for that.

In contrast, current ANNs are focused on unidirectional propagation, and are much worse at training from single samples - to reach abilities of biological, maybe it is worth to start thinking about multidirectional?

Neurons containing joint distribution model can do propagate conditional distributions in various direction, and it is not that difficult to represent - maybe something like that could be hidden in biological (?)