I'm also envious of your education too. I learned that stuff via
the Internet mostly. I never quite got the math parts, but
conceptually it made sense to me.
I'm still on my "quest to understand everything" and I keep my
bullshit detectors on at all times - I'm especially critical of
scientific news articles who make grand claims. [IBMs brain on a
chip had me annoyed but even they had to apologize for the one
representative that equated it to the intelligence of a cat. He
*definitely* was exaggerating and got called on it.
But this chip has merit. I'm not sure about the pinched
hysteresis pattern as being "the model" for human memory, but
it's a darn good start just the same.