3 ms·
A new way to capture the brain’s electrical symphony
- Udik 8y agoI'm tempted to attach electrodes to this very article in the hope of extracting some information from the noise. Someone should write a generator of articles like this: "One day, in <random_year>, <intro_character> was [swimming in the Caribbeans|strolling in the streets of Manhattan|hunting bears in northern Alaska|having a tooth removed|relaxing in an Amsterdam coffeeshop] when [received an unexpected phone call| noticed something relevant to her research|experienced a vision of the Truth]". <intro_character> had been working for [months|years|decades] on [visualising neurons activity|teaching salmons to count|developing fluorescent cabbages|cloning ancient etruscans]. Now, there was some hope... Since <other_random_year> scientists had been studying the issue, but progress was slow, because [only a few researchers in the field| salmons brain is very small| Italian bioethical laws]. In the meantime, [5000 km away| on the other side of the globe| in the opposite building| in Poughkeepsie] <another_random_character> had been... Etc.
- codeulike 8y agoyeah I really dislike this style, and you see it everywhere. For some reason this sort of pop science article always needs to start with a person doing something somewhere picturesque
- posterboy 8y agoJust today I remembered the well known fact that story telling facilitates memorization. The other day I wondered whether story telling was the highest form of art, prompted by HN comments on the reception of art. Later I wondered how much the sequential nature of histories facilitated the development of language, and how the need to express parallel developments using a sequential medium created syntax, recursion and dialogue. Here, the author isn't in the place of the protagonist, neither is the reader. But a story needs a hero. Especially in topics such as this it helps to remind that these could be familiar people. Naturally, in science the heroic result should be most important. In that regard this is click bait. It paints a stark contrast. It does not present a new way, just another stepping stone to high fidelity measurements. It's way over the top for entertainment purposes. The style doesn't prohibit skim reading though. If jumping to the highly abstract abstract would be too terse ... maybe the story you are trying to compose by reading nothing in particular is highly parallel, but lacking interaction.
- aperrien 8y agoIs it possible to use the information from the florescent flashes to build a truth table for individual neurons over time?
- hprotagonist 8y agonot really. Neurons fire in the absense of any stimulus at some base noise floor rate, so there’s always a little bit of uncertainty. They don’t really act like logic units, close up.
- Erlich_Bachman 8y agoWhy would this be an argument against getting data of an individual neuron? We would obviously just have some filtering applied to it to attempt to remove the noise, in the simplest case even just a noise gate adjusted to that default rate. It would still provide information from individual neurons.
- hprotagonist 8y agoyou can absolutely get data from an individual neuron. What data you get is not a truth table.