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The brain maps out ideas and memories like spaces
- jcims 5y agoI think it will be interesting to see what develops as we learn more and more about the mechanisms of our brain and how they intersect with the subjective experience of our mind. I feel reasonably certain we’re going to be able to unlock new capabilities that were previously either undiscovered or not reliably available to humans. Things like the ability for some people to essentially be a human calculator, and others to have photographic memories. The possible downside however is that we will likely be able to quantify the capabilities of any particular brain based solely on an assessment of its physical attributes. That seems like a dark place.
- neom 5y agoCouldn't agree more if I tried. The number of hours I've spent thinking about this is ridiculous. Here is a fun rabbit hole: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=minicolumn&sp=EgIYAg%253D%253D https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=minicolumn&sp=E...
- IIAOPSW 5y agoReading this comment is like what back mirror was before it went down hill.
- raspasov 5y agoOr we might discover that brains are not so fundamentally different and most of the differences arise from the environment? It's the centuries old nature vs nurture debate. Perhaps that is the wrong question to ask. I agree both extremes are possible. I don't feel confident betting on either extreme. I would bet it's both at the same time (nature AND nurture) to the point where the individual influence of each is practically impossible to disentangle.
- breck 5y agoThis is why I think 2D and 3D languages are the future (and of course, are a big part of the present and past, just not in traditional programming languages). Human minds are highly evolved to work in 2D and 3D. Further reading: 1972 - Mark Wells' A Review of Two-Dimensional Programming Languages https://github.com/breck7/wells/blob/main/wells1972.pdf https://github.com/breck7/wells/blob/main/wells1972.pdf
- nexuist 5y agoOh man I'm excited to read the replies to this thread. I'm working on my own 2D language right now as a layer above JS. Let me know if you'd be interested to beta test! I have a sense that the programming community at large will reject it at first, but if it helps non-technical people ship it's a win in my book.
- oh_sigh 5y agoIs it better the befunge? If so, how?
- nexuist 5y agoBefunge is very cool, although a bit difficult to onboard users onto :) My language is a lot simpler: it uses functional programming principles to transform input to output without storing state. The programmer would place down blocks on the screen and draw lines between them to indicate where they want data to flow. They'd start on the left (input side) and end on the right (output side). The cool benefit of this paradigm is that it's recursive; you can build blocks that contain blocks that contain blocks etc... all of which shuttle and transform data from the left to the right. The other part of this is that it won't just be a language, I'm planning on building an actual cloud environment where you can click a button to deploy your code onto a REST endpoint, so you can integrate it with your existing websites + scripts + apps.
- sdenton4 5y agopitch: 'buzz tracker for data transforms.' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeskola_Buzz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeskola_Buzz (which is admittedly a terrible pitch, unless you're trying to hook an old demo scenester...)
- 101001001001 5y agoOk well what happens when the entorhinal cortex is excised or probed?
- jacobsievers 5y agoSurprised the article mentions Kant but omits Bachelard, topoanalysis and the Poetics of Space.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rememberlenny 5y agoThere is a company that takes this concept and lets you take notes in "spaces". https://www.nototo.app/ https://www.nototo.app/
- nevster 5y agoIn some ways, Panorama Tab Groups in Firefox is similar
- marmot777 5y agoReminds me of the Queen’s Gambit where the protagonist plays chess on a hallucinated chess board projected on the ceiling.
- noyeastguy 5y agoI believe that people with hyperphantasia can actually visualize chess boards on ceilings. As somebody who cannot actually visualize things with my mind’s eye (aphantasia) I cannot comprehend this.
- azeirah 5y agoYou can train your visualization. Check out image streaming, it's a sort of meditation where you focus on what you see when you close your eyes. If you have aphantasia you will still see the purples and blues and green and stars and dots and whatever happens when you close your eyes. What you do is you speak out loud what you see "A purple blob in the middle, it's moving to the right, now it's morphing into a more green blob" etc If you do this for a couple of minutes what you will see in your closed eyes will become more shape-like "the blob is now more circular. It's back to a blob again, now it sort of resembles a weird pillow" Somehow, the feedback loop of objectively describing out loud what you're seeing trains the brain to fantasize more real shapes and objects. Try it out if this sounds interesting to you!
- marmot777 5y agoWow, that’s extraordinary. Do you think it’d be fun for kids too?
- azeirah 5y agoI have no clue, I have personally tried it and yes it can be very fun. It's supposed to be done with two people ideally^1 But it can get really dark as well. I have done this between 10-20 times on my own, and the one time the visuals are about like... fruit, and the other time they're about really really bad super shameful and traumatic personal experiences. It's not necessarily a game, although I can imagine it has the potential to be one. The danger is that this requires you to speak up about anything that comes to mind, and sometimes your mind will wander to very serious memories or pictures. I can say that it works incredibly well though. The purpose of image streaming is that it should improve your ability to imagine shaped in your head, and it works _really, really well_. I personally stopped because I didn't feel comfortable speaking out loud many of the things I saw (even when I was alone), it involves "confronting your shadow" in Jungian terms Here's the inventor's article on it by the way: http://www.winwenger.com/imstream.htm http://www.winwenger.com/imstream.htm ^1: the person who invented it says it has something to do with how the feedback loop is more real if there is real consequence to what you say iirc
- taeric 5y agoThis feels oversold. As someone that is not visual in thinking at all, I find it hard to even know what this means. :(
- raspasov 5y agoHow would you classify or describe your type of thinking?
- taeric 5y agoHard to say. I remember things, but I can't and don't visualize things. I learned the term aphantasia a while back and that hits me fairly well. It is a lot like a constant word association game. Just sometimes without words. And no narrator voice at all.
- 29athrowaway 5y agoWhat blows my mind is the concept of sensor fusion and how it works in the brain. How you can infer the shape of an object by progressively touching it with your fingers even if you cannot see it. Try to implement an algorithm or ML solution that does this and you'll know how insanely hard this problem is.
- rebelos 5y agoCould you elaborate on this a bit? I don't have familiarity with that class of problems, so I'm having trouble understanding the obstacles. My naive instinct is that you would detect and store points of contact between the sensor surface and the object while also positionally tracking the sensor in 3D space relative to an origin. You would certainly need a lot of precision in movement tracking to minimize error. Maybe that's where it gets tricky? Also worth noting that the problem feels somewhat moot since there are easier solutions (e.g. lidar).
- 29athrowaway 5y agoLidar is pretty expensive in terms of energy consumption.
- macawfish 5y agoI adore this magazine, it consistently makes me happy
- matthewmorgan 5y agoMight be time to dust off the old memory palace technique
- taneq 5y agoMy first thought too. I've always meant to give them a more serious go...
- dheera 5y agoIt somehow always irks me when VCs talk about "spaces" in reference to markets and how "spaces" are "crowded", and how that limits their thought into what's possible. To me a market isn't a space that can be occupied in the same sense of occupying a finite physical space.
- harperlee 5y agoWhy not? Obviously not in exactly the same sense but if there is a limited resource (attention from customers to solve their particular issue, and dollars dedicated to solving it), and a spectrum of solutions with niches for different clients, the analogy with space seems legit. And if there is a space of solutions and you are very close to another one, and you can only differenciate in price, you can say you are uncomfortably close to the other one. If moving away from the similar product to differenciate yourself makes you very quickly uncomfortably close to another product, then its crowded. Sounds very useful for discussion.
- dheera 5y agoIn many markets startups are very far from that being a limited resource. For many startups, to think that the market is a limited space (rather than an expandable balloon) is a big fallacy IMO.
- harperlee 5y agoYeah but then it’s not that the space analogy isn’t apt, it’s just it’s not crowded space. Space is a big thing, it holds entire galaxies :)
- raspasov 5y agoWhoever says this is falling into a "limited resources" type of fallacy and is stuck in some form of local-maximum thinking. It's one of the big failures of economics that it treats resources as "finite". There's zero evidence that anything is really finite anywhere in nature. Why should it be finite in economics or finance? Providing crackpot, pseudo-philosophical examples of why something can't be done can make me look smart but ultimately has no utility.
- a9h74j 5y agoI'm glad to see Jeff Hawkins was mentioned. Much recommend A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence.
- marco_craveiro 5y ago+1. And if you haven't read it, On Intelligence is also a great read.
- taneq 5y agoI'm always super skeptical when I see a blanket statement like this about how "the brain" works. Maybe many brains do but there are too many incredibly fundamental variations of how peoples' brains work to generalise too much. Aphantasia, variations in inner monologues, different sensory processing... we really are all our own unique creatures.
- johnchristopher 5y agoBut saying "no we are all unique" is another blanket statement. It's more likely we almost all share the same feature set. Doesn't mean exceptions or tendencies don't exist. You know... Like... Most of us have fingers, ears, skin, etc.
- taneq 5y agoTrue, most of us share a bunch of processing and the same kind of tricks work on us. And we all share a lot of lower level stuff with most mammals. There's still way more variation between humans mentally than physically.
- peter303 5y agoOne of the ancient Greek craft of mnemonics is to spatialize what you wish to remember. For example, use the rooms of a house to contain sequential items of a speech.
- xpuente 5y agoPlace Cell/Grid Cells/Head Cells/etc... might be not mapping space but cortex location (i.e., the "where" in the hippocampal complex isn't referring to physical space but from/to cortex location the "when" is recalled or should be stored). Rodent specific navigation abilities might be driving us toward the wrong interpretation of HC complex?
- toolslive 5y agoWe've been taking advantage of this for at least 2500 years. Our languages show this ("in the first place, in the second place", in Latin, in Greek, ...)
- agumonkey 5y agoWouldn't be surprising since spatial memory would be one if not the first recalling system for survival.. piggybacking on it for abstraction would be structurally efficient.
- Havoc 5y agoThat's probably why so called memory palaces work