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Mental phenomena don’t map into the brain as expected
- BLKNSLVR 5y agoTangential to article topic: When I first read "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" it gave me such a profound understanding of the unpredictability of not only brain injury, but mental illness and the fragility of human nature, that I thoroughly believe it should be required reading for late primary schoolers or early high-schoolers to help guide them through their life's journey of interacting with the full spectrum of humanity they may encounter. A handbook for empathy.
- MihikaBasu 5y agoWestern #neuroscience admits a link between #memory formation and metabolic regulation. In #India, mothers and grandmothers always ensured you go light on the stomach for a good sleep. If your system is upset, you don't have anything to make a good memory. https://twitter.com/IamLindaAshok/status/1430385304687419401 https://twitter.com/IamLindaAshok/status/1430385304687419401
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ElFitz 5y agoWhich basically means the brain doesn’t think the way the brain thinks the brain thinks. Aside from the horrible phrasing, it's quite funny to think about, leading us to: My brain thinks it is funny to think about how the brain doesn’t think the way the brain thinks the brain thinks. In the same way that atoms don’t exactly work the way the atoms think the atoms work since, as Niels Bohr said, "A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself." Reminds me of some comment I heard somewhere, about how the brain and the body don’t come with an instruction manual, and how it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective: we so far apparently haven’t needed to know how they work to use them well enough to survive.
- PeterisP 5y agoFor me a key insight is that it's not necessarily possible for a brain to understand itself. Obviously there's a certain "capability floor" that a brain needs to have in order to understand a system of some complexity. A rat's brain is capable of understanding some systems, but it's definitely not sufficiently capable to understand a rat's brain. A human brain can understand various systems that are too complex for rats, but it's also finite in it's capabilities - and it's not totally certain that the inherent complexity of how human brains work is small enough to be understandable by human brains; perhaps it would take something more (e.g. brains augmented with tech or biologically enhanced or something totally alien) to properly understand how our brains work.
- ravi-delia 5y agoI see this a lot, but I don't think it's accurate. It's definitely not possible for a brain to completely understand itself, as in know the state of every neuron and how all of those states will evolve over time, but that absolutely doesn't preclude a very complete understanding. The more we learn about the brain, the more it seems it is very friendly to a certain degree of abstraction. If it wasn't it wouldn't be able to turn sense data into world models so well!
- ElFitz 5y agoThat’s what models are for. Many systems are too complex to be fully understood as a whole. But by modelling them, we can still understand why they behaved they they have, and predict how they will behave. There is no need for any one individual to fully grasp a process for it to be modelled. It really is the whole point of modelling.
- d0mine 5y agoFor me it is more mandane: there were times when people thought of human health in terms of 4 elements. [Much] Later they discovered germ theory that uses more useful concepts. Using "memory", "perception" to describe how the brain works is like using 4 elements to describe how our bodies function.
- Invictus0 5y ago> Recent work has found, for instance, that two-thirds of the brain is involved in simple eye movements; meanwhile, half of the brain gets activated during respiration. Talk about misleading... obviously these two tasks alone don't account for 116% of the brain's power. The neocortex is all the same part of the brain--yes it can loosely be delineated into segments, but it is pretty pointless to say the whole brain is involved when really the neocortex is just distributing its inputs along its length in the process of searching for the appropriate cortical columns.
- SketchySeaBeast 5y agoI'm confused. That's what the article is about. The quote you chose is 1/4 of the way in and then they spend the rest of the article explaining why those details are misleading. I don't understand what you're objecting to.
- coldtea 5y agoParent is objecting against patient reading
- philipov 5y agoIt's only misleading if you're stuck in a reductionist mindset where every piece only has one job and combines linearly together with other pieces.
- simonh 5y agoYou have made it misleading by taking it out of the context of the article which explains how that works.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- criddell 5y agoAre the neurons outside of the head considered to be part of the brain?
- netizen-936824 5y agoIs "brain" equated to "nervous system"?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dspillett 5y agoGenerally not. Which is why the nervous system of cephalopods seems so alien — their processing is performed in a more distributed fashion. Sometimes the brain and spinal column are considered together in our case, as some of our survival reactions are governed by neurons in our spine, but that does not really match how cephalopods distribute their processing (something that is presumably necessary, or at least helpful/efficient, for controlling the flexibility of their limbs).
- tgbugs 5y agoThe top level partonomy for the nervous system is usually as follows. nervous system -> central nervous system -> brain -> spinal cord -> peripheral nervous system
- yboris 5y agoMy favorite writings on the topic of consciousness are by the philosopher Daniel Dennett with his books like "Consciousness Explained". He provide such fun thought experiments, and brings together so much science - it's a treat!
- lnjarroyo 5y agoNever read that, I will look into it. One of the books I love is "The Mind's I" by Dennett and Hofstadter. Easily one of the best books I have ever read.
- Giorgi 5y agoBrain is interested how it thinks so made me click
- DiabloD3 5y agoThe brain is a piece of soggy bacon that lives in a shell of bone, has its own membrane that is like the gut lining, cleans itself by power-washing itself (and shorting itself out, essentially; REM sleep is basically the side effect of this process), depends on glucose for its special mitochondria[1], and your humanity is literally a thin layer of meat-paint on top of millions of years of evolution... ... that is doing scientific research on itself, and then reading it and understanding the strange symbols on the screen. [1]: All your organs have unique metabolic signatures, but they, generally, can all run on purely fatty acids; the brain requires about 30-40g of dietary glucose to run optimally, as fatty acids do not cross the BBB quickly enough.
- remir 5y agoTo me this is the most interesting thing. A bunch of organic matter evolved to the point where it is trying to understand itself. How crazy is that?
- techbio 5y agoI know your ending question is a figure of speech, but since we are imagining it simultaneously, it's more or less by definition not crazy at all.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoPoetry for nerds. (Thank you)
- codeflo 5y agoSomething something diagonalization proof something something.
- tudorw 5y agohow much?
- amanaplanacanal 5y agoDoesn’t require dietary glucose, the liver will manufacture as needed from fats and proteins.
- DrNuke 5y agoMechanistic solutions are never meant to solve high level problems, but they very often make the fundamental bricks more advanced solutions will rely upon, at a later stage.
- robwwilliams 5y agoTrue. But mechanistic “solutions” can also be used as a crutch that allows us to avoid asking the right hard questions. I started my career as an electrophysiologist studying a big chunk of the thalamus referred to as a visual information “relay”nucleus. In 40 years I have never seen anyone question this “relay” function seriously. I am reminded of the phrase from Princess Bride: “I don’t think that word means what you think it means”. “Relay” is a crutch to mask ignorance. No collection of complex circuitry—one million neurons in this case—is just a relay. It is also an important processor, but probably in a domain invisible to a neuroscientist recording from one or even 1000 neurons simultaneously. My vote is that the “relay” is actually a timebase corrector for noisy retinal input mosaics that have their own quirky dynamics and temporal noise.
- joe_the_user 5y agoIf you were to look at how a computers' memory is organized, a rough, non-programmer idea of how it would map wouldn't be correct. Big visible things like windows or the start menu aren't put in a single place, etc. It seems like remarkable that people don't want to imagine there are the rough equivalent of many, many software layers between the level of the neuron and the level of "reason", "emotions", "self", "consciousness" and etc. I think this comes because the "sense of self" is a process that reflexively takes you as primary and indivisible. A framework that view this as generated by lower process violates this.
- PeterisP 5y agoThis reminds me of this nice paper (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/055624v2.full.pdf https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/055624v2.full.pdf) "Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor?" exploring the (nonsensical) results we would get if we'd apply currently used neuroscience approaches to analyze an Atari console running a simple game.
- radicaldreamer 5y agoSimilarly, there may be a layer below neurons -- microtubules. Something that many neuroscientists and AI researchers don't want to consider seriously, primarily because we're very limited in our ability to examine, interact, and model that layer. It also throws off by orders of magnitude the effort which would be required to fully model an organism neural behavior.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoThere may be that layer, but is there evidence for that layer, and I'm not talking about that certain physicists hypothesis about microtubules and free will.
- zone411 5y agoThere is evidence that each neuron performs calculations equivalent to a small neural net: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0896627321005018?dgcid=coauthor https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08966....
- cblconfederate 5y agoThe original title might have been OK since the gist of the article is that what we call "mental phenomena" may not map at all. Just like somebody can't find "beauty" in an ANNs parameters.
- Borrible 5y agoMindboggling how brains have a blind spot for the thought of being an idea. Just as mindboggling as the mind's reluctance to think of itself as a brain.
- robwwilliams 5y agoVery D. Hofstadter ;-)
- Borrible 5y agoThank god, I'm not him. I couldn't stand my haircut in the mirror.
- mistermann 5y ago> Just as mindboggling as the mind's reluctance to think of itself as a brain. A bit of an understatement in my experience...very often, minds get rather emotionally agitated when encountering the idea that the reality they perceive is a representation of reality, implemented by a brain (as opposed to being reality itself).
- Borrible 5y ago>implemented by a brain Which is an idea. Which is a point in the mirror, it avoids to face. Same as its mirror can't face the opposite. Whereever the difference of them my be, if there even is one. ;-)
- mistermann 5y ago> Which is an idea. An idea which seems to be overwhelmingly axiomatic. > Which is a point in the mirror, it avoids to face. Are you thinking of this phenomenon where when people look directly into their own eyes in a mirror, or directly into the eyes of another human being, something "weird" seems to happen?
- Borrible 5y ago
- peter303 5y agoMuch of current cognitive science is neo-phrenology: geography = function. This article shows thats too simple.
- ravi-delia 5y agoThe article shows that its harder than you'd think to draw a world map if you don't know the names of the countries. Localization to, at the very minimum, specific circuits isn't really in doubt.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- techbio 5y agoThe article begins by analogy to cartography, in which, the First Law of Geography[1] "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things" applies to the space defined by the surface of the Earth. The brain is smaller than a pixel in a typical satellite photo but contains information to build the satellite, put it into orbit, and communicate with it via radio. Why would anyone believe that analogy should hold? Having read D'Amasio[2] ages ago, this appears to be looking for keys under a streetlamp simply because the light is better. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobler%27s_first_law_of_geography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobler%27s_first_law_of_geog... [2] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125777.The_Feeling_of_What_Happens https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125777.The_Feeling_of...
- ravi-delia 5y agoThe experimental reason is that damage to most areas of the brain causes consistent and remarkably narrow impairment, ie aphasia. The reason you should predict localization just from first principles is latency. The bulk of your brain is connective tissue networking the cortex to itself, but even still signals can make many round trips within a small patch of cortex before it can cross the brain. Neurons are large and slow, and the more distant the neighbors they have to interact with the larger they have to be. Does that mean that the regions of the brain kindly sort themselves into exactly the high-level categories we want them to be in? Absolutely not! Concepts like "attention" or "memory" might not even make sense when looking at how the brain is actually implemented. But regions of the brain probably perform specific tasks.
- dboreham 5y agoProbably need to consider I/O too: whatever is doing the front-end processing of vision is probably not too far away from the end of the optic nerves, otherwise you'd have a routing nightmare.
- ravi-delia 5y agoActually that's sorta not the case, and it is indeed a routing nightmare. Most vision processing is actually done in the far rear, with the signals traveling all the way from the front to the back. However, there are two big reasons why this isn't as bad as you'd think: - The data from the eyes is already lightly processed. The way the neurons hook into the rods and cones is basically running a few convolutions all at once, and the result is what's sent back - Most sensory info gets centralized in the LGN before it's routed to the various parts of the brain, so it's about the same hop it would have to go through anyway We actually still have a lot of questions about what exactly is going on in the middle bit. It seems like structures deep in the brain have duplicate versions of all the sense processing and motor controlling centers. What do they do? Well reflexes probably, and maybe somehow motivation? Reward is tucked in there somewhere too, or so we think.
- brainmapper 5y agoPlease note that merely seeing some place in the brain activate in a functional MRI task does NOT necessarily mean that that location is either necessary, sufficient or even involved in representing information relevant to that task. Functional MRI amplifies small global signals related to arousal, and if arousal changes during a task then these arousal-related signals can propagate over much of the brain. And even something as simple as an eye movement can be correlated with global changes in arousal. (A similar problem occurs with attention.) Unfortunately many of the most common modeling and analysis methods methods used in fMRI have no way to distinguish these rather uninteresting arousal-related changes from those that are actually informative about task-specific processes. The bottom line is that whenever you read about any fMRI result, you should ask yourself whether that could be a mere artifact of changes in arousal (or attention), and if so you should find out what was done to address this potential confound.
- brainmapper 5y agoSorry I should have clarified this comment was addressed at the claims in the article that most of the brain is activated even for trivial tasks...
- kens 5y agoAn interesting paper is "Could a neuroscientist understand a microprocessor". The idea is to apply neuroscience-style analysis to the 6502 processor running programs such as Space Invaders and see if you can find out anything interesting about the processor. They tried a bunch of different approaches which gave a bunch of data but essentially nothing useful about the processor's structure or organization. The point is that if these techniques are useless for figuring out something simple and structured like the 6502, they're unlikely to give useful information about the brain. https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268 https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo... (Click "download PDF", it's open access.)
- EMM_386 5y agoIf anyone is interested in the "deep" topics such as consciousness, materialism, quantum physics, religion, etc. I highly recommend the "Closer to Truth" series. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl9StMQ79LtEvlrskzjoYbQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl9StMQ79LtEvlrskzjoYbQ I recently stumbled across this and it has some fascinating episodes where he interviews many top people in each field. Michio Kaku, Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, religious leaders, etc etc.
- fjfaase 5y agoI suggest you also watch some videos by Joscha Bach.
- robg 5y agoWe‘ve known for over thirty years, first based on lesion studies then neuroimaging. For instance, we saw that language didn’t map to one region, but depended on how language was being used and then word meanings relying on sensory vs more abstract brain regions (e.g., cannon vs cannoli vs carve). Think of features with distributed representations, patterns of connectivity re-using bits in endless ways. Another oversimplification is that neurons can be only representing 1’s and 0’s. The true computational power is every state in-between and strength of connections between processing units.