13 ms·
To be energy-efficient, brains predict their perceptions
- blurbleblurble 5y agoQuestions of efficiency are questions of survival. This framework resonates with my understanding of trauma responses.
- zero_iq 5y agoThe ideas in this article are strongly reminiscent of those in Jeff Hawkins' "On Intelligence" (2004). The idea of the brain operating (at least in part) as a "prediction machine" is certainly not a new one. I'm actually surprised it's taken this long for this sort of experimental confirmation and theory to become more mainstream.
- Invictus0 5y agoThought of this as well. Have you read his newer book? I haven't decided if I should pick it up or not.
- KingFelix 5y agoIt's alright, I didn't end up finishing it. I really like On Intelligence, wasn't pulled in to finish. Might have been state of mind at the time etc
- chalcolithic 5y agoOh, he has a newer book! Thank you!
- metanonsense 5y agoI have read the book and I really liked the first half, which explains the "thousand brains theory of intelligence". Very inspiring and thought-provoking (at least to me as an interested amateur in this field). The second half, however, would better have been a book of its own. It's about Hawkins' ideas on AGI implications and whatnot, which is quite entertaining but devalues the first half, in a way.
- cr4zy 5y agoPrediction machines, yet critically, taking actions that pursue states which we are not quite able to predict. https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0896627315007679?token=2058D96CB1CC7E72C4A6EF354562FBA56845309F568B74E974B46BA4778BBB3CF36C659D67DEE1C2863B438CA7219108&originRegion=us-east-1&originCreation=20211117172428 https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0896627315007679?...
- ethbr0 5y agoIt's been known in many communities, I think. There's been a number of articles on HN over the years on saccades / visual interpolation. See: https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-surviving-on-the-roads/ https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-s...
- carrolldunham 5y agoFor thousands of years: >The mind has a basic habit, which is to create things. In fact, when the Buddha describes causality, how experiences come about, he says that the power of creation or sankhara—the mental tendency to put things together—actually comes prior to our sensory experience. It’s because the mind is active, actively putting things together, that it knows things. >The problem is that most of its actions, most of its creations, come out of ignorance, so the kind of knowledge that comes from those creations can be misleading. The second paragraph is getting off the topic - or is it?
- SubiculumCode 5y agoOn any serious discussion of neuroscience, I'd advise to keep Jeff Hawkins out of it. Not only are the ideas he publishes often gross simplifications with little data to back it up (but does wonders as marketing), they were ideas pushed and developed by real working neuroscientists. Just my opinion.
- LesZedCB 5y agoisn't that pretty face value what Numenta's goal is though? They read research papers on neuroscience and try to distill it down to applicable engineering problems for their HTM and see what works. i can't speak much as to their original research efforts, but i personally appreciate the engineering-research side of what they are doing.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoI personally don't mind what his company is doing, but I just don't think his views represent the understandings of my field all that well.
- blueblimp 5y agoWhat resource would you recommend for getting an intro to those topics in neuroscience, that provides a better representation?
- SubiculumCode 5y agogoogle scholar
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Raphaellll 5y agoIt’s basically how large language models like GTP-3 work. They simply predict the next most probable word and suddenly you can prompt them to give you answers to rather intelligent tasks.
- jonmc12 5y ago"Being You" by Anil Seth, released last month, is a great primer on predictive processing and its relationship to the science of consciousness. Its a great complement to Hawkins' latest. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W2J9WWD https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08W2J9WWD
- _0ffh 5y ago>The idea of the brain operating (at least in part) as a "prediction machine" is certainly not a new one Yeah, you hit the nail on the head right there! The idea goes back at least as far as Hermann von Helmholtz (19th century).
- FearlessNebula 5y agoSpeculative execution
- motohagiography 5y agoRich, rich analogy. SPECTRE and Meltdown attacks for the mind have to be a thing, possibly as interrogation and cross examination techniques?
- 988747 5y agoWe use SPECTRE and Meltdown attacks against brain every day, we call them "jokes".
- motohagiography 5y agoWoah. That could make me a very dangerous person, because I am not funny at all.
- forgetfulness 5y agoWell... from the looks of it, we've gotten diddly squat from trying to think of the brain like the thing I'm writing this comment on, so probably not.
- sangnoir 5y agoPolitical ads/campaigns do this all the time - especially the negative ones
- paradaux 5y agoThis would certainly explain why my brain periodically suffers from meltdown.
- nefitty 5y agoOne of my "executive function" problems is that I get overwhelmed when I think about things I need to do. I noticed that a sort of movie starts playing in my head of how to accomplish the task, i.e. the steps entailed, resources needed, etc. What happens frequently is that my brain takes multiple discrete tasks and attempts to simulate each one's steps to completion simultaneously. I suddenly find myself at the front door paralyzed for five minutes, "Should I grab the trash since I'm going to go check the mail? I have to walk the dog, I can't carry all this trash while holding the dog. Where will I put the dog when I get the mail. Ok, put the leash on the dog, grab the trash... Crap, there's so much trash! Ok, just take the office trash out..." ADHD medicine stopped working after a month. What has helped a lot is N-acetylcysteine. In fact, it's been several months and I'm comfortable saying that it has changed my life. The trainwreck thought loops give way to singular chains of focus.
- afarviral 5y agoYour comment on N-acetylcysteine is really left-field. Its not even listed as a use of that medication, whos primary purpose is to treat panadol overdose. Can you elaborate?
- nefitty 5y agoI hesitated to mention the specific supplement for that reason, but maybe it will help someone. Apparently, the glutamate-glutamine system is implicated in psychiatric problems. Through my research I found that GABA deficiencies can cause ADHD symptoms. GABA is produced in the gut, I have stomach problems, so this seemed feasible. I learned that NAC increases glutathione and helps regulate glutamate. The effects people report point to an effect on this system. The Wikipedia page for NAC has many references, but this is one review of its possible uses in psychiatric problems: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763415001190 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylcysteine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylcysteine
- guerrilla 5y agoThis TED talk has a great example where the same sound sounds different to you based on what you expect to hear, if you need to prove this to yourself [1]. His thesis is also that the brain is a prediction machine. 1. https://youtu.be/lyu7v7nWzfo?t=365 https://youtu.be/lyu7v7nWzfo?t=365
- tasty_freeze 5y agoMichael Shermer played Stairway to Heaven backwards and it mostly sounds like gibberish. But when he displays the 'translation' as text and plays it again, the words seem pretty clear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYG2oZXSvdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYG2oZXSvdE
- jodrellblank 5y agoIn 1985 two young men attempted suicide, and the family sued the British rock band Judas Priest, accusing them of hiding subliminal messages in the music that said "Do It!" when listened to backwards. From memory, part of the trial was the defence taking a song, suggesting what words the court would hear in it played backwards, and then playing it backwards. e.g. this clip https://youtu.be/uyIsu93zAoM?t=1123 https://youtu.be/uyIsu93zAoM?t=1123 and showing that you hear the suggested words out of the noise. The trial was thrown out, after deciding there were words and they were subliminal, but were not deliberate. The whole situation included: "In a pre-trial motion, the judge ruled that subliminal messages were incapable of being protected speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, since they were by definition not noticeable and thus could not form part of a dialogue." Documentary - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104140/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104140/
- rgoulter 5y agoOne more demonstration like this is in Matt Parker's "Clutching at Random Straws" lecture. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf5OrthVRPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf5OrthVRPA
- _Microft 5y agoHere is a sound that sounds like either brainstorm or green needle, depending on which words you focus. Try own word combinations. I have no trouble hearing brain needle or green storm, for example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1okD66RmktA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1okD66RmktA
- supperburg 5y agoThe brain is a prediction machine largely. How is it possible that you can experience a lucid dream where every sensation and interaction is as real as real life? It’s because your consciousness lives inside a simulation. When you’re awake, your brain uses sensory input to populate the simulation. But when you’re asleep it populates it itself. When you’re awake, your brain doesn’t scan every square inch of the real world looking for things to populate the simulation; it scans sparsely looking for key indicators and then guesses the rest. It’s an optimization for time and energy. Most of the things you experience are guesses. And when you’re asleep this guessing is all that you’re seeing. Dreams are just the guessing machine. There are scattered reports of lucid dreamers who take benzodiazepines. They can’t escape their dreams. They simply wake up into the dream again if they die. Everyone reported it as being terrifying. Some reported that their reality checks stopped working; double taking at a watch didn’t change the position of the hands. The world became frighteningly real. It’s likely that the guessing machine you experience during a normal dream is not operating at full capacity. It explains everything. How people swear on their life that they saw something, ordinary or extraordinary, that couldn’t be explained by a trick of light on the eyes or anything else. It explains dreams of course and other realistic hallucinations had by schizophrenics or drug users. The simulation doesn’t just deal with the physical world, it deals with abstract things like the “presence” of a person or entity. It’s all haywire simulation. This idea that synapses are a part of an energy optimization is fascinating. It is widely speculated that inflammation has to do with schizophrenia, and inflammation is also involved in metabolic interference. African sleeping sickness for example is a purely inflammatory disease that causes people to run out of energy and fall asleep. Perhaps schizophrenia is some kind of metabolic knob being turned down by an inflammation signal which then results in the progressive shutting down of synapses as a way to conserve energy…
- Borrible 5y agoEgon Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel - The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, Basic Books 2009 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5895503-the-ego-tunnel https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5895503-the-ego-tunnel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di9SPPx8Jic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di9SPPx8Jic
- podgaj 5y agoI have Aspergers and suffer from something called closed eye visions. When I close my eyes, mostly at night, I get flashes of images, like faces and people and places. The idea is that the brain is trying to make sense of the random light patterns I am seeing even when my eyes are close. And so it’s hyper predictive. Like others are saying, this is nothing new to me.
- guerrilla 5y agoSame here. I used to narrate them and make up stories about them to my girlfriend :) There's also a different TED talk than the one I already linked about your theory which gives a lot of interesting examples[1]. 1. https://youtu.be/SgOTaXhbqPQ https://youtu.be/SgOTaXhbqPQ
- somebodythere 5y agoI get these too, although I wouldn't describe it as suffering. Sometimes the images are detailed and tangible enough that it feels like looking at a printed photo through my eyelids. When the images are particularly interesting, I like to draw them.
- podgaj 5y agoSometimes mine are horrific though. Like a face in bandages with an eye hanging out. But sometimes they are interesting and nice, like tree tops of a forest.
- shostack 5y agoIs this akin to asynchronous space warping or synchronous space warping used with VR headsets to improve perceived frame rates?
- CyberDildonics 5y agoNo, that has nothing to do with this at all. This is about making predictions and comparing them to new information.
- strict9 5y ago>Through predictive processing, the brain uses its prior knowledge of the world to make inferences or generate hypotheses about the causes of incoming sensory information. I wonder if this mechanism is responsible for many shared false memories (or Mandela Effect). As an example, the spelling of the Berenstain Bears is misremembered by many, perhaps because we're so accustomed to seeing the suffix -stein in last names.
- mcny 5y agoI still refuse to believe ET by Katy Perry always said "different DNA". I distinctly remember it used to say perfect DNA, not different DNA. Or I've lost my mind.
- rectang 5y agoFor a couple of years I made my living as an audio mastering engineer, which involves making tiny changes at or below the threshold of perception. One of the main ways I set myself up for success was to accept the human perceptual mechanism's propensity for illusion, and then to build systems which helped me avoid being deceived by it. • An instant level-matched AB switching mechanism for auditioning changes • Preferring tools which could be checked under optimal perceptual conditions, and choosing to avoid gear which did not lend itself easily to such conditions. This generally meant preferring software plugins and avoiding outboard gear unless the budget was very high (which it rarely was for my clients). • Isolating changes and amplifying the effect to well above perceptual threshold in order to get an impression of the change before dialing it back down. (This is a standard practice, especially for mix engineers.) Many audio engineers don't hold the same priorities, especially "audiophile" types those who advertise their "golden ears"[1]. And many customers don't want someone who acknowledges the fallibility of their perceptions. But I was confident that I was absolutely doing my best work and offering the best possible value to my clients. [1] It's basically impossible to talk intelligently about audio in an open internet forum (including HN) because there will always be a swarm of participants who don't accept the limits of perception and their own propensity for illusion.
- skulk 5y ago
- jackallis 5y agothe saying "My brain runs faster than my mouth" lends to this idea.
- birriel 5y agoFriston on the Free Energy Principle and Markov Blankets: https://youtu.be/NIu_dJGyIQI https://youtu.be/NIu_dJGyIQI
- vga805 5y agoAndy Clark's Surfing Uncertainty[1] is a nice monograph of the topic 1: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190217013.001.0001/acprof-9780190217013 https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/a...
- Geee 5y agoNot just the human brain, but anything that is intelligent. Life itself is a prediction machine. Evolution selects for prediction power in an energy-constrained environment.
- eevilspock 5y ago> Life itself is a prediction machine. I beg to differ. That assumes evolution is teleological, that it isn't reactive. It's like saying positive and negative feedback loops are predictive. You're diluting the meaning of "predictive" to say something that sounds deep.
- ravi-delia 5y agoParticularly when talking about predictive processing in a neurological sense, you'll often see people blending prediction and feedback loops of any kind. It sounds sort of weird and pointless at first, but the point they're trying to make is that the same circuits could work to do both. So the brain moves the arm by "predicting" extremely hard that the arm will be in a different place, and waiting for the error to go away. From the top we know that it's really just a control system, but from any given neuron's perspective it could just as easily be a predictive one.
- eevilspock 5y agoDo you notice that your visual center of focus shifts to different parts of the duck vs rabbit image? While I strongly agree with the ideas of the article, the fact that you have to focus on different parts of the image to shift perception, altering the "bottom up" sensory data your brain receives, undermines at least a little the use of this example.
- defaultname 5y agoRelated but also not: One of the most interesting aspects about a "shroom" trip is the incredible ability to visualize. Visualizing is something that we all think we can do normally, but if you really try to picture something in your head -- specific faces, the design of a bicycle, the layout of a room -- it's quickly evident that we are actually terrible at it (it's hard to reverse information from that neural network). Even if you're drawing it's often an iterative process where each line drives the next. Maybe other people are better at it, but when self-interrogating and inspecting one's own vision, it just completely falls apart. https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on-peoples-attempts-to-draw-them-from-memory/ https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on... Normally. I can only speak to personal experience, but under the influence of psilocybin I find that closing my eyes and visualizing complex environments and machines -- of literally inspecting and walking through gearing systems, for instance, and rationalizing their operation -- with complex lighting, etc, leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity. It literally feels like looking into another universe, the construction of the reality simply too complex to be imagined and visualized. I've actually felt my head to ensure I'm not overheating, contemplating the process like the mind was a GPU.
- frisco 5y ago> Visualizing is something that we all think we can do normally... we are actually terrible at it > leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity Want a really trippy realization? All you ever see is brain activity! Sounds obvious, but most people haven't really internalized it. That's all regular perception, which feels totally real and solid, is. The psychedelic just gave you a greater ability to volitionally influence the percepts.
- Barrin92 5y agoI think this is a very intuitive theory. I feel you can actually notice this consciously when you do some mundane repetitive task you've done a lot and something is off. For example if you lift a cup you thought was full and it isn't and for a moment it really throws you off. It's not just perceived as a difference but as something 'out of whack'.
- euroderf 5y agoOr when you lift an egg carton with one hand but it's only partially full and all the eggs are at one end and you lose your grip oops. I always rearrange our eggs to have left/right symmetry in the carton and my wife must think I'm nuts.
- csee 5y agoOr when you're walking and expecting a step to be there and it isn't.
- Talanes 5y agoLiving with you would drive me insane, because I solved the same problem by always orienting the full half of the carton in back and adjusting my expectations to match.
- euroderf 5y agoI should have added that this is in a large household. So egg arrangement is self-defense.
- swayvil 5y agoA kind of reverse-science if you will. Don't think about what you see, see about what you think. And what we think derives from so many different sources. It explains a lot.
- xyzzy21 5y agoAnd in many cases only the prediction is used - people see what they want to see. It's a natural extrapolation of this (which can be very wrong and even deadly).
- ravi-delia 5y agoI'd argue that the main reason the brain predicts in the first place is how noisy our senses are. Your brain is doing everything in its power to tell you how the world actually is, but it isn't working with great equipment.
- ithkuil 5y agoFunny coincidence, I'm in the middle of reading of "a thousand brains" by Jeff Hawkins
- leobg 5y agoClassic in marriage counseling. Many fights occur not because of what the other person has said or done, but because what your own brain has added to their behavior. Often, you see what you are most afraid of. Or what you used to experience in childhood. To “see” that your partner here and now is actually completely different takes a lot of energy.
- xeromal 5y agoYou have to clear the cache constantly.
- HenryKissinger 5y agoInsufficient memory to perform operation. Your brain will go to sleep in 5...4...3...2...1...
- daemoens 5y agoIs this a reference to a book or a show? That seems like something I'd really like to read.
- trhway 5y agoIt isn't that straightforward for GAN.
- deleted 5y ago
- exporectomy 5y agoA lot of comments here seem to be overlooking the point of the article. That brains predict their sensory inputs isn't new. What seems to be is that a NN where correct predictions are done with small values of the weights and error correction has large weights uses lower weight values overall. That being energy efficient seems to be more a coincidence of how biological brains happen to work - larger weights use more energy. At least that's how I understand it. Doesn't seem quite as incredible as predicting sensory inputs. Obviously being able to predict the future has value beyond conserving energy.
- hypertexthero 5y ago“The observer is the observed.” —Jiddu Krishnamurti
- amelius 5y agoMakes sense. If someone throws a ball into the air and you want to catch it, you predict where it will go. Along the way, if there is an error between prediction and actual position, you adjust for it. Classic control theory :)
- vez- 5y agoConsidering these three statements: - the brain predicts what its upcoming input will be, - quantum biologists ask if the human eye is sensitive to quantum effects, and - measuring quantum information under different bases result in a different quantum state of not only the measurer, but of the world being measured. I wonder if it is possible that the brain uses its predictive power to change the basis under which the eye measures photons, resulting in different perceptions as well as a different reality. A bit of a crazy idea but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be the case other than if it is shown that biological sensory organs are simply not that precise. [0]https://www.templeton.org/grant/is-the-human-eye-able-to-see-entanglement https://www.templeton.org/grant/is-the-human-eye-able-to-see...
- ravi-delia 5y agoI can think of a few reasons to think that's not the case. For one, Rhodopsin isn't really under neurological control, so there's no way for top-down predictions to alter it. For another, what possible benefit would changing your evaluation basis give you? The whole point is that no matter what basis you pick everything works out the same!
- PikachuEXE 5y agoThis would break if the observation is done via recording > watch later Has it ever been done that way?
- sea_things 5y agoThis article is so fascinating... and it reminds me of one of my favorite topics! I'm excited to share this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideasthesia#Neurophysiology_of_ideasthesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideasthesia#Neurophysiology_of... > Ideasthesia is congruent with the theory of brain functioning known as practopoiesis. According to that theory, concepts are not an emergent property of highly developed, specialized neuronal networks in the brain, as is usually assumed; rather, concepts are proposed to be fundamental to the very adaptive principles by which living systems and the brain operate.
- CyanBird 5y agoOh, that's interesting and it lines up with Chomskys ideas that language "surged" as a self soothing mechanism, as a mental scheme where the "individual" can "think words" to self soothe and make sense of its environment , our differences as humans is our capacity to verbalize and structuralize it more easily than other species such as maybe dogs, or zebras Whales, Elephants and many others can achieve strong degrees of said structuralization and verbalization of the "language" in their minds as well
- buildsjets 5y agoSo basically, the brain is a predictive Kalman filter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter
- kgin 5y agoI once fell off my bike and smashed my nose pretty badly. To this day, when I trip and lose my balance for a second, I feel a shooting pain in my nose. It’s like it’s ready to start hurting again before anything touches it.
- scotty79 5y agoI heard nice phrasing for this. We don't live in the real world, or even the world of our perceptions. We live in completely virtual world of what our mind anticipates the perceptions will be in some number of milliseconds.
- r00fus 5y agoIt makes complete sense when you realize that the speed of actually computing and thinking through every move would look more like a chess match rather than a dance (latter being instinctive moves). Our body and mind are intertwined so tightly because we'd be dead.
- guerrilla 5y agoI don't understand how this isn't obvious to anyone who's thought about it for a bit: Nobody's ever seen anything other than what their mind shows them.
- pshc 5y agoI read once that “dopamine encodes prediction error” and it stuck with me. When your brain stumbles off the beaten path it wakes up in so many ways. Surprise is a powerful emotion.
- sydthrowaway 5y agoThe brain has brainch prediction
- Ozzie_osman 5y agoI've definitely read somewhere else (can't remember where) that the predictive loop is a core learning mechanism. Your brain diffs its prediction against what actually happens, and when there's a big enough difference between prediction and reality, learning occurs (ie your brain tries to change its prediction model so that it can encompass whatever it just perceived in the future).
- Borrible 5y agoBrains that could 'predict' predators, and dangers in general, faster based on an 'educated' guess have obviously a higher survival rate. Or, to be precise, have a higher chance of making little copies of themselves afterwards. Those naughty bunnies, there's nothing more sexy than the thrill to have survided... Increased energy efficiency is probably just a side effect. Allthough of course, energy optimized brains, being big energy sinks aren' that small a factor. But than again, brains back then didn't last that long before they were eaten by predators, so I still would think it is much more important not to be eaten than to be energy efficient. 'Premature optimization', 'Deliver fast' and all that. You know the drill.
- Couponplay 5y agoWonderful posts. Thank you for updated great information about our brains. These are what I need for my study. Please keep updating more. https://couponplay.com/ https://couponplay.com/