7 ms·
Neural Noise Shows the Uncertainty of Our Memories
- swayvil 5y agoCertainty seems to be an entirely artificial state. Born of a combination of insulation from reality and assertion of arbitrary distinctions. Truth becomes a mere videogame artifact, like loot-chests and magic swords.
- cmehdy 5y ago> Yet if computing probabilities is such an integral part of how we perceive and think about the world, why have humans gained a reputation for being bad at probability? Maybe we are able to grasp probabilities at the most fundamental parts of our physiology, but layers and layers of cognition on top of it add estimators with noise (all our guesses around the world and ourselves) which pretty much hide entirely the probabilistic foundation (perhaps due to limits in cognition & memory degradation). Guessing that something is "a red car turning left" is a hell of a lot more complicated than guessing whether a singular line is at a 45-degree angle. For the latter maybe we can tap into neuronal activity almost 1-to-1, for the former you have to add estimators around red, car, turning, left, and language assumptions.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aeternum 5y agoIt would be much better if these articles started by describing the experiments themselves and experimental results. Instead the article and even recent 'scientific' papers now start with the outlandish conjectures by the author based on some strained potential interpretation of the evidence.
- darkerside 5y agoStarting with why makes a lot of sense before you start putting technical details in front of a lay audience
- aeternum 5y agoThe problem is the why is complete conjecture. No one knows how human memories are stored, it's ridiculous to assert that quantum noise plays a role when we can't even tell whether it's the brain's connectome that stores memories vs. molecules like talin.
- bonoboTP 5y agoThis is a typical problem with Quanta. I'm not quite sure who their target audience is, but I doubt they get anything beyond the vaguest idea of what is done here. And if you know more, you don't need to be told about Thomas Bayes etc. and you could probably quickly realize that the research is an overinterpreted incremental thing dressed up as a breakthrough to advance careers and back-scratch some famous academics who then go on to pose as the face of, and to take credit for an entire subfield/line of research. Laypeople would gain much more from learning about solid, settled and stable pieces of knowledge about various scientific aspects. Instead, we get these weird frankenstein stories mixing basic concepts and cutting edge research, where in the end readers go aways with a smug sense of satisfaction of keeping up with new scientific developments while not really understanding what it really was about. Instead, listening to a well-structured didactic lecture or reading a textbook has much better "return on investment", but it's less satisfying than the glossy magazine (or its online equivalent).
- gfody 5y agoFOKs (feeling-of-knowing states like when you know it when you hear it or you know it but you can't get it off the tip of your tongue) are supposedly the perception of "certainty" encoded in cannabinoids and our brains have more cannabinoid receptors than any other kind (stuggling to find a source for this atm, I read it somewhere on the internet)
- The_rationalist 5y ago