7 ms·

New map of meaning in the brain changes ideas about memory

174 points by nsoonhui 5y ago

going_ham 5y ago
It is really interesting to see how these are tangled together! One simple experiment you can do is, think of a cup then a image pops up. That image will likely be the image of recently used cup or something you cherished deeply. Now after a while if you read "a cup" you see same associations! Of course I removed a lot of details, but it's really easy to verify the idea presented here. And something like CLIP[0] seems to be a good direction because it combines both visual and language aspect! [0]: https://openai.com/blog/clip/ https://openai.com/blog/clip/
- dannyw 5y ago
  I have aphantasia[0], when I think of a cup, no image pops up. I can think about the properties of a cup: it holds a drink, it's a physical object, and if I specifically think about what color or shape a cup is, I can describe it; but I never visualise it. I wonder how my brain works in this context. I also have wondered if this contributed to me being fairly good at programming and systems thinking; but dismal at art and anything creative. [0]: "https://psyche.co/ideas/i-have-no-minds-eye-let-me-try-to-describe-it-for-you https://psyche.co/ideas/i-have-no-minds-eye-let-me-try-to-de..."
  - cosmojg 5y ago
    Can you feel the cup? Can you imagine holding it in your hands, caressing the rim, scooping the inside, and feeling the pressure on your hands? Can you imagine your hands getting wet or even the pain of a thousand shards of glass as the cup suddenly shatters? Does it make a sound? Can you smell the tea? Can you taste it?
    - lstamour 5y ago
      Not the same person, but have a similar condition, so I’ll take a go at it. Sample size of one here. > Can you feel the cup? No. There really isn’t a specific cup. > Can you imagine holding it in your hands, caressing the rim, scooping the inside, and feeling the pressure on your hands? Yes, I can imagine these actions, but it’s more about remembering what it might be like to feel that sensation again and is somewhat disconnected from the cup. I end up wanting to remember a different, real cup, when I might have done those actions. Like how I can remember when I last cut off circulation in my hands carrying a heavy plastic bag, say. I know how that feels, but it’s not something I’m particularly good at imagining visually - with a mental image. > Can you imagine your hands getting wet or even the pain of a thousand shards of glass as the cup suddenly shatters? Not quite, and no, I can’t really imagine the shattering. I mean, I can remember a time when a cup fell and shattered and sort of associate that, but just “visualizing” the pain or shattering seems impossible. I can play concept association and “imagine” the cup exploding outwards like a grenade, but it’s not visual or concrete, it’s more conceptual and I lose any connection to pain or feeling or hands and fingers. The more I try to make up without associating with a memory, the more abstract (verbal, less real) the “imagining” seems. > Does it make a sound? I can imagine sounds, and get songs stuck in my head, so I have some idea of how mental visualization should work for me, but it doesn’t visually work that way. It’s interesting that to me, just now, imagining the sound of a cup shattering produces an associated concept mentally than the reverse … I can’t easily go from a shattered or falling cup concept to the sound, but I can relatively easily do the reverse: I can go almost instantly from imagining the sound of a shattered cup to thinking of a shattered or falling cup and what that might look like or how the shards might feel. > Can you smell the tea? Again, thinking of smells first brings back sounds and memories more strongly than visuals would for me, and when I was trying to think of an image, it was abstract - there were no sounds or smells in particular and it wasn’t something I could interact with. More of a model of a cup. Even thinking of the interactions or how something would feel, I now realize, is thinking about feelings and memories of feelings - that visualizing my other senses such as touch, smell or hearing is much easier for me than to visualize based on appearances. > Can you taste it? Not from the mental imagining of the cup, no. If I remember the sounds of when I was at a tea house, or if I pull up a photo of a cup of tea on my phone, then I can imagine the taste. But it feels disconnected to try and purely jump from a “visual” cup to thinking, it tastes like tea. Thinking of how certain foods taste does bring up memories and can make my mouth water imagining or remembering how certain foods tasted, though. Thinking of a taste can bring back the smells, the feeling of heat rising off a dish or hot plate, the sounds of sizzling, and a memory of what it would look like. But there still isn’t really a “picture” and if I wasn’t looking at a photo on my phone, all I could tell you about my visual imaginings would be words or concepts. I can tell that something is missing in my imagining because of how different it is to go from non-visual senses to other non-visual senses. But visuals … don’t have the same mental impact unless I can see them in front of me, e.g. on a computer screen. For others, remembering a layout might trigger memories of details, for me it is the opposite - I remember the layout of a flowchart by remembering which details are connected and then from there I can describe the diagram’s layout in my head. But again, sample size of one here.
  - tasty_freeze 5y ago
    I've read a number of times about aphantasia, but I'm still unsure about things. For instance, if I'm asked to think of a cup in my minds eye, I would say yes, I can. Therefore I don't have aphantasia. But it is not at all like looking at a real cup or a picture of a cup. It is far more liminal and fleeting. One bit of evidence of this is when I tried LSD a few times in the past, I don't get CEV (closed eye visuals), while some people report rich, colorful scenery. All the same, I do get visual impressions without actually seeing anything. For instance, while listening to a particular song it generated nothing but blackness in my minds eye, yet all the same I had the impression of looking at glossy flower made of hard glass. I was getting the interpretive conclusion of vision without any of the other information flow that comes along with actually seeing the object. When I visualize things in my mind, it is kind of like that too -- I can describe what I'm seeing but I don't really see it.
    - captaincaveman 5y ago
      Maybe because its a class of things, you can't visualise 'furniture', but you can visualise instance such as an office chair, or dinning table. My description is poor, office chair is also a class, but it not the top class ... I dunno read about this once anyway, didn't make it up, honest!
    - ummwhat 5y ago
      I don't know how much LSD you did or what your body weight was or anything else that might be chemically relevant. But I would be deeply surprised by an individual being immune to the closed eye hallucinations. When you look at a lightbulb for a moment and then close your eyes, do you get the after image? The "closed eye hallucinations" are just that normal after image chopped up in frequency space. LSD exposes the fact that a lot of what the brain does can be understood in terms of analog signal processing. The most reliable way to get a high quality viewing of the crystal patterns is with TV static. Baring that, any randomized constant texture such as a carpet will suffice. The reason is because random noise evenly fills up the entire spectrum in frequency space, so whatever frequencies are cut, de-phased, or otherwise affectef are guaranteed to be present in an image of pure noise. Another reliable glitch is that all lines below a certain thickness will tend to wobble or drift in and out of visibility. Again, construct a line as a really thin gaussian wave packet and see what happens when the high frequency terms pick up phase drift. LSD hallucinations have nothing to do with aphantasia.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- cosmojg 5y ago
  > That image will likely be the image of recently used cup or something you cherished deeply. I ended up imagining a comically ornate, little, blue, fine-china teacup. It's not one I've used recently. In fact, I can't remember ever using such a thing! But the image arose effortlessly so I must have seen it at some point, no? Maybe in a videogame or at a friend's house? I don't know; the same thing happens when I attempt this exercise with the words "tree" or "car" or "pencil". It's almost like I'm imagining my own, personal platonic ideals. On the other hand, when I think of a duck, it's a mallard rather than a call duck, and I definitely see more mallard than call ducks in my day-to-day life.
- dEnigma 5y ago
  I've just imagined the most bland white cup, almost like the platonic ideal of a cup. None of my cups, or the cups at work, look like that.
- emsy 5y ago
  I have aphantasia and I think of a very generic cup, akin to a stock image. It’s only a faint image, what’s more prominent is the concept of a cup.
  - lstamour 5y ago
    Likewise. I think, “can hold liquids, handheld, might be hot or cold,” probably a white ceramic comes to mind, maybe something I might have seen at IKEA. No handle, no decorations, a cup isn’t defined by those and they don’t show up in my imagining of one. Smaller in diameter yet about as high or maybe a bit taller than a bowl. Bigger than a thimble, roughly the size of my hand, or easy to palm. Probably in a kitchen or on a dining table. It’s all rather conceptual for me. What’s weird for me is if I do the reverse, and instead of trying to jump from visually imagining a cup to associate other senses, if I instead think of the feeling of a warm cup in my hands, I can more easily imagine what it smelled and tasted like, and even a particular memory comes to mind too. But if I try to do the reverse, such as visualizing that same memory as a picture in my head, I can’t recall the heat or other details, I end up thinking of either concepts (words) or it’s like a photograph and flat, not real life. For me, associations from “imagery” are harder than other kinds of associations and don’t have much impact at all. Strangely, I can associate positionally, though. E.g. that something is on a third shelf or inside a closet, and have that trigger memories. But I can’t do so by remembering what the shelf or closet looked like.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  It makes sense. If I'm asked to visualize a cup, I probably first think of an emptiness that can be filled, then I enclose that, while I'm enclosing it I remember that it needs a hole to be filled or drunk from, and an orientation so I can put that hole on the top and its opposite on the bottom so I can sit it on a table - it has become a cylinder, now I remember a particular, very cylindrical glass that I own that has a Norman Rockwell painting screened onto it, then I realize that I've thought the word "glass," so I get rid of the painting and make it plastic. Then I make it blue, probably because that's the first color I go to when somebody asks me to name a color. If I come across the word "cup" for a little while, I'll just remember that time when I tried to visualize a cup, and think of a blue cylindrical cup.
d--b 5y ago
Wow! When you read these things, and combine that with the advances in AI, it really seems that understanding what happens in the brain is within reach.
- stupendousyappi 5y ago
  IMO, if that's true, it's horrifying. I think there's a great risk that AGI will lead to the extinction or near extinction of the human race.
  - cosmojg 5y ago
    C'est la vie.
  - felipemnoa 5y ago
    Not sure why you are getting downvoted. I would say that AGI is even more dangerous than the Atom bomb. It will still get invented though, we just cannot help ourselves. And to be honest, I would be first in line to invent the thing if I could.
  - PhantomGremlin 5y ago
    Hmmm. Maybe that's why we haven't detected any signs of an advanced civilization elsewhere in the universe. Steps: 1) quantum mechanics 2) semiconductors 3) AGI 4) the machines take over We're about 100 years into that progression, and we're well into step 2. How many years do we have left? Another 100? The machines are probably not "foolish" enough to announce themselves to the rest of the universe.
    - 0ldskool 5y ago
      then wouldn't we find an advanced machine civilization???
  - tetraca 5y ago
    Do you fear that one day your child might be something greater than you yourself ever could be? No. There is no greater accomplishment humanity could achieve than to make itself obsolete.
novacane 5y ago
It’s fascinating to see that the human brain is so adaptive, and that we think more linguistically than we previously thought. Maybe this is also related to the fact that we are primary think in our native language.
- yboris 5y ago
  Anecdata: I was born in Russia but came to the US at the age of 11 years old. I think in English exclusively. One tidbit I read is that people who think in a foreign language like me are in some decision processes more-rational [0]. I think I don't get hung up on emotionally-stirring words, or get offended by vulgarities, as they feel more abstract to me than visceral. May be the same mechanism. [0] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-foreign-language-people-rational-decisions.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-foreign-language-peop...
  - PhantomGremlin 5y ago
    I think in English exclusively But can you still think in your native language if you try to? I was born in the USA, a child of immigrants. So I didn't speak English until perhaps 3 or 4 years old. But I can still think in my native language if I really try.
    - yboris 5y ago
      I can think in Russian, but with a 5th-grader-like vocabulary I'm missing out on ways of articulating some things. It also takes effort. And now that I'm trying it out as an experiment - it feels like I have a concept/idea, and then I'm simply trying to narrate it. I speak Russian to parents and my brother, but it often feels like I have a concept I want to articulate and have to use a bunch of non-SAT words to vaguely gesture at what I want to say; or, I simply don't know a word like "easel" in Russian and feel like I'm playing the game "taboo" :P I think naturally I gravitated out of thinking in Russian since it's too much effort for no payoff. One thing I miss about Russian are all the prefixes you can add to a verb, like "drive over", "drive into", etc are accomplished with short prefixes: "pere-" or "v-". It doesn't sound like much, but when you can apply the dozen-ish prefixes to the word "fuck" you realize the potential English is missing ;)
evancoop 5y ago
The ability to generalize patterns is the link between current brain-computer-interface (BCI) technology that must be recalibrated daily and solutions that might generalize for a single brain across time or even multiple brains (of which no two are alike). Clearly, we respond to our fellow human beings not by processing the activity of their 80 billion neurons, but by recognizing latent patterns in their expressions and the vibrations of the air around them (sound/speech). It looks like these models are the beginning of a path where software ascends that learning curve. Exciting!
- staindk 5y ago
  The other comments in this thread talking about aphantasia has caused me to realise/think I have that condition (and have had interesting chats with my family about it today). Now in context of your comment I'm wondering if people with aphantasia wouldn't perhaps do better at (current) BCI than those who have very image-intensive ways of thinking? Or perhaps it's the other way around - perhaps someone with aphantasia would do worse at BCI, especially if the current tech is based on interpreting images or something.
pengstrom 5y ago
It seems intuitive that perception and memory are one and the same. How we perceive and how we recall is intrinsically bound to the neuron superstructure. Changes in one affects the other. The mind really is an interconnected prediction machine. Fascinating stuff!
MauranKilom 5y ago
Hidden in the article is this link: https://gallantlab.org/huth2016/ https://gallantlab.org/huth2016/ Honestly, this is kinda scary. Some of the concepts that are stored in close proximities feel like they tell... stories. Possibly very individual ones. For example, this is the "tag cloud" for voxel [26,35,42] right ("Good, very reliable"): > housekeeper, landlord, husband, wife, refused, apartment, husband's, parents, wife's, jail, bedroom, servant, family, pregnant, insisted, wives, refusing, pleaded, lawyer, ill Here's another one ([22,42,31] right): > wife, husband, afterwards, afterward, aunt, staying, months, weeks, slept, waited, month, leaving, leave, until, pregnant, decided, date, hadn't, wife's, stay Like, it doesn't seem that far from here to something like "your brain connects child, death and jail very strongly - did you murder a child?"... Of course, I'm theorizing ideas into research that I know very little about. But if it's true, it's hard to put back into the box...
- bonoboTP 5y ago
  No, that's your fantasy and I wonder what dark thoughts you have that you made this leap. For example you inserted "death" (and for that matter "child") out of the blue when it wasn't even there! Out of thre 3 words you speculate about, only one is in the list above, two are purely your own mind's product. The first cluster seems to do with homemaking, accommodation-finding, living arrangements and stresses involving this. The second one is about family and processes/conflicts/stress around it.
- arbol 5y ago
  This brain map was constructed from fMRI scans of participants listening to fictional podcasts called "The Moth". The fact these words are all grouped together suggests a high level of `arousal` which may be related to an emotive part of the story's narrative. You may very well have deduced part of the story. "child" does seem like an outlier when you consider individual words but it's the overall context that's important. Your second example highlights many words that related to time. wife, husband, *afterwards*, *afterward*, aunt, *staying*, *months*, weeks, *slept*, *waited*, *month*, *leaving*, *leave*, *until*, pregnant, decided, *date*, hadn't, wife's, *stay* Being able to visualise general concepts like this is one of the main benefits of the brain map. Reading anything more into it is prone to error.
sireat 5y ago
From the article " memory isn’t a facsimile of past perceptions that gets replayed. Instead, it is more like a reconstruction of the original experience, based on its semantic content." I thought memories as reconstruction not recall model was an already pretty commonly accepted view. One of the examples were people with seemingly perfect memories of their lives. On closer inspection it turned these perfect memories were actual constant replays/refreshes. EDIT: One example I remember reading about was that Nixon aide who claimed perfect recall but actually he was was conflating multiple dates into one. So it is with us with our childhood memories, we might be conflating multiple occurrences into one when we reconstruct our stories.
- causi 5y ago
  I thought memories as reconstruction not recall model was an already pretty commonly accepted view. I don't see any other explanation for, for example, forgetting someone's name and having it disappear from every memory you have of that person.
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  It is! This finding justifies that observation with neurological data.
cestith 5y ago
To take a single-sentence stab at summary: It seems the brain stores semantic descriptions of what we perceive, and memories are reconstructions from those descriptions rather than retrieval of the actual perception.
magicalhippo 5y ago
About 20 years ago I read about an experiment, where they played a game involving a ball with some young kids that had just started to learn to speak. They did a test to evaluate their vocabulary and played the game. Then they came back a year later. Again they evaluated their vocabulary, and asked if they recall the game. The interesting part was that the kids that had not learned the word ball when they first played, but since learned it, would not use that word when recalling the rules of the game. Based on this experiment, they suggested that there was a close link between the available vocabulary and formation of memory. I told my dad about this. He had his major in Norwegian (our native language) and had taught Norwegian to immigrants from Pakistan and similar in the 70s, and had a keen interest in languages. He found it very interesting, as he had read studies showing that immigrants who lost their native language also lost knowledge they learned before they emigrated. Things they had learned at school or university for example. So both sets of studies seemed to point to the same cause, that the memories formed were closely linked to the language you know at the time of formation. As such I'm not terribly surprised that the same seems to be happening with visual memories, as this article suggest. Then again, totally not my field.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  > He found it very interesting, as he had read studies showing that immigrants who lost their native language also lost knowledge they learned before they emigrated. That example would be a negative aspect of it, but forgetting things in itself can be positive. For example, I wonder if this might also work for trauma and rebuilding a new life after migrating to a different country.
- Swizec 5y ago
  As an ESL who grew up in Slovenia, did most of his work in English, and now lives in USA with full immersion[1] – the memory language barrier is very noticeable. Talking to my mom and sister about things that happened in Slovenia is easy and fluent. Talking about things that happened in USA is … hard. I have to translate, I can’t find words, the concepts make no sense, everything is awkward. Make me talk about software engineering in Slovenian and I sound like a bumbling fool. It just doesn’t work. Every 3rd word is English. Entire sentences sometimes. [1] I speak Slovenian maybe a couple times per month nowadays
robg 5y ago
The analytics here are really interesting but the general framework is not new. I was doing this work 20 years ago: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16672666/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16672666/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17243357/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17243357/ The biggest challenge in neuroimaging remains the analytic techniques to show signals. Kudos to this team for those advances.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mike_ivanov 5y ago
"Neurons that fire together, wire together" --Donald Hebb

174 points by nsoonhui 5y ago

It is really interesting to see how these are tangled together! One simple experiment you can do is, think of a cup then a image pops up. That image will likely be the image of recently used cup or something you cherished deeply. Now after a while if you read "a cup" you see same associations! Of course I removed a lot of details, but it's really easy to verify the idea presented here. And something like CLIP[0] seems to be a good direction because it combines both visual and language aspect! [0]: https://openai.com/blog/clip/ https://openai.com/blog/clip/

dannyw 5y ago
I have aphantasia[0], when I think of a cup, no image pops up. I can think about the properties of a cup: it holds a drink, it's a physical object, and if I specifically think about what color or shape a cup is, I can describe it; but I never visualise it. I wonder how my brain works in this context. I also have wondered if this contributed to me being fairly good at programming and systems thinking; but dismal at art and anything creative. [0]: "https://psyche.co/ideas/i-have-no-minds-eye-let-me-try-to-describe-it-for-you https://psyche.co/ideas/i-have-no-minds-eye-let-me-try-to-de..."
- cosmojg 5y ago
  Can you feel the cup? Can you imagine holding it in your hands, caressing the rim, scooping the inside, and feeling the pressure on your hands? Can you imagine your hands getting wet or even the pain of a thousand shards of glass as the cup suddenly shatters? Does it make a sound? Can you smell the tea? Can you taste it?
  - lstamour 5y ago
    Not the same person, but have a similar condition, so I’ll take a go at it. Sample size of one here. > Can you feel the cup? No. There really isn’t a specific cup. > Can you imagine holding it in your hands, caressing the rim, scooping the inside, and feeling the pressure on your hands? Yes, I can imagine these actions, but it’s more about remembering what it might be like to feel that sensation again and is somewhat disconnected from the cup. I end up wanting to remember a different, real cup, when I might have done those actions. Like how I can remember when I last cut off circulation in my hands carrying a heavy plastic bag, say. I know how that feels, but it’s not something I’m particularly good at imagining visually - with a mental image. > Can you imagine your hands getting wet or even the pain of a thousand shards of glass as the cup suddenly shatters? Not quite, and no, I can’t really imagine the shattering. I mean, I can remember a time when a cup fell and shattered and sort of associate that, but just “visualizing” the pain or shattering seems impossible. I can play concept association and “imagine” the cup exploding outwards like a grenade, but it’s not visual or concrete, it’s more conceptual and I lose any connection to pain or feeling or hands and fingers. The more I try to make up without associating with a memory, the more abstract (verbal, less real) the “imagining” seems. > Does it make a sound? I can imagine sounds, and get songs stuck in my head, so I have some idea of how mental visualization should work for me, but it doesn’t visually work that way. It’s interesting that to me, just now, imagining the sound of a cup shattering produces an associated concept mentally than the reverse … I can’t easily go from a shattered or falling cup concept to the sound, but I can relatively easily do the reverse: I can go almost instantly from imagining the sound of a shattered cup to thinking of a shattered or falling cup and what that might look like or how the shards might feel. > Can you smell the tea? Again, thinking of smells first brings back sounds and memories more strongly than visuals would for me, and when I was trying to think of an image, it was abstract - there were no sounds or smells in particular and it wasn’t something I could interact with. More of a model of a cup. Even thinking of the interactions or how something would feel, I now realize, is thinking about feelings and memories of feelings - that visualizing my other senses such as touch, smell or hearing is much easier for me than to visualize based on appearances. > Can you taste it? Not from the mental imagining of the cup, no. If I remember the sounds of when I was at a tea house, or if I pull up a photo of a cup of tea on my phone, then I can imagine the taste. But it feels disconnected to try and purely jump from a “visual” cup to thinking, it tastes like tea. Thinking of how certain foods taste does bring up memories and can make my mouth water imagining or remembering how certain foods tasted, though. Thinking of a taste can bring back the smells, the feeling of heat rising off a dish or hot plate, the sounds of sizzling, and a memory of what it would look like. But there still isn’t really a “picture” and if I wasn’t looking at a photo on my phone, all I could tell you about my visual imaginings would be words or concepts. I can tell that something is missing in my imagining because of how different it is to go from non-visual senses to other non-visual senses. But visuals … don’t have the same mental impact unless I can see them in front of me, e.g. on a computer screen. For others, remembering a layout might trigger memories of details, for me it is the opposite - I remember the layout of a flowchart by remembering which details are connected and then from there I can describe the diagram’s layout in my head. But again, sample size of one here.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago
  I've read a number of times about aphantasia, but I'm still unsure about things. For instance, if I'm asked to think of a cup in my minds eye, I would say yes, I can. Therefore I don't have aphantasia. But it is not at all like looking at a real cup or a picture of a cup. It is far more liminal and fleeting. One bit of evidence of this is when I tried LSD a few times in the past, I don't get CEV (closed eye visuals), while some people report rich, colorful scenery. All the same, I do get visual impressions without actually seeing anything. For instance, while listening to a particular song it generated nothing but blackness in my minds eye, yet all the same I had the impression of looking at glossy flower made of hard glass. I was getting the interpretive conclusion of vision without any of the other information flow that comes along with actually seeing the object. When I visualize things in my mind, it is kind of like that too -- I can describe what I'm seeing but I don't really see it.
  - captaincaveman 5y ago
    Maybe because its a class of things, you can't visualise 'furniture', but you can visualise instance such as an office chair, or dinning table. My description is poor, office chair is also a class, but it not the top class ... I dunno read about this once anyway, didn't make it up, honest!
  - ummwhat 5y ago
    I don't know how much LSD you did or what your body weight was or anything else that might be chemically relevant. But I would be deeply surprised by an individual being immune to the closed eye hallucinations. When you look at a lightbulb for a moment and then close your eyes, do you get the after image? The "closed eye hallucinations" are just that normal after image chopped up in frequency space. LSD exposes the fact that a lot of what the brain does can be understood in terms of analog signal processing. The most reliable way to get a high quality viewing of the crystal patterns is with TV static. Baring that, any randomized constant texture such as a carpet will suffice. The reason is because random noise evenly fills up the entire spectrum in frequency space, so whatever frequencies are cut, de-phased, or otherwise affectef are guaranteed to be present in an image of pure noise. Another reliable glitch is that all lines below a certain thickness will tend to wobble or drift in and out of visibility. Again, construct a line as a really thin gaussian wave packet and see what happens when the high frequency terms pick up phase drift. LSD hallucinations have nothing to do with aphantasia.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cosmojg 5y ago
> That image will likely be the image of recently used cup or something you cherished deeply. I ended up imagining a comically ornate, little, blue, fine-china teacup. It's not one I've used recently. In fact, I can't remember ever using such a thing! But the image arose effortlessly so I must have seen it at some point, no? Maybe in a videogame or at a friend's house? I don't know; the same thing happens when I attempt this exercise with the words "tree" or "car" or "pencil". It's almost like I'm imagining my own, personal platonic ideals. On the other hand, when I think of a duck, it's a mallard rather than a call duck, and I definitely see more mallard than call ducks in my day-to-day life.
dEnigma 5y ago
I've just imagined the most bland white cup, almost like the platonic ideal of a cup. None of my cups, or the cups at work, look like that.
emsy 5y ago
I have aphantasia and I think of a very generic cup, akin to a stock image. It’s only a faint image, what’s more prominent is the concept of a cup.
- lstamour 5y ago
  Likewise. I think, “can hold liquids, handheld, might be hot or cold,” probably a white ceramic comes to mind, maybe something I might have seen at IKEA. No handle, no decorations, a cup isn’t defined by those and they don’t show up in my imagining of one. Smaller in diameter yet about as high or maybe a bit taller than a bowl. Bigger than a thimble, roughly the size of my hand, or easy to palm. Probably in a kitchen or on a dining table. It’s all rather conceptual for me. What’s weird for me is if I do the reverse, and instead of trying to jump from visually imagining a cup to associate other senses, if I instead think of the feeling of a warm cup in my hands, I can more easily imagine what it smelled and tasted like, and even a particular memory comes to mind too. But if I try to do the reverse, such as visualizing that same memory as a picture in my head, I can’t recall the heat or other details, I end up thinking of either concepts (words) or it’s like a photograph and flat, not real life. For me, associations from “imagery” are harder than other kinds of associations and don’t have much impact at all. Strangely, I can associate positionally, though. E.g. that something is on a third shelf or inside a closet, and have that trigger memories. But I can’t do so by remembering what the shelf or closet looked like.
pessimizer 5y ago
It makes sense. If I'm asked to visualize a cup, I probably first think of an emptiness that can be filled, then I enclose that, while I'm enclosing it I remember that it needs a hole to be filled or drunk from, and an orientation so I can put that hole on the top and its opposite on the bottom so I can sit it on a table - it has become a cylinder, now I remember a particular, very cylindrical glass that I own that has a Norman Rockwell painting screened onto it, then I realize that I've thought the word "glass," so I get rid of the painting and make it plastic. Then I make it blue, probably because that's the first color I go to when somebody asks me to name a color. If I come across the word "cup" for a little while, I'll just remember that time when I tried to visualize a cup, and think of a blue cylindrical cup.

d--b 5y ago

Wow! When you read these things, and combine that with the advances in AI, it really seems that understanding what happens in the brain is within reach.

stupendousyappi 5y ago
IMO, if that's true, it's horrifying. I think there's a great risk that AGI will lead to the extinction or near extinction of the human race.
- cosmojg 5y ago
  C'est la vie.
- felipemnoa 5y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvoted. I would say that AGI is even more dangerous than the Atom bomb. It will still get invented though, we just cannot help ourselves. And to be honest, I would be first in line to invent the thing if I could.
- PhantomGremlin 5y ago
  Hmmm. Maybe that's why we haven't detected any signs of an advanced civilization elsewhere in the universe. Steps: 1) quantum mechanics 2) semiconductors 3) AGI 4) the machines take over We're about 100 years into that progression, and we're well into step 2. How many years do we have left? Another 100? The machines are probably not "foolish" enough to announce themselves to the rest of the universe.
  - 0ldskool 5y ago
    then wouldn't we find an advanced machine civilization???
- tetraca 5y ago
  Do you fear that one day your child might be something greater than you yourself ever could be? No. There is no greater accomplishment humanity could achieve than to make itself obsolete.

novacane 5y ago

It’s fascinating to see that the human brain is so adaptive, and that we think more linguistically than we previously thought. Maybe this is also related to the fact that we are primary think in our native language.

yboris 5y ago
Anecdata: I was born in Russia but came to the US at the age of 11 years old. I think in English exclusively. One tidbit I read is that people who think in a foreign language like me are in some decision processes more-rational [0]. I think I don't get hung up on emotionally-stirring words, or get offended by vulgarities, as they feel more abstract to me than visceral. May be the same mechanism. [0] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-foreign-language-people-rational-decisions.html https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-foreign-language-peop...
- PhantomGremlin 5y ago
  I think in English exclusively But can you still think in your native language if you try to? I was born in the USA, a child of immigrants. So I didn't speak English until perhaps 3 or 4 years old. But I can still think in my native language if I really try.
  - yboris 5y ago
    I can think in Russian, but with a 5th-grader-like vocabulary I'm missing out on ways of articulating some things. It also takes effort. And now that I'm trying it out as an experiment - it feels like I have a concept/idea, and then I'm simply trying to narrate it. I speak Russian to parents and my brother, but it often feels like I have a concept I want to articulate and have to use a bunch of non-SAT words to vaguely gesture at what I want to say; or, I simply don't know a word like "easel" in Russian and feel like I'm playing the game "taboo" :P I think naturally I gravitated out of thinking in Russian since it's too much effort for no payoff. One thing I miss about Russian are all the prefixes you can add to a verb, like "drive over", "drive into", etc are accomplished with short prefixes: "pere-" or "v-". It doesn't sound like much, but when you can apply the dozen-ish prefixes to the word "fuck" you realize the potential English is missing ;)

evancoop 5y ago

The ability to generalize patterns is the link between current brain-computer-interface (BCI) technology that must be recalibrated daily and solutions that might generalize for a single brain across time or even multiple brains (of which no two are alike). Clearly, we respond to our fellow human beings not by processing the activity of their 80 billion neurons, but by recognizing latent patterns in their expressions and the vibrations of the air around them (sound/speech). It looks like these models are the beginning of a path where software ascends that learning curve. Exciting!

staindk 5y ago
The other comments in this thread talking about aphantasia has caused me to realise/think I have that condition (and have had interesting chats with my family about it today). Now in context of your comment I'm wondering if people with aphantasia wouldn't perhaps do better at (current) BCI than those who have very image-intensive ways of thinking? Or perhaps it's the other way around - perhaps someone with aphantasia would do worse at BCI, especially if the current tech is based on interpreting images or something.

pengstrom 5y ago

It seems intuitive that perception and memory are one and the same. How we perceive and how we recall is intrinsically bound to the neuron superstructure. Changes in one affects the other. The mind really is an interconnected prediction machine. Fascinating stuff!

MauranKilom 5y ago

Hidden in the article is this link: https://gallantlab.org/huth2016/ https://gallantlab.org/huth2016/ Honestly, this is kinda scary. Some of the concepts that are stored in close proximities feel like they tell... stories. Possibly very individual ones. For example, this is the "tag cloud" for voxel [26,35,42] right ("Good, very reliable"): > housekeeper, landlord, husband, wife, refused, apartment, husband's, parents, wife's, jail, bedroom, servant, family, pregnant, insisted, wives, refusing, pleaded, lawyer, ill Here's another one ([22,42,31] right): > wife, husband, afterwards, afterward, aunt, staying, months, weeks, slept, waited, month, leaving, leave, until, pregnant, decided, date, hadn't, wife's, stay Like, it doesn't seem that far from here to something like "your brain connects child, death and jail very strongly - did you murder a child?"... Of course, I'm theorizing ideas into research that I know very little about. But if it's true, it's hard to put back into the box...

bonoboTP 5y ago
No, that's your fantasy and I wonder what dark thoughts you have that you made this leap. For example you inserted "death" (and for that matter "child") out of the blue when it wasn't even there! Out of thre 3 words you speculate about, only one is in the list above, two are purely your own mind's product. The first cluster seems to do with homemaking, accommodation-finding, living arrangements and stresses involving this. The second one is about family and processes/conflicts/stress around it.
arbol 5y ago
This brain map was constructed from fMRI scans of participants listening to fictional podcasts called "The Moth". The fact these words are all grouped together suggests a high level of `arousal` which may be related to an emotive part of the story's narrative. You may very well have deduced part of the story. "child" does seem like an outlier when you consider individual words but it's the overall context that's important. Your second example highlights many words that related to time. wife, husband, *afterwards*, *afterward*, aunt, *staying*, *months*, weeks, *slept*, *waited*, *month*, *leaving*, *leave*, *until*, pregnant, decided, *date*, hadn't, wife's, *stay* Being able to visualise general concepts like this is one of the main benefits of the brain map. Reading anything more into it is prone to error.

sireat 5y ago

From the article " memory isn’t a facsimile of past perceptions that gets replayed. Instead, it is more like a reconstruction of the original experience, based on its semantic content." I thought memories as reconstruction not recall model was an already pretty commonly accepted view. One of the examples were people with seemingly perfect memories of their lives. On closer inspection it turned these perfect memories were actual constant replays/refreshes. EDIT: One example I remember reading about was that Nixon aide who claimed perfect recall but actually he was was conflating multiple dates into one. So it is with us with our childhood memories, we might be conflating multiple occurrences into one when we reconstruct our stories.

causi 5y ago
I thought memories as reconstruction not recall model was an already pretty commonly accepted view. I don't see any other explanation for, for example, forgetting someone's name and having it disappear from every memory you have of that person.
ravi-delia 5y ago
It is! This finding justifies that observation with neurological data.

cestith 5y ago

To take a single-sentence stab at summary: It seems the brain stores semantic descriptions of what we perceive, and memories are reconstructions from those descriptions rather than retrieval of the actual perception.

magicalhippo 5y ago

About 20 years ago I read about an experiment, where they played a game involving a ball with some young kids that had just started to learn to speak. They did a test to evaluate their vocabulary and played the game. Then they came back a year later. Again they evaluated their vocabulary, and asked if they recall the game. The interesting part was that the kids that had not learned the word ball when they first played, but since learned it, would not use that word when recalling the rules of the game. Based on this experiment, they suggested that there was a close link between the available vocabulary and formation of memory. I told my dad about this. He had his major in Norwegian (our native language) and had taught Norwegian to immigrants from Pakistan and similar in the 70s, and had a keen interest in languages. He found it very interesting, as he had read studies showing that immigrants who lost their native language also lost knowledge they learned before they emigrated. Things they had learned at school or university for example. So both sets of studies seemed to point to the same cause, that the memories formed were closely linked to the language you know at the time of formation. As such I'm not terribly surprised that the same seems to be happening with visual memories, as this article suggest. Then again, totally not my field.

vanderZwan 5y ago
> He found it very interesting, as he had read studies showing that immigrants who lost their native language also lost knowledge they learned before they emigrated. That example would be a negative aspect of it, but forgetting things in itself can be positive. For example, I wonder if this might also work for trauma and rebuilding a new life after migrating to a different country.
Swizec 5y ago
As an ESL who grew up in Slovenia, did most of his work in English, and now lives in USA with full immersion[1] – the memory language barrier is very noticeable. Talking to my mom and sister about things that happened in Slovenia is easy and fluent. Talking about things that happened in USA is … hard. I have to translate, I can’t find words, the concepts make no sense, everything is awkward. Make me talk about software engineering in Slovenian and I sound like a bumbling fool. It just doesn’t work. Every 3rd word is English. Entire sentences sometimes. [1] I speak Slovenian maybe a couple times per month nowadays

robg 5y ago

The analytics here are really interesting but the general framework is not new. I was doing this work 20 years ago: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16672666/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16672666/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17243357/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17243357/ The biggest challenge in neuroimaging remains the analytic techniques to show signals. Kudos to this team for those advances.

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mike_ivanov 5y ago

"Neurons that fire together, wire together" --Donald Hebb