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> It turned out that either visual stimulus—the grating or moving dots—resulted in the same patterns of neural activity in the visual cortex and parietal cortex
by JackFr 5y ago
> It turned out that either visual stimulus—the grating or moving dots—resulted in the same patterns of neural activity in the visual cortex and parietal cortex. The parietal cortex is a part of the brain used in memory processing and storage.
>These two distinct visual memories carrying the same relevant information seemed to have been recoded into a shared abstract memory format. As a result, the pattern of brain activity trained to recall motion direction was indistinguishable from that trained to recall the grating orientation.
>This result indicated that only the task-relevant features of the visual stimuli had been extracted and recoded into a shared memory format. But Curtis and Kwak wondered whether there might be more to this finding.
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That is outrageously bad logic and is basically assuming your conclusion. This is not good science.
- roflc0ptic 5y agopossible it's just bad science reporting
- theptip 5y agoReading the paper's abstract, definitely just bad science reporting. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35395195/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35395195/
- JackFr 5y agoI don't know. I just don't see it. The subject is given two tasks requiring working memory. The researchers observe activity in the parietal and visual cortices via fMRI, and find the neural activity between the two tasks is indistinguishable. And conclude > ... distinct visual stimuli (oriented gratings and moving dots) are flexibly recoded into the same WM format in visual and parietal cortices when that representation is useful for memory-guided behavior. Seems a pretty big leap to me. I'm not a neuroscientist, and fMRI is amazing. But I think there's more handwaving about how 'thoughts' and 'memories' are 'encoded' as if the brain were a piece of electronics we fully understood. There's no magic -- everything we think has to happen at some physical level, but I think there is a generation of neuroscientists who are fooling themselves by projecting a reductionist mental(?!) model of how the brain works that is as yet unjustified, and interpreting all of their results in the light of that model.
- theptip 5y agoI read it as saying they actually got topographical line-like structures in the MRI, similarly to the well established result that there are typographically-arranged visual neurons that essentially light up like pixels in response to a scene. So if that’s right then they are actually measuring a spatial encoding. Anyway, it’s just the abstract so I could be completely wrong.
- theptip 5y agoShould be “topographically-arranged” above…