3 ms·

possible it's just bad science reporting

• theptip 5y ago
  Reading the paper's abstract, definitely just bad science reporting. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35395195/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35395195/
  • JackFr 4y ago
    I 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 4y ago
      I 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 4y ago
        Should be “topographically-arranged” above…