4 ms·

Ayyyyy fellow neurosignal hater, I wasted the first year of my PhD (out of 3) working on electroencephalography (EEG) signals, I'm forever bitter. You see all

Ayyyyy fellow neurosignal hater, I wasted the first year of my PhD (out of 3) working on electroencephalography (EEG) signals, I'm forever bitter. You see all these great papers on medical applications but no one tells you it's a high-dimensional signal that contains one bit or maybe a byte of data at best. So you can do binary classification, or one of many classification (poorly). And that's all you see in all studies: Claim: "Learn to predict behaviour from EEGs" Actual: "We learn to tell whether the patient is moving in any way or completely still with 60% accuracy." Claim: "Learn to reconstruct images from EEGs" Actual: "1 in n classification of previously seen images, then we put a billion parameters on top to go from the binary vector to the mean of the training images with no actual information used from the original signal."

icoder 4y ago
Do you agree that the 'consumer grade' devices that claim mind-control, and seem to work, actually respond to (facial) muscle movements - rendering them useless in (locked) in patients?
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  I don't have enough experience with those to answer I'm afraid, I guess it'd depend on the number of electrodes and their placement. The big problem with those recordings is the skull which acts as a low-pass filter over the signal that goes into your electrodes, more so than the equipment (within reason). So it could go both ways.
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  There are definitely external arrays that can work in locked in patients, but even when the stars align you'll usually be looking at something like 10-20 bits of data per minute. For most people it'll be much less than that, and for some it won't work at all. Generally speaking, these arrays are greatly outperformed by eye tracking, or even a nurse holding an A4 piece of paper and responding to blinks/grunts. This in and of itself wouldn't be a problem, as the tech is in its infancy, but the real issue comes is that researchers are focused on bullshitting the public and selling science fiction rather than improving the existing technology. Nobody understands how or why it works, and instead of learning about the brain we're just inventing new ML trickery.
AussieWog93 4y ago
>I'm forever bitter Ahahaha, that sums it up 100%. And nothing will change as long as researchers can keep selling the same bullshit to grants bodies over and over.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  There should be the ability to grant-hunt. Proof your opponents work is bullshit and get the money assigned to your project. Make hunting research false claims and grant hacks profitable for actual researchers and experts. For example proof irrelevance of research or previous work and get a percent of the grants. Make it unprofitable and dangerous to be a fraud.
  - elektrontamer 4y ago
    This is a really good idea. At my previous job I was handed a scientific paper to implement for an image classifying algorithm, hand picked by the team. Within a month the entire paper turned out to be fabrication, that's 160 man hours gone to waste. They still have the documents and the code as definite proof but it's worthless.

icoder 4y ago

Do you agree that the 'consumer grade' devices that claim mind-control, and seem to work, actually respond to (facial) muscle movements - rendering them useless in (locked) in patients?

ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
I don't have enough experience with those to answer I'm afraid, I guess it'd depend on the number of electrodes and their placement. The big problem with those recordings is the skull which acts as a low-pass filter over the signal that goes into your electrodes, more so than the equipment (within reason). So it could go both ways.
AussieWog93 4y ago
There are definitely external arrays that can work in locked in patients, but even when the stars align you'll usually be looking at something like 10-20 bits of data per minute. For most people it'll be much less than that, and for some it won't work at all. Generally speaking, these arrays are greatly outperformed by eye tracking, or even a nurse holding an A4 piece of paper and responding to blinks/grunts. This in and of itself wouldn't be a problem, as the tech is in its infancy, but the real issue comes is that researchers are focused on bullshitting the public and selling science fiction rather than improving the existing technology. Nobody understands how or why it works, and instead of learning about the brain we're just inventing new ML trickery.

AussieWog93 4y ago

>I'm forever bitter Ahahaha, that sums it up 100%. And nothing will change as long as researchers can keep selling the same bullshit to grants bodies over and over.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
There should be the ability to grant-hunt. Proof your opponents work is bullshit and get the money assigned to your project. Make hunting research false claims and grant hacks profitable for actual researchers and experts. For example proof irrelevance of research or previous work and get a percent of the grants. Make it unprofitable and dangerous to be a fraud.
- elektrontamer 4y ago
  This is a really good idea. At my previous job I was handed a scientific paper to implement for an image classifying algorithm, hand picked by the team. Within a month the entire paper turned out to be fabrication, that's 160 man hours gone to waste. They still have the documents and the code as definite proof but it's worthless.