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As someone who works in EEG, you may be surprised that I somewhat agree with you. Let's start with where I am in agreement. EEG or fMRI data only tells us abo

As someone who works in EEG, you may be surprised that I somewhat agree with you. Let's start with where I am in agreement. EEG or fMRI data only tells us about electrical activity in the brain, specifically the firing of neurons in different patterns and areas of the brain. We are yet to make the absolute connection of how that electrical activity translates into thought. What I do find interesting is that in the age when we were learning about the movement of fluid and pumps, everything was taken from the understanding of how blood moved through the body and how we "worked" as a result of this fluid moving through our pipes. As we learned more about electrical activity, we suddenly thought "oh! The pumps are moving necessary biological matter, but it's really the electrical impulses that are the important part. Even when we look at how the heart or any other muscle works, it's all about the electrical now. So what is the next phase? As we understand more about quantum mechanics, will that be the next state of science that we attach to our understanding of how we work? Will it be something else? However, the way I see this differently from you is that knowing how the pumps work, or knowing how the electrical systems work does are still valuable to us. This isn't like the old days where we got sick from "humours". So don't through the baby out with the bathwater. Understanding the electrical function of the brain is likely important in reaching our next level of understanding. Now a somewhat unrelated, but tied to your thinking. I think this is what most people miss when they are talking about Nuralink and other implantable BCI. When people talk about "connecting our brains to the internet", we have to realize that we don't really have the ability to directly put information in. We can try to map electrical activity to requests, but I don't believe we have that in a high resolution method. This doesn't mean BCI isn't valuable. If you have Parkinson's or other medical issue that can be treated with stimulation, it is absolutely valuable. But getting a monkey to play a game is still a long way from getting information in. Plus, a joystick is still easier, cheaper, and probably more fun than just staring at a screen without moving your body....assuming you have a body to move.

Smoosh 4y ago
The 1970's BBC series, "The Body In Question" [0] explained the functioning of the body as understood through medical history and I found it very interesting that the latest technology was always used as a metaphor (and sometimes more) to expand understanding. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_in_Question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_in_Question
Someone 3y ago
> EEG or fMRI data only tells us about electrical activity in the brain, specifically the firing of neurons in different patterns and areas of the brain. We are yet to make the absolute connection of how that electrical activity translates into thought. To do that, I think we’d need much higher resolution imaging, both in space and in time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_imaging#BOLD_hemodynamic_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_... talks of submillimeter spatial for fMRI while a neuron is about 0.1mm. It also says temporal resolution can be about a second. Whether that is sufficient isn’t clear to me. I think we know too little of the human brain to make a judgment on that. On the one hand, https://aiimpacts.org/rate-of-neuron-firing/ https://aiimpacts.org/rate-of-neuron-firing/ says a brain neuron, on average, fires less than 2 times a second. On the other hand https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2016.00239/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2016.0023... talks of fast-spiking neurons that fire hundreds of times a second. The current data is like trying to figure out how a CPU works from recordings that don’t show individual bits, but only show what parts get active when doing floating point calculations, when doing I/O, etc.

Smoosh 4y ago

The 1970's BBC series, "The Body In Question" [0] explained the functioning of the body as understood through medical history and I found it very interesting that the latest technology was always used as a metaphor (and sometimes more) to expand understanding. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_in_Question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_in_Question

Someone 3y ago

> EEG or fMRI data only tells us about electrical activity in the brain, specifically the firing of neurons in different patterns and areas of the brain. We are yet to make the absolute connection of how that electrical activity translates into thought. To do that, I think we’d need much higher resolution imaging, both in space and in time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_imaging#BOLD_hemodynamic_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_magnetic_resonance_... talks of submillimeter spatial for fMRI while a neuron is about 0.1mm. It also says temporal resolution can be about a second. Whether that is sufficient isn’t clear to me. I think we know too little of the human brain to make a judgment on that. On the one hand, https://aiimpacts.org/rate-of-neuron-firing/ https://aiimpacts.org/rate-of-neuron-firing/ says a brain neuron, on average, fires less than 2 times a second. On the other hand https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2016.00239/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2016.0023... talks of fast-spiking neurons that fire hundreds of times a second. The current data is like trying to figure out how a CPU works from recordings that don’t show individual bits, but only show what parts get active when doing floating point calculations, when doing I/O, etc.