5 ms·

Our brains create mental "chapters" with new event segmentation study

197 points by domofutu 2y ago

aussieguy1234 2y ago
And now, AI LLMs have a way to prioritise what's important and organise their memory (context window) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42411409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42411409
JimmyWilliams1 2y ago
[dead]
paweladamczuk 2y ago
Please fix the title.
azeirah 2y ago
I wonder if this is the same for people who haven't grown up with linear media (books with chapters, shows with episodes/chapters, albums with songs etc) I always think of the WEIRD people nuance when reading about these kinds of findings. Is the study cohort - Western - Educated - Independent - Rich - Democratic ?
- HPsquared 2y ago
  As most of the readers are also WEIRD, the results would still be relevant even if the scope was limited to that.
  - azeirah 2y ago
    Oh absolutely! The WEIRD "assumption" is basically a description of "the west"
baxtr 2y ago
So many upvotes but very few comments. My feeling is that people are interested in the topic per se but struggle with the takeaway from this paper. I have tried to read the article and also skimmed the original paper, but could not summarize any of it if you asked me now.
- spacemanspiff01 2y ago
  So what I got (but I don't really know what I am talking about) When thinking about a story (or a sequence of events) we can parse it in different ways. We may think about the changes in time/location: ------- 1 he went to the store 2. then went to gas station 3. then went home 4. the next day he woke up. --------- Or you could think of the emotional changes: --------- 1. he was concerned about being unemployed. 2. then at the gas station he got a call saying he got the job and he starts tomorrow. 3. He is nervous about his first day of work. ------ With fmri we can detect these context shifts. The thing the paper adds is that by prompting the user to pay attention to 'emotions' or 'location' it affects where these segmentation changes occur in the fmri results.
  - baxtr 2y ago
    Ok interesting, thanks. In storytelling these are called outer and inner journey respectively.
    - alexpetralia 2y ago
      Also called the fabula and syzuhet!
- uxhacker 2y ago
  You're absolutely right—this topic is fascinating but complex, which might explain why people are engaging with the idea but struggling with the takeaway. One way to think about the paper is that it extends the chunking model, which is essential not only for UX design but also for understanding how people perceive and organize the world around them. How This Extends the Chunking Model 1) Dynamic, Real-Time Chunking: Traditional chunking models focus on discrete, often static information (like remembering a phone number or words). This study shows how the brain applies a similar principle to continuous, dynamic experiences—segmenting life into "mental chapters" as events unfold. 2)Neural Foundations: By identifying the specific brain areas (hippocampus and prefrontal cortex) responsible for marking event boundaries, it adds a biological layer to the chunking model. It’s not just a cognitive strategy—it’s a neural process tied to memory formation and retrieval. 3) Application to UX Design: In UX, understanding event boundaries can inform how we design user journeys. For example, breaking a process (like signing up for a service) into clear steps with defined "boundaries" helps users perceive the flow and remember their progress. Similarly, designing interfaces to reflect natural event segmentation (e.g., transitions between scenes in a video or steps in an onboarding flow) aligns with how people mentally organize experiences. 4) Understanding and Communication: Beyond UX, this model shows why clear, structured narratives are critical for teaching, storytelling, or even summarizing a paper. Without clear boundaries, information gets lost in the noise. Potential Hypotheses for Altered States: It also hints at why psychedelics, which might blur these event boundaries, lead to a sense of timelessness or interconnectedness. This could extend into therapeutic applications or understanding atypical cognition. Why This Matters for Understanding Things When we fail to structure information with clear boundaries, it becomes harder to process or remember—perhaps like your experience skimming the article. This study offers a roadmap for how we can improve communication and design to better align with our brain's natural segmentation processes.
m0llusk 2y ago
This reminds me of the emerging description of conscious function from Daniel Bor's book The Ravenous Brain. In this interpretation the mind is constantly trying to interpret sensory data as intent driven actions from differentiated actors. This makes available critical information about threats and possible targets and so on.
- baxtr 2y ago
  Interesting. Reminds me of the book "The Mind is Flat" by Nick Charter who says that the mind is constantly improvising.
MailleQuiMaille 2y ago
Well…if you present stories, for sure we gonna make chapters out of it. Or beats, even. I wonder what the results would have been if people were showed documentary footage with no narration ? But my suspicion is that just like we sometimes see human faces in places they clearly don’t belong, structuring information in a story format (beginning, middle, end with rises and falls in between) is an intrinsic part of how we process. Maybe it’s not so much that we like stories, but that we see stories everywhere and the more information takes this digest form, the more we feel at ease ?
- HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  We always predict as well we can - that's just how the brain works. Even without narration we'll be subconsciously comparing what we're seeing to past experiences and using those experiences to predict what comes next at various levels of abstraction. I highly doubt we have any intrinsic bias towards perceiving things as following a story template, since our DNA has been shaped by nature, not stories. The major bias we do have, encoded in the way that our brain works, is just that nature is largely predictable on various scales - next time will be the same as last time - and this bias is what causes us to predict and perceive/segment current experience based on past experience.
  - MailleQuiMaille 2y ago
    >our DNA has been shaped by nature, not stories. Interesting point, I believe the opposite. Or, let's say, that stories have much more impact that DNA on our behaviour/thinking models. Religion, money, appartenance to a tribe outside of immediate family, all of that are stories that we adhere to. Hell, look at kamikazes : a group of people willingly destroying themselves (and therefore, their DNA) for the perceived well-being of a larger imaginary group, "their countrymen". No, I believe animals can and do predict their environment, but we differ because we can adhere to a layer of information that is on top of what we can observe : call it collective subconscious or myths, but this is information that helps us do more.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
tinthedev 2y ago
This sounds quite interesting even from a non-AI/machine learning perspective (as a lot of posts are discussing that). I'd say it's a quite important lesson in UI/UX design, and interfaces generally. As per the article, our brains are primed to: > actively constructs event boundaries based on internal priorities rather than passively responding to environmental cues Explains why ads effectivity is low, why a lot of users miss obvious cues, and why UI design is so hard. It's something a lot of professionals know intuitively and through anecdotal evidence. It is quite interesting to see research dig deeper into it, and possibly research/develop better "levers" to pull human attention more efficiently - essentially make us remember things. Priming was long understood to help, and that's primarily from observation/empiricism. Deeper insights into how the brain itself handles this could be game changers.
- notnaut 2y ago
  Outside of a direct connection into the brain, doesn’t it seem a bit unlikely that we ever discover some sort of psychological method of achieving significantly better attention grabbing for individuals or (harder yet) groups than what we’ve already got? The stuff my cartoon addled mind can picture is akin to brainwashing with a black and white spinning spiral. That or extensive, repeated exposure to certain stimuli, clockwork orange style. Better priming seems like the best we could hope to achieve, in a sense, outside of things we’d probably be better off not getting into?
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    Not an expert, but it seems the Holy Grail would be to make an advertisement relevant to the activity the person is currently doing, or things they are thinking about. At least then there's a better chance they'd remember it, if they in fact remember the thing at all. Like a tool that recommends a better tool when you try to do it for a job it's not intended for. I always wish I had a better chop saw when I'm using a circle saw for a too-large post, but when I see ads for chop saws I ignore them. This is probably why there's this enduring trope about going to the hardware store and getting stuck for hours and walking out with too much stuff. You're already in the project mode and there to buy things you need. Very easy to grab just one more thing. Like, why is hobby lobby still a thing?
lenerdenator 2y ago
I feel like my ADHD brain creates a bunch of sticky notes that then get attached to a page in a notebook, which is then unceremoniously shoved into a backpack with its cover open so that the sticky notes come off of the pages and fall into the backpack and get crumpled.
- galleywest200 2y ago
  It either does this, or it superglues the sticky note to the zipper of the backpack so its always the thing you think about first.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rigrassm 2y ago
  Thank you so much for the laugh! I'm definitely quoting this the next time it comes up in conversation, absolutely nails it lol.
constantcrying 2y ago
I hate these studies. The title is obviously false, the study obviously could not demonstrate the claim the title makes. Can we please stop asking people something while looking at their brain "activities"? It is not helpful at all, it generates exactly zero knowledge. This is like trying to figure out how the weather works by throwing scraps of paper into the air and tracing how the wind is throwing them around.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  If you take everything literally then everything is wrong. All models are wrong but some are useful. (And wasn't that essentially the plot of twister?)
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    There is no model. It is just an observation that in March more often then not the scraps thrown into the wind move in an 8 like shape. Even supposing this finding replicates, it shows essentially nothing. It definitely doesn't show anything about the brain creating "chapters".
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      The article and this discussion uses a lot of "scare quotes". Those are approximations / models. The use of the world "Chapters" isn't meant to be taken literally, it is instead meant to convey that the temporal data is chunked, probably approximated by a small set of the brain, and cached. The fact that I'm using more precise language doesn't change the fact that those are also models. What you describe (throwing leaves to the wind) is observations. If someone were to say "The leaves swirl in figure 8 in the autumn" that is a model (autumn->figure8) that can be tested and proven/disproven. It's not useful, but it's a model of the world (autumn causes figure 8 swirls). You can disagree that it's useful, but sorry, it's a model of the brain that is testable and refineable - look for clusters of neurons (for some def of clustering) that is responsible for storing temporal events with a clear start/stop. I'm not an expert, but probably the methods (which cause some consternation for you perhaps?) are wishy washy b/c we don't have a great way of probing the brain - we can't just throw brain cells into the air and watch them make figure 8s. That complexity and noisy input signal does not change the fact that they are proposing a model and measuring a noisy output signal to see if the model is validated or not. (or maybe model came after, in this case, but it's still testable)
giardini 2y ago
IOW Minsky's frames and scripts, later fleshed out by Roger Schank, but in an fMRI context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence... Before the recent LLM distraction, I thought that (frames, scripts, et al; not fMRI) was the one true path.
kordlessagain 2y ago
As with anything generalized about humans, some will do it and some will not. And a few will do something completely different.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
lanceax 2y ago
[dead]
domofutu 2y ago
original study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421683

197 points by domofutu 2y ago

And now, AI LLMs have a way to prioritise what's important and organise their memory (context window) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42411409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42411409

JimmyWilliams1 2y ago

[dead]

paweladamczuk 2y ago

Please fix the title.

azeirah 2y ago

I wonder if this is the same for people who haven't grown up with linear media (books with chapters, shows with episodes/chapters, albums with songs etc) I always think of the WEIRD people nuance when reading about these kinds of findings. Is the study cohort - Western - Educated - Independent - Rich - Democratic ?

HPsquared 2y ago
As most of the readers are also WEIRD, the results would still be relevant even if the scope was limited to that.
- azeirah 2y ago
  Oh absolutely! The WEIRD "assumption" is basically a description of "the west"

baxtr 2y ago

So many upvotes but very few comments. My feeling is that people are interested in the topic per se but struggle with the takeaway from this paper. I have tried to read the article and also skimmed the original paper, but could not summarize any of it if you asked me now.

spacemanspiff01 2y ago
So what I got (but I don't really know what I am talking about) When thinking about a story (or a sequence of events) we can parse it in different ways. We may think about the changes in time/location: ------- 1 he went to the store 2. then went to gas station 3. then went home 4. the next day he woke up. --------- Or you could think of the emotional changes: --------- 1. he was concerned about being unemployed. 2. then at the gas station he got a call saying he got the job and he starts tomorrow. 3. He is nervous about his first day of work. ------ With fmri we can detect these context shifts. The thing the paper adds is that by prompting the user to pay attention to 'emotions' or 'location' it affects where these segmentation changes occur in the fmri results.
- baxtr 2y ago
  Ok interesting, thanks. In storytelling these are called outer and inner journey respectively.
  - alexpetralia 2y ago
    Also called the fabula and syzuhet!
uxhacker 2y ago
You're absolutely right—this topic is fascinating but complex, which might explain why people are engaging with the idea but struggling with the takeaway. One way to think about the paper is that it extends the chunking model, which is essential not only for UX design but also for understanding how people perceive and organize the world around them. How This Extends the Chunking Model 1) Dynamic, Real-Time Chunking: Traditional chunking models focus on discrete, often static information (like remembering a phone number or words). This study shows how the brain applies a similar principle to continuous, dynamic experiences—segmenting life into "mental chapters" as events unfold. 2)Neural Foundations: By identifying the specific brain areas (hippocampus and prefrontal cortex) responsible for marking event boundaries, it adds a biological layer to the chunking model. It’s not just a cognitive strategy—it’s a neural process tied to memory formation and retrieval. 3) Application to UX Design: In UX, understanding event boundaries can inform how we design user journeys. For example, breaking a process (like signing up for a service) into clear steps with defined "boundaries" helps users perceive the flow and remember their progress. Similarly, designing interfaces to reflect natural event segmentation (e.g., transitions between scenes in a video or steps in an onboarding flow) aligns with how people mentally organize experiences. 4) Understanding and Communication: Beyond UX, this model shows why clear, structured narratives are critical for teaching, storytelling, or even summarizing a paper. Without clear boundaries, information gets lost in the noise. Potential Hypotheses for Altered States: It also hints at why psychedelics, which might blur these event boundaries, lead to a sense of timelessness or interconnectedness. This could extend into therapeutic applications or understanding atypical cognition. Why This Matters for Understanding Things When we fail to structure information with clear boundaries, it becomes harder to process or remember—perhaps like your experience skimming the article. This study offers a roadmap for how we can improve communication and design to better align with our brain's natural segmentation processes.

m0llusk 2y ago

This reminds me of the emerging description of conscious function from Daniel Bor's book The Ravenous Brain. In this interpretation the mind is constantly trying to interpret sensory data as intent driven actions from differentiated actors. This makes available critical information about threats and possible targets and so on.

baxtr 2y ago
Interesting. Reminds me of the book "The Mind is Flat" by Nick Charter who says that the mind is constantly improvising.

MailleQuiMaille 2y ago

Well…if you present stories, for sure we gonna make chapters out of it. Or beats, even. I wonder what the results would have been if people were showed documentary footage with no narration ? But my suspicion is that just like we sometimes see human faces in places they clearly don’t belong, structuring information in a story format (beginning, middle, end with rises and falls in between) is an intrinsic part of how we process. Maybe it’s not so much that we like stories, but that we see stories everywhere and the more information takes this digest form, the more we feel at ease ?

HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
We always predict as well we can - that's just how the brain works. Even without narration we'll be subconsciously comparing what we're seeing to past experiences and using those experiences to predict what comes next at various levels of abstraction. I highly doubt we have any intrinsic bias towards perceiving things as following a story template, since our DNA has been shaped by nature, not stories. The major bias we do have, encoded in the way that our brain works, is just that nature is largely predictable on various scales - next time will be the same as last time - and this bias is what causes us to predict and perceive/segment current experience based on past experience.
- MailleQuiMaille 2y ago
  >our DNA has been shaped by nature, not stories. Interesting point, I believe the opposite. Or, let's say, that stories have much more impact that DNA on our behaviour/thinking models. Religion, money, appartenance to a tribe outside of immediate family, all of that are stories that we adhere to. Hell, look at kamikazes : a group of people willingly destroying themselves (and therefore, their DNA) for the perceived well-being of a larger imaginary group, "their countrymen". No, I believe animals can and do predict their environment, but we differ because we can adhere to a layer of information that is on top of what we can observe : call it collective subconscious or myths, but this is information that helps us do more.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago

tinthedev 2y ago

This sounds quite interesting even from a non-AI/machine learning perspective (as a lot of posts are discussing that). I'd say it's a quite important lesson in UI/UX design, and interfaces generally. As per the article, our brains are primed to: > actively constructs event boundaries based on internal priorities rather than passively responding to environmental cues Explains why ads effectivity is low, why a lot of users miss obvious cues, and why UI design is so hard. It's something a lot of professionals know intuitively and through anecdotal evidence. It is quite interesting to see research dig deeper into it, and possibly research/develop better "levers" to pull human attention more efficiently - essentially make us remember things. Priming was long understood to help, and that's primarily from observation/empiricism. Deeper insights into how the brain itself handles this could be game changers.

notnaut 2y ago
Outside of a direct connection into the brain, doesn’t it seem a bit unlikely that we ever discover some sort of psychological method of achieving significantly better attention grabbing for individuals or (harder yet) groups than what we’ve already got? The stuff my cartoon addled mind can picture is akin to brainwashing with a black and white spinning spiral. That or extensive, repeated exposure to certain stimuli, clockwork orange style. Better priming seems like the best we could hope to achieve, in a sense, outside of things we’d probably be better off not getting into?
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  Not an expert, but it seems the Holy Grail would be to make an advertisement relevant to the activity the person is currently doing, or things they are thinking about. At least then there's a better chance they'd remember it, if they in fact remember the thing at all. Like a tool that recommends a better tool when you try to do it for a job it's not intended for. I always wish I had a better chop saw when I'm using a circle saw for a too-large post, but when I see ads for chop saws I ignore them. This is probably why there's this enduring trope about going to the hardware store and getting stuck for hours and walking out with too much stuff. You're already in the project mode and there to buy things you need. Very easy to grab just one more thing. Like, why is hobby lobby still a thing?

lenerdenator 2y ago

I feel like my ADHD brain creates a bunch of sticky notes that then get attached to a page in a notebook, which is then unceremoniously shoved into a backpack with its cover open so that the sticky notes come off of the pages and fall into the backpack and get crumpled.

galleywest200 2y ago
It either does this, or it superglues the sticky note to the zipper of the backpack so its always the thing you think about first.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rigrassm 2y ago
Thank you so much for the laugh! I'm definitely quoting this the next time it comes up in conversation, absolutely nails it lol.

constantcrying 2y ago

I hate these studies. The title is obviously false, the study obviously could not demonstrate the claim the title makes. Can we please stop asking people something while looking at their brain "activities"? It is not helpful at all, it generates exactly zero knowledge. This is like trying to figure out how the weather works by throwing scraps of paper into the air and tracing how the wind is throwing them around.

jvanderbot 2y ago
If you take everything literally then everything is wrong. All models are wrong but some are useful. (And wasn't that essentially the plot of twister?)
- constantcrying 2y ago
  There is no model. It is just an observation that in March more often then not the scraps thrown into the wind move in an 8 like shape. Even supposing this finding replicates, it shows essentially nothing. It definitely doesn't show anything about the brain creating "chapters".
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    The article and this discussion uses a lot of "scare quotes". Those are approximations / models. The use of the world "Chapters" isn't meant to be taken literally, it is instead meant to convey that the temporal data is chunked, probably approximated by a small set of the brain, and cached. The fact that I'm using more precise language doesn't change the fact that those are also models. What you describe (throwing leaves to the wind) is observations. If someone were to say "The leaves swirl in figure 8 in the autumn" that is a model (autumn->figure8) that can be tested and proven/disproven. It's not useful, but it's a model of the world (autumn causes figure 8 swirls). You can disagree that it's useful, but sorry, it's a model of the brain that is testable and refineable - look for clusters of neurons (for some def of clustering) that is responsible for storing temporal events with a clear start/stop. I'm not an expert, but probably the methods (which cause some consternation for you perhaps?) are wishy washy b/c we don't have a great way of probing the brain - we can't just throw brain cells into the air and watch them make figure 8s. That complexity and noisy input signal does not change the fact that they are proposing a model and measuring a noisy output signal to see if the model is validated or not. (or maybe model came after, in this case, but it's still testable)

giardini 2y ago

IOW Minsky's frames and scripts, later fleshed out by Roger Schank, but in an fMRI context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_(artificial_intelligence... Before the recent LLM distraction, I thought that (frames, scripts, et al; not fMRI) was the one true path.

kordlessagain 2y ago

As with anything generalized about humans, some will do it and some will not. And a few will do something completely different.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

lanceax 2y ago

[dead]

domofutu 2y ago

original study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421683