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The discovery that changed how scientists think about memory
- Animats 5mo agoGreat result on the biochemistry of memory storage. Then they venture into philosophy: "They still struggle to explain the spark that transforms information into insight." Go watch Stable Diffusion iteratively transform noise into originality.
- project2501a 5mo agoi'm sorry, I cannot agree that anything like that can create "originality".
- taneq 5mo agoCreativity can be thought of as a combination of two things: A random idea generator, and a nonsense filter. Generate new random results ideas, filter out the nonsense ones, and you’ve generated good ideas.
- boston_clone 5mo agoA massive chasm exists between good, creative ideas and ideas that aren’t nonsense.
- CrimsonRain 5mo agoThat's why most people are not creative, and tbqh, rather dumb
- coldtea 5mo agoNot that massive. A lot of good, creative ideas have been called out and derived as nonsense or crazy. Many still are.
- stevenhuang 5mo agoYeah you should really familiarize yourself with the history of scientific achievements, it will quickly disabuse you of this notion. What separates is often a thin line and dogged persistence, hardly the chasm you make it seem.
- itsalwaysgood 5mo agoCreativity also requires information. And Information is discovered. We can only generate random ideas from what we know. We can't imagine something we've never sensed, or know. You can't imagine a color you've never seen without recalling known colors. You can freely mix ideas due to your imagination. But when we discover new information, we must decide whether the information is useful. Otherwise the information is considered noise. We give weight to decisions: time spent pondering, considering, and the more weight we give, the better the decision. Almost always the idea is measured in usefulness. Sound familiar?
- Earw0rm 5mo agoIMV creativity that matters contains a third ingredient: intent, purpose, the will to make an artistic statement of some kind about how the world is or should be.
- goodmythical 5mo agoThat's just an anthropomorphic viewpoint though. One could argue from a religious standpoint that creativity requires a spark of divinity. One could argue from a naturalist standpoint that natural selection has been a creative process in which nature tries random things until they stick for no purpose that we can directly observe. One could argue from a platonic standpoint that creativity in this realm of existence is merely the process of approximating ideal forms. I'd wager that creativity is a human construct and therefore up to interpretation. Kinda like how the ancient greeks didn't have as many colors words as we did. Was it because they couldn't see all the colors we could see? No, it was because in their opinion only certain color words were necessary to discuss what was important.
- coldtea 5mo agoAs opposed to what? Water and tissue?
- ProllyInfamous 5mo ago>>They're made out of meat... >>>They're made out of weights...
- mr_toad 5mo agoIt still surprises me that people can complain about LLMs making things up (i.e. hallucinating), and simultaneously complain that they never produce anything original.
- MarceliusK 5mo agoSo I'd say diffusion models make the philosophy less mystical but not necessarily solved
- bambax 5mo ago> Every memory begins with tiny changes inside the brain Maybe. But the brain is not the only place where memory is stored. Flat worms remember things (and skills!) after their head has been cut off and they regrew it: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapitated-worms-regrow-old-memories-along-with-new-heads-9497048/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapita...
- Earw0rm 5mo agoFlatworms branched off our side of the animal tree of life very early on. They're on the same side as molluscs, some of whom (cephalopods) are famous for having a more distributed nervous system. Granted though many/most organs are stateful and somewhat adaptive - in a sense they'll "remember" what happened. Even plants possess that to varying degrees.
- Roark66 5mo agoDid you know human overies contain neurons? I suppose memories are not stored there :-) but still the fact is rather surprising.
- j45 5mo agoThe heart has neurons in it too.
- adrianN 5mo agoI believe there are tastebuds in your colon too.
- Earw0rm 5mo agoAFAIK the gut in large terrestrial vertebrates has its own nervous system that rivals the complexity of the entire system in simpler creatures. The idea that all stateful/regulatory stuff is entirely localised to the brain is a bit too simple to be true. Most of it, sure, but that last few percent can be doing all sorts of clinically important stuff. Nature is an incredibly brilliant engineer, but not always a tidy one.
- kator 5mo agoI think the most interesting thing is that it took 15 years for people to apparently take this seriously. And another 40 to recognize its impact. The original paper[1] was from 1982... Having been in software development for 45 years, I find this crazy. Maybe it's because in our world, it often takes a month for something to spread from "interesting" to the new technology of the day, or the new way of doing things. [1] https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/2/3/284.full.pdf https://www.jneurosci.org/content/jneuro/2/3/284.full.pdf
- layer8 5mo agoIt used to be slower in software development as well. The internet and the exponentially increasing number of software developers accelerated it. And of course new hardware that made things practical that were only a theoretical possibility before.
- kator 5mo agoTrue, that said, I downloaded and compiled Perl in 1987 from comp.sources.misc, even back then, things moved at light speed compared to health and medical.
- MarceliusK 5mo agoA lot of "rapid adoption" in software is really the result of unusually cheap distribution and feedback loops
- MarceliusK 5mo agoI think part of the difference is that in software we can often try the new thing immediately and see whether it helps. In biology, "this is real" and "this is important" are much harder to establish because the system is noisy, the experiments are slow and the implications may not be obvious until other pieces of the puzzle show up
- stefantalpalaru 5mo ago[dead]
- unsupp0rted 5mo agoIt's amazing after all these years we're still so bad at improving an average person's recall, even by 50%. It feels like there's a lot of low-hanging fruit there, and all we can do is spaced repetition systems, the memory palace, strong associative scents, etc Weak. If we had a better understanding of memory perhaps we could give the average person techniques for 10x'ing their recall without jumping through Anki hoops.
- MarceliusK 5mo ago[dead]
- MarceliusK 5mo agoWhat I like about this story is how physical the problem is
- truvem 5mo ago[flagged]
- gibsonf1 5mo agoThis discovery fully validates the organic system side of Peter Putnam's theory on induction, the Neuro Conditioned Reflex Principle, that requires changing state at synapses over time to select the nested Relative Dominance feedback winner in a given Conditioned Reflex feedback loop. Its quite incredible that the functionality of induction proposed by Putnam in 1963 has been consistently validated since then. [1] [1] https://www.peterputnam.org/outline-of-a-functional-model-of-the-nervous-system-putnam-1963 https://www.peterputnam.org/outline-of-a-functional-model-of...