7 ms·

Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture? Ma

by csense 12y ago

Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture? Maybe memories are stored in some partitioned database, and one of the partitions is always stuff relating to "my identity", and somehow this partition can get unlinked and temporarily re-linked to a blank one, which is discarded after a few hours. Hmm, maybe this is actually a feature, not a bug. In ancient times people often had to deal with being abused, enslaved, etc. Maybe being able to blank out really unpleasant experiences helped young slaves tolerate their abuse without becoming totally insane or going the route of suicide or rebellion (assuming the latter's success rate was negligible, rebellion would basically be the same as suicide from the standpoint of evolutionary pressures). Which ultimately helped them survive and reproduce. Then once the mechanism exists, it can still get triggered naturally in modern humans if they're abused, or artificially by drugs.

pbz 12y ago
It most definitely is a feature, not a bug. We all dissociate, but to a much lesser degree. When it happens repeatedly and to extreme degrees of trauma it allows the victim to continue functioning (surviving) without being overwhelmed by the past trauma. It's (somewhat) similar to how ships have compartments that prevent the entire ship from sinking in case of a collision.
- drinchev 12y ago
  Can you give more specific examples of "We all dissociate, but to a much lesser degree". Looks interesting to do more googling on that, but I have no keywords.
  - pbz 12y ago
    Have you ever driven home and when you got there you weren't sure how it happened? You didn't remember driving the entire time. Your hands were at the wheel, but your "mind" was somewhere else.
    - kazinator 12y ago
      If it was your home and you recognized it, and the people in it, then that is not relevant here at all. You're equivocating between the colloquial use of "dissociate" (as in "marathon runners practice dissociation and association") and the clinical term as it is used in this context for a disturbing disorder which has nothing to do with driving a memorized route on "auto pilot". And, by the way, you'd still hit the brakes if a kid jumped out onto the road chasing a ball. It's just multitasking. Simliarly, a piano player isn't "dissociating" just because he or she isn't thinking about which finger goes to which key at all times.
      - pbz 12y ago
        The kind of dissociation you may experience driving a car (being on auto-pilot) is definitely not as extreme as DID, but they share the same foundation. This is our current understanding of how it works. If you don't believe me you'll have to take it up with the professionals in the field. Comparing zoning out with DID is like comparing a hill to a mountain. However, I understand where you're coming from. I don't know how to explain it briefly. The mind works in parallel, way more than we think. So it can focus on two things at once, but "you" may not be part of both at all times. You'd have to let go of the idea that "you" (the person that typed that message) control or are even aware of everything that goes on in your mind. You're just an inhabitant (part) of your mind, and you don't control your mind. (This probably doesn't make much sense; sorry.)
        deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
        ajkjk 12y ago
        We don't believe you because you haven't shared any sources, not because we disagree with professionals.
        Balgair 12y ago
        Please pick up a neuroscience textbook such as this one : http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Edition-Kandel/dp/0071390111 http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Edition-Kand... (here is the camel camel camel page for price comparison: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Edition-Kandel/product/0071390111 http://camelcamelcamel.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Edition... ) Much of what you say is correct on the first pass, and is better than that of the typical citizen, however, some important details are missing. It seems like you are actually interested in the subject and would benefit from learning in depth about the subjects. The mind does indeed work in parallel, but you cannot focus on 2 things at once. I think you are referring to reflexes, which are subtlety different than cerebellar functioning and 'automatic' movements. You are very much in control of your own mind, how else would you define what a mind is? However, you are correct in thinking that certain neural processes are outside of our control and that our mind is conditioned by experience to perceive things in a schema. Really though, the book I linked is great for you, as it seems you have an interest in the subject and want to learn more.
mathattack 12y ago
This is why a lot of cognitive psychologists study abnormal psychology. It's when things break that you can find out what's going on. I do think being able to blank things out (including times of immense pain) is a feature that increases survival rather than a bug. If you are excessively afraid, your ability to pass on your genes goes down.
- ttty 12y ago
  like hackers which hunt unwanted trace output or unexpected errors (:
  - mathattack 12y ago
    Exactly! The magic is revealed when things go wrong.
- kamaal 12y ago
  >> It's when things break that you can find out what's going on. Please correct me if I'm wrong, early part of Medical academics is all about studying how a healthy body body works. So that when they start studying the diseases they can learn to distinguish between a disease and a expected behaviour. So to know if something is an abnormal psychology, you need to first know what is normal.
  - mathattack 12y ago
    I'm not an expert but my guess is yes, though normal is harder to define in psychology. Psych 101 was all about how things work. It took a few classes to get into why things break.
jsprogrammer 12y ago
1) Why do you imply this is a 'failure mode'? You're imposing a very rigid perspective by using that term. 2) People are being abused at this very moment, it's not something that has only occurred in 'ancient times'.
saganus 12y ago
I think (I'm no neuro-*) that one of the things that make the brain so hard to understand is that a lot of the things that a brain is capable of doing could very well be just a side effect or emergent behavior, instead of something that's actually "architectured" (if that even means something..) or designed to do that. Maybe that applies here and so only the emergent behavior was disrupted instead of actually a "piece" of the system?
baby 12y ago
> Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture? Like a fault attack to reveal the inners of human. Brilliant :) And I want to say yes! I've read about it somewhere: a region of the brain was damaged on some persons, and they would function normally most of the time, except they couldn't understand metaphors. I can't remember where I read this though...
lotophage 12y ago
> Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture? There is a long history of this in Neuropsychology. It's referred to as Double Dissociation [1]. Arguably, this is more about the hardware, but the hardware affects the software ("Brain is the seat of the Mind"). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_%28neuropsychology%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_%28neuropsycholog...
Balgair 12y ago
Failure modes are almost the best ways to figure it out. H.M. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison) is a famous case of what can go wrong with seemingly small areas of architecture. One thing to keep in mind is that the brain is not an OS, it is more of a FPGA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array) that is programmed by experience and life. Memory is very much dissociated all over the brain and in non-intuitive ways. For example the motor cortex deals with voluntary (non-reflexive) movement and is in the cortex near the top of your brain. However, given enough time and practice, these movements become controlled by the cerebellum, that little wrinkly thing hanging onto the back and bottom of your brainstem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum#Learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum#Learning). Abuse has a much longer history than just the social ones the we humans experience. Though your description of the mechanisms that may underlie this and the reasoning behind it is cloudy, I would assume that the evolutionary pressure to disassociate mentally is a preserved one throughout evolution. We can see this most memorably with dogs that learn to roll over or become head-shy, this may be a form of the behavior that has been with mammals and manifests itself similarly though not in the same way for each species. Also, our view of slavery is distorted and brutal, Roman slave laws were permissive in the later years of the empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Treatment_and_legal_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Treatm...) and even allowed legal redress of the slave to the master. If we evolved in this system, then most humans had to be slaves from the point of view of genes. This is possible, though not probable.
api 12y ago
Hacker News: where a very human story of empathy and healing immediately turns into a discussion of what this can tell us about the brain's computational architecture.
- mikeash 12y ago
  "Human" includes the drive to figure out how things work and how to fix them when they break.
- mst 12y ago
  Let's do both. My dissociative loves would all consider it a win.
- aaronem 12y ago
  Eh. I mean, I see what you're saying, but it is an interesting line of inquiry, and right up HN's alley.
- driverdan 12y ago
  That's how problems like this get solved.
  - normloman 12y ago
    I get that, but you gotta think about how it comes across. A bunch of computer nerds treating a mental disorder like a math problem. It's seen as insensitive to dive into the problem like that, without a little acknowledgement of the human side of the equation. That's how it comes across to an outsider reading this. But don't get me wrong, empathy won't always lead to better treatment. Science will. And we should ask these questions. Although you're comment "that's how problems like this get solved" is too optimistic. HN is not a forum for neurologists. I doubt a bunch of programmers on a comment section are going to to make a breakthrough in understanding this disease.
    - hueving 12y ago
      Empathy won't lead to a discovery, period. This isn't a forum to discuss our feelings about articles like this. The entire point of the 'hacker' culture is about fixing and changing things through action.
thewarrior 12y ago
There is a guy who has dedicated his career to this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_S._Ramachandran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_S._Ramachandran
TylerJay 12y ago
This is the most fascinating part of mental illness. And it's a bittersweet thought that as horrible as mental illness is, it might be what allows us to really understand the human mind. However, making evolutionary arguments for psychological traits is tricky business and while I'm not a professional evolutionary psychologist myself, I think the explanation you gave violates a fundamental principle of evolutionary arguments. Imagine gene A confers a fitness advantage because it allows a person to better cope with a selection pressure X, and gene B confers an additional fitness advantage against X, but only if gene A is present, and does nothing otherwise. In this (common) case, gene B will not be selected for unless gene A is already universal in the population. Following the same rules, imagine we then get gene C which is dependent on B, then a variant of gene A called A* which is dependent on B and C, and so on. Eventually, if even one gene is removed (either by sexual reproduction with someone who doesn't have it or by mutation), the whole tower falls down and the entire piece of complex biological machinery is broken. Basically, there's no way for selection pressure X on a significant chunk but not all of the population to produce a piece of complex machinery (read: involving 2+ interdependent genes) in the first place, and it would be broken beyond all repair in all offspring who didn't have both parents with the full genetic instructions. So the idea that "many humans were abused, enslaved, etc." only works if the selection pressure was on everyone and the adaptation is universal in the human population, unless it's attributed to a single mutation. The rarity of this condition isn't consistent with it being a feature. Seems like a bug to me. Hope this was helpful!
mtrimpe 12y ago
I just happened to be reading Consciousness and the Social Brain [1] which gives a theory of consciousness as the brain's representation of attention. One of their points was that if consciousness is just a representation it should be possible for your brain to alternate between representations, much like as happens in multi-stable perception [2], which would explain DID. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349805-consciousness-and-the-social-brain https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349805-consciousness-a... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistable_perception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistable_perception
robocat 12y ago
Oliver Sacks' books looks at a wide range of failure modes, and what those failure modes mean about the structure of the brain (e.g. The man who mistook his wife for a hat). Brilliant writer, scientist, and seems like an all round good guy.

by csense 12y ago

pbz 12y ago

It most definitely is a feature, not a bug. We all dissociate, but to a much lesser degree. When it happens repeatedly and to extreme degrees of trauma it allows the victim to continue functioning (surviving) without being overwhelmed by the past trauma. It's (somewhat) similar to how ships have compartments that prevent the entire ship from sinking in case of a collision.

drinchev 12y ago
Can you give more specific examples of "We all dissociate, but to a much lesser degree". Looks interesting to do more googling on that, but I have no keywords.
- pbz 12y ago
  Have you ever driven home and when you got there you weren't sure how it happened? You didn't remember driving the entire time. Your hands were at the wheel, but your "mind" was somewhere else.
  - kazinator 12y ago
    If it was your home and you recognized it, and the people in it, then that is not relevant here at all. You're equivocating between the colloquial use of "dissociate" (as in "marathon runners practice dissociation and association") and the clinical term as it is used in this context for a disturbing disorder which has nothing to do with driving a memorized route on "auto pilot". And, by the way, you'd still hit the brakes if a kid jumped out onto the road chasing a ball. It's just multitasking. Simliarly, a piano player isn't "dissociating" just because he or she isn't thinking about which finger goes to which key at all times.
    - pbz 12y ago
      The kind of dissociation you may experience driving a car (being on auto-pilot) is definitely not as extreme as DID, but they share the same foundation. This is our current understanding of how it works. If you don't believe me you'll have to take it up with the professionals in the field. Comparing zoning out with DID is like comparing a hill to a mountain. However, I understand where you're coming from. I don't know how to explain it briefly. The mind works in parallel, way more than we think. So it can focus on two things at once, but "you" may not be part of both at all times. You'd have to let go of the idea that "you" (the person that typed that message) control or are even aware of everything that goes on in your mind. You're just an inhabitant (part) of your mind, and you don't control your mind. (This probably doesn't make much sense; sorry.)
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - ajkjk 12y ago
        We don't believe you because you haven't shared any sources, not because we disagree with professionals.
      - Balgair 12y ago
        Please pick up a neuroscience textbook such as this one : http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Edition-Kandel/dp/0071390111 http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Edition-Kand... (here is the camel camel camel page for price comparison: http://camelcamelcamel.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Edition-Kandel/product/0071390111 http://camelcamelcamel.com/Principles-Neural-Science-Edition... ) Much of what you say is correct on the first pass, and is better than that of the typical citizen, however, some important details are missing. It seems like you are actually interested in the subject and would benefit from learning in depth about the subjects. The mind does indeed work in parallel, but you cannot focus on 2 things at once. I think you are referring to reflexes, which are subtlety different than cerebellar functioning and 'automatic' movements. You are very much in control of your own mind, how else would you define what a mind is? However, you are correct in thinking that certain neural processes are outside of our control and that our mind is conditioned by experience to perceive things in a schema. Really though, the book I linked is great for you, as it seems you have an interest in the subject and want to learn more.

mathattack 12y ago

This is why a lot of cognitive psychologists study abnormal psychology. It's when things break that you can find out what's going on. I do think being able to blank things out (including times of immense pain) is a feature that increases survival rather than a bug. If you are excessively afraid, your ability to pass on your genes goes down.

ttty 12y ago
like hackers which hunt unwanted trace output or unexpected errors (:
- mathattack 12y ago
  Exactly! The magic is revealed when things go wrong.
kamaal 12y ago
>> It's when things break that you can find out what's going on. Please correct me if I'm wrong, early part of Medical academics is all about studying how a healthy body body works. So that when they start studying the diseases they can learn to distinguish between a disease and a expected behaviour. So to know if something is an abnormal psychology, you need to first know what is normal.
- mathattack 12y ago
  I'm not an expert but my guess is yes, though normal is harder to define in psychology. Psych 101 was all about how things work. It took a few classes to get into why things break.

jsprogrammer 12y ago

1) Why do you imply this is a 'failure mode'? You're imposing a very rigid perspective by using that term. 2) People are being abused at this very moment, it's not something that has only occurred in 'ancient times'.

saganus 12y ago

I think (I'm no neuro-*) that one of the things that make the brain so hard to understand is that a lot of the things that a brain is capable of doing could very well be just a side effect or emergent behavior, instead of something that's actually "architectured" (if that even means something..) or designed to do that. Maybe that applies here and so only the emergent behavior was disrupted instead of actually a "piece" of the system?

baby 12y ago

> Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture? Like a fault attack to reveal the inners of human. Brilliant :) And I want to say yes! I've read about it somewhere: a region of the brain was damaged on some persons, and they would function normally most of the time, except they couldn't understand metaphors. I can't remember where I read this though...

lotophage 12y ago

> Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder: Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture? There is a long history of this in Neuropsychology. It's referred to as Double Dissociation [1]. Arguably, this is more about the hardware, but the hardware affects the software ("Brain is the seat of the Mind"). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_%28neuropsychology%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_%28neuropsycholog...

Balgair 12y ago

Failure modes are almost the best ways to figure it out. H.M. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison) is a famous case of what can go wrong with seemingly small areas of architecture. One thing to keep in mind is that the brain is not an OS, it is more of a FPGA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array) that is programmed by experience and life. Memory is very much dissociated all over the brain and in non-intuitive ways. For example the motor cortex deals with voluntary (non-reflexive) movement and is in the cortex near the top of your brain. However, given enough time and practice, these movements become controlled by the cerebellum, that little wrinkly thing hanging onto the back and bottom of your brainstem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum#Learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum#Learning). Abuse has a much longer history than just the social ones the we humans experience. Though your description of the mechanisms that may underlie this and the reasoning behind it is cloudy, I would assume that the evolutionary pressure to disassociate mentally is a preserved one throughout evolution. We can see this most memorably with dogs that learn to roll over or become head-shy, this may be a form of the behavior that has been with mammals and manifests itself similarly though not in the same way for each species. Also, our view of slavery is distorted and brutal, Roman slave laws were permissive in the later years of the empire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Treatment_and_legal_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Treatm...) and even allowed legal redress of the slave to the master. If we evolved in this system, then most humans had to be slaves from the point of view of genes. This is possible, though not probable.

api 12y ago

Hacker News: where a very human story of empathy and healing immediately turns into a discussion of what this can tell us about the brain's computational architecture.

mikeash 12y ago
"Human" includes the drive to figure out how things work and how to fix them when they break.
mst 12y ago
Let's do both. My dissociative loves would all consider it a win.
aaronem 12y ago
Eh. I mean, I see what you're saying, but it is an interesting line of inquiry, and right up HN's alley.
driverdan 12y ago
That's how problems like this get solved.
- normloman 12y ago
  I get that, but you gotta think about how it comes across. A bunch of computer nerds treating a mental disorder like a math problem. It's seen as insensitive to dive into the problem like that, without a little acknowledgement of the human side of the equation. That's how it comes across to an outsider reading this. But don't get me wrong, empathy won't always lead to better treatment. Science will. And we should ask these questions. Although you're comment "that's how problems like this get solved" is too optimistic. HN is not a forum for neurologists. I doubt a bunch of programmers on a comment section are going to to make a breakthrough in understanding this disease.
  - hueving 12y ago
    Empathy won't lead to a discovery, period. This isn't a forum to discuss our feelings about articles like this. The entire point of the 'hacker' culture is about fixing and changing things through action.

thewarrior 12y ago

There is a guy who has dedicated his career to this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_S._Ramachandran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_S._Ramachandran

TylerJay 12y ago

This is the most fascinating part of mental illness. And it's a bittersweet thought that as horrible as mental illness is, it might be what allows us to really understand the human mind. However, making evolutionary arguments for psychological traits is tricky business and while I'm not a professional evolutionary psychologist myself, I think the explanation you gave violates a fundamental principle of evolutionary arguments. Imagine gene A confers a fitness advantage because it allows a person to better cope with a selection pressure X, and gene B confers an additional fitness advantage against X, but only if gene A is present, and does nothing otherwise. In this (common) case, gene B will not be selected for unless gene A is already universal in the population. Following the same rules, imagine we then get gene C which is dependent on B, then a variant of gene A called A* which is dependent on B and C, and so on. Eventually, if even one gene is removed (either by sexual reproduction with someone who doesn't have it or by mutation), the whole tower falls down and the entire piece of complex biological machinery is broken. Basically, there's no way for selection pressure X on a significant chunk but not all of the population to produce a piece of complex machinery (read: involving 2+ interdependent genes) in the first place, and it would be broken beyond all repair in all offspring who didn't have both parents with the full genetic instructions. So the idea that "many humans were abused, enslaved, etc." only works if the selection pressure was on everyone and the adaptation is universal in the human population, unless it's attributed to a single mutation. The rarity of this condition isn't consistent with it being a feature. Seems like a bug to me. Hope this was helpful!

mtrimpe 12y ago

I just happened to be reading Consciousness and the Social Brain [1] which gives a theory of consciousness as the brain's representation of attention. One of their points was that if consciousness is just a representation it should be possible for your brain to alternate between representations, much like as happens in multi-stable perception [2], which would explain DID. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349805-consciousness-and-the-social-brain https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17349805-consciousness-a... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistable_perception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistable_perception

robocat 12y ago

Oliver Sacks' books looks at a wide range of failure modes, and what those failure modes mean about the structure of the brain (e.g. The man who mistook his wife for a hat). Brilliant writer, scientist, and seems like an all round good guy.