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posted by takyon on Monday August 19 2019, @08:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the echo-echo-echo dept.

Seconds before a memory pops up, certain nerve cells jolt into collective action [DOI: 10.1126/science.aax1030] [DX]. The discovery of this signal, described in the Aug. 16 Science, sheds light on the mysterious brain processes that store and recall information.

Electrodes implanted in the brains of epilepsy patients picked up neural signals in the hippocampus, a key memory center, while the patients were shown images of familiar people and places, including former President Barack Obama and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. As the participants took in this new information, electrodes detected a kind of brain activity called sharp-wave ripples, created by the coordinated activity of many nerve cells in the hippocampus.

Later blindfolded, the patients were asked to remember the pictures. One to two seconds before the participants began describing each picture, researchers noticed an uptick in sharp-wave ripples, echoing the ripples detected when the subjects had first seen the images.


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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Monday August 19 2019, @08:18PM (1 child)

    by looorg (578) on Monday August 19 2019, @08:18PM (#882299)

    "one or two seconds before", it might just be me but I would imagine the brain was a bit faster then that. But then I guess perhaps the delay is in the human-to-human communication step; hearing command, interpret command, start talking ...

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @08:47AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @08:47AM (#882537)

      You might think that but look up the P300 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P300_%28neuroscience%29 [wikipedia.org] and the P500 etc. That P means prior and that 300 is in ms, which means 0.3s prior to awareness of or action based on a decision, the decision to do that has been initiated. Operations in the brain on the order of 1s are very common outside of feedback loop signal processing of inputs.

      Related to your train of thought, also, *most* people don't think expressible sentiments faster than they talk, in my limited experience.

  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 19 2019, @08:56PM (4 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday August 19 2019, @08:56PM (#882318)

    The best neurologically oriented description of brain cognitive function I've ever heard went something like this:

    Different brain regions are stimulated by repeating spike-trains of particular patterns, such as the patterns received by the optic nerve as you read this. Those various spike-train patterns compete at the current level of processing until a clear dominant pattern emerges which then goes on to stimulate the next level of processing. Overly simplifying: as you read letters, the collection of letters fires off their recognition patterns and the word recognition level synthesizes the collection of letters into a word pattern, which then goes off to the next level, to try to make sense of the words in context, etc. This is particularly compelling when you consider the demonstration of how you can rcogeznie amslot any wrod as long as the first and last letter are correctly placed and the other letters are in there, somewhere.

    Anyway, fun stuff, particularly if you imagine the competing chaos of all the thoughts that don't quite make it to top position and what you might have thought if they did.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @02:40AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @02:40AM (#882455)

      You sound like you'd enjoy "I Am A Strange Loop", if Hofstadter's writing style doesn't bother you (I enjoy it FWIW, but his style has probably fueled a few cranks who misunderstood).

    • (Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday August 20 2019, @07:20AM

      by ledow (5567) on Tuesday August 20 2019, @07:20AM (#882518) Homepage

      A bit like a Fourier transform of an image causing the frequencies within it to fire off certain paths, which ultimately results in a kind of "spectrograph" of data in the brain, which is then triggering memory extraction.

      Would make sense - works at any scale/size, in any colour or orientation, and it's exactly how we do computer-based image recognition.

      Not just a singular bit-path (that's far too computer-y), but a map, changing into a frequency map, laid over a billion neurons, which then produce their own output map which is used in ever-deeper interpretation.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:37AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:37AM (#882939)

      Your model is fine but it assumes a very simple structure. Have a gander at https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/06/book-review-behavior-the-control-of-perception/ [slatestarcodex.com] - I'll check back here in case you'd like to discuss the ideas.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @06:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 22 2019, @06:42AM (#883494)

      I thought a fair bit of the brain was more like a bunch of Bingo halls with neurons in them... As stuff gets "read out" in a hall a bunch of neurons who get a match yell out BINGO! and their output gets fed to other Bingo halls. ;)

      See also:
      https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7567-why-your-brain-has-a-jennifer-aniston-cell/ [newscientist.com]
      https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/single-cell-recognition-halle-berry-brain-cell-1013 [caltech.edu]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @02:32AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @02:32AM (#882448)

    I don't recall the details, but I never took "On Intelligence" too seriously beyond a source of interesting ideas.

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