To Predict the Future, the Brain Uses two Clocks:
That moment when you step on the gas pedal a split second before the light changes, or when you tap your toes even before the first piano note of Camila Cabello's "Havana" is struck. That's anticipatory timing.
One type relies on memories from past experiences. The other on rhythm. Both are critical to our ability to navigate and enjoy the world.
New University of California, Berkeley, research shows the neural networks supporting each of these timekeepers are split between two different parts of the brain, depending on the task at hand.
"Whether it's sports, music, speech or even allocating attention, our study suggests that timing is not a unified process, but that there are two distinct ways in which we make temporal predictions and these depend on different parts of the brain," said study lead author Assaf Breska, a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at UC Berkeley.
The findings, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, offer a new perspective on how humans calculate when to make a move.
"Together, these brain systems allow us to not just exist in the moment, but to also actively anticipate the future," said study senior author Richard Ivry, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist.
[...] Both groups viewed sequences of red, white and green squares as they flashed by at varying speeds on a computer screen, and pushed a button the moment they saw the green square. The white squares alerted them that the green square was coming up.
In one sequence, the red, white and green squares followed a steady rhythm, and the cerebellar degeneration patients responded well to these rhythmic cues.
In another, the colored squares followed a more complex pattern, with differing intervals between the red and green squares. This sequence was easier for the Parkinson's patients to follow, and succeed at.
"We show that patients with cerebellar degeneration are impaired in using non-rhythmic temporal cues while patients with basal ganglia degeneration associated with Parkinson's disease are impaired in using rhythmic cues," Ivry said.
How about that? Background music can be helpful for concentration.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @09:58PM (2 children)
Most Americans can't read a clock. Tell Joe Sixpack that you'll meet him at the bar at 20:00 and his eyes will glaze over. He doesn't understand that there are 24 hours in a day, and that you want to meet him at the 20'th hour of the day. Instead, he needs you to do the complicated mathematical dance of subtracting 12 from 20, then giving him the translation to 8:00 PM.
But, we have the best education system on earth! Just ask any administrator with a degree in education!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @10:27PM (1 child)
While most Americans can't read a clock, they are capable of advanced mathematics. For example, millennial Americans can deal with complex numbers such as the current number of recognized genders.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Sunday December 02 2018, @02:32AM
That's okay. On a similar vein, I don't require a spectrum to accurately categorise your douchebaggery into either "full on douchebag" or "absolute non-douchebag". Fortunately, you perfectly fit into that binary choice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @10:34PM (3 children)
See, he's a day ahead, and....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 01 2018, @10:49PM (2 children)
you ain't got no buddy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kkrb4h4weW4 [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by RandomFactor on Saturday December 01 2018, @11:23PM (1 child)
Props for linking the original I quite enjoyed it. I know David Lee Roth's version of course, but don't believe I have ever heard the original. They compare pretty well actually.
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02 2018, @03:29AM
Louis Arsmtrong version is probably better known - you've heard it? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCMAeJ73JEg [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by crafoo on Saturday December 01 2018, @10:54PM (2 children)
Really interesting research. I'm curious if this understanding of how the mammal brain works will inform deep learning, neural networks, and real-time applications of NNs to tasks such as navigation. Can a system make a decision based on learned past experience patterns and then update the decision incrementally based on real-time data? Maybe this is all being done already. I don't know.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Sunday December 02 2018, @02:39AM (1 child)
We don't have a single "AI" (all those things you just mentioned collectively) system that's capable of any inference whatsoever.
They are all statistical models driven by human-created statistics. "Sufficiently advanced technology" that may be "indistinguishable from magic" for a small range of tasks, but essentially untrainable, certainly not RETRAINABLE (you just have to start from scratch every time) and nowhere near capable of even the most basic of inference.
As such, expecting any such system to adapt to new patterns generally results in failure.
To simplify: You can teach a machine to recognise a banana in an image with 90% accuracy. To get 95% accuracy becomes a thousand times harder. And it plateaus even more after that. To then take THAT machine and re-train it to recognise apples (i.e. "unlearn" everything it "learned") would take decades of effort.
Which is why you'll always see these things as PhD projects. You start from scratch, get some accuracy, get some "increasing" accuracy, and then abandon it quickly when you realise that it isn't getting much better no matter what you do. And then if someone wants to use your work for something else, they pretty much have to start from scratch with their own training data all over again or somehow "untrain" everything you did.
We don't have a damn clue how our mind works, and we certainly don't have anything even approaching a digital analogue of it.
If it was just a case of training and brute-force, then Google's AI wouldn't just be playing Go, it would be running the world. Fact is AlphaGo can play a perfectly describable and logical game better than humans. IBM's Watson could look up facts and word an answer from keywords faster than a Jeopardy player. But neither could do both with the same program, or any kind of meld of such, and neither improved once they started to plateau. IBM's Watson has been the subject of a number of articles along the "fine, what do we do with it now" line... neither IBM nor anyone else has any real proper use for it.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday December 04 2018, @08:17PM
Humans don't adapt to new patterns very well either. Most humans aren't capable of very much inference and aren't very trainable either.
We don't have a damn clue how our mind works, and we don't have a damn clue how artificial neural networks work either.
I find a lot of smart people can't avoid the subconscious feeling that there's something "special" about human intelligence, like there's a kind of "soul" behind them.
Spoilers, there's not. It's just a matter of building a big enough neural network and training it with the right environment and interfaces, and some natural/artificial selection, and time. It took evolution millions of year, I'm sure we can replicate it given a millennium if we don't destroy ourselves first.
Intelligence is in the eye of the beholder. We observe some inputs and outputs, and we call some of those intelligence and some of those not.
If a robot only says "Welcome to Corneria", that's not intelligence. If an AI tasked with surviving a game as long as possible figures out it can just pause the game, that looks an awful lot like what a young boy would do, experimentation followed by an "Ah ha!" moment and "technically I completed the task".
"But an AI trained to do X can't do Y!" Most humans can't either.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday December 01 2018, @10:57PM (2 children)
My first job out of high school was pumping fuel serve at Fairfield Shell. For the most part this was a relaxing job, I could sit in a chair and read most of the day which led my manager Bill to come up with such chores for me as policing the lot and weeding our planters, but after I'd done both just once Bill just had to suffer in silence as I read books way beyond his grade level.
I worked 6:00 AM - 2:00 PM; our morning and lunch time rushes were just like the flight deck of an air craft carrier in battle was once described on Usenet: "You had to have eyes on the back of your head".
My assistant manager quite quickly taught me how to peg the precise - to within less than one cent of error - the _precise_ cost of gasoline that the customer requested:
Towards the end of their fueling, keep a close eye on the price display; it helped that we had mechanical pumps so we could hear the pennies clicking by. Then start tapping your foot with the prices - fifty, sixty, seventy, seventy-five, eighty, eighty-five, ninety, one two three four five six seven eight nine... let go of the hose handle valve right about half-way between ninety-nine and one-hundred.
While there was some finesse to getting just the right delay before one let go of the valve, because of the one-cent quantization of the price meter, it was not at all to learn that delay well enough to become muscle memory.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02 2018, @03:42AM (1 child)
Congratulations! You just realized the skills any decent musician has to employ every other measure of a performance, often in signficantly more complex patterns (not just let's count to 100).
Astounding someone like you could manage it...
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday December 02 2018, @05:31AM
If you download it please drop it right in your shared folder
http://mike.soggywizards.com/music/geometric-visions-the-rough-draft/ [soggywizards.com]
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday December 02 2018, @12:23AM
Filter error: Commont Too Long.
I'll mark it up, post it at warplife.com then link it in a reply.
Something is quite seriously wrong. I've had an intense head rush for like ten minutes, and a truly loud ringing in my ears.
Were I to try to get up quite likely I would fall down. But I must do so so I can perform a Stroke Exam in the bathroom mirror.
If I think I really _am_ having a stroke I'll dial 9-1-1.
_third_ time since last Saturday. That's a Personal Best!
Now I am incredibly dizzy. Please Don't Let Me Die Before I Debut!
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02 2018, @02:04AM (1 child)
and yet, the trains still don't run on time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 02 2018, @09:20AM
There is no train. -funny looking robed kid from the Matrix
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday December 03 2018, @03:27PM
Maybe the ability to have rhythm and anticipatory timekeeping was important at some point when trying to throw a spear at moving prey? Where today it is to see who can get first post.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.