Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Have you ever sat down to complete your morning crossword or Sudoku and wondered about what's happening in your brain? Somewhere in the activity of the billions of neurons in your brain lies the code that lets you remember a key word, or apply the logic required to complete the puzzle.
Given the brain's intricacy, you might assume that these patterns are incredibly complex and unique to each task. But recent research suggests things are actually more straightforward than that.
It turns out that many structures in your brain work together in precise ways to coordinate their activity, shaping their actions to the requirements of whatever it is that you're trying to achieve.
We call these coordinated patterns the "low-dimensional manifold," which you can think of as analogous to the major roadways that you use to commute to and from work. The majority of the traffic flows along these major highways, which represent an efficient and effective way to get from A to B.
We have found evidence that most brain activity follows these types of patterns. In very simple terms, this saves your brain from needing to work everything out from scratch when performing a task. If someone throws you a ball, for instance, the low-dimensional manifold allows your brain to swiftly coordinate the muscle movements needed to catch the ball, rather than your brain needing to learn how to catch a ball afresh each time.
In a study published today in the journal Neuron, my colleagues and I investigated these patterns further. Specifically, we wanted to find out whether they play a role in shaping brain activity during really challenging cognitive tasks that require lots of concentration.
[... They found that] the circuitry of the thalamus is such that it can act as a filter for ongoing activity in the cerebral cortex, the brain's main information processing center, and therefore could exert the kind of influence we were looking for.
Patterns of activity in the thalamus are hard to decipher in traditional neuroimaging experiments. But fortunately, the high-resolution MRI scanner used in our study collected by my colleagues Luca Cocchi and Luke Hearne allowed us to observe them in detail.
Sure enough, we saw a clear link between activity in the thalamus and the flow of activity in the low-dimensional manifold. This suggests that when performing particular tasks, the thalamus helps to shape and constrain the activity in the cortex, a bit like a police officer directing busy traffic.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @10:15PM
I sat down one time and dissected an MIT differential equation in my head until it made sense. You have to concentrate on two sides of the equation at the same time.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday October 25 2019, @10:53PM
A ball, sure. But other things [youtube.com] ... maybe it doesn't work all the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @11:16PM (1 child)
Please just think for me and tell me the answer since I'm a lazy piece of shit.
Simple.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @11:21PM
To be fair, talking to Alexa is exhausting.
Yeah we need to jack in so Alexa can get us off.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Saturday October 26 2019, @12:35AM (3 children)
It's been said that nature park rangers struggle with the design of trash container locks so the most stupid tourists can open them, but the smartest bears cannot. And the ability to match up an observation with simple abstract patterns explained to them is already beyond some. Contrast that to people (*) who look at some stupidly complex thing and go like "Oh, that is a Klugewitz-Li topology, there's no closed form solution, but it can trivially be approximated numerically in cubic time". I've always thought that the span from bear to dork looks smaller than that from dork to nerd. Interesting, if research figures out the mechanisms of how the brain is able to apply abstract logic.
(*) at that level, they might start to have problems with the locks again. Which actually could relate to the brain logic being researched, somehow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @12:45AM (2 children)
Frustratingly in science, the "simplify" gene is not spread evenly. For every 1 paper that clarifies a confusing mess of empirical sludge, there are 10 that generate more empirical sludge. It's like swimming in Chinese excrement. But they're good at math, I guess.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday October 27 2019, @01:09AM (1 child)
Never heard that idiom, "swimming in Chinese excrement"
Where does the idiom come from?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Bot on Sunday October 27 2019, @07:44AM
China.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 26 2019, @02:36AM (1 child)
I had a hell of a time reading this summary. I started thinking about what my brain was doing while I was reading it, so then I was thinking about what my brain has to do to read things while I was reading it, and with each word I started thinking about what my brain has to do to think about reading while I was thinking about what my brain has to do to read things, and then I kept getting deeper and deeper with each meta-loop...
... and then an email came in and the computer beeped, which jerked me out of the mental loop I was strangling myself with. I might have been trapped inside my own mind for the rest of my existence, eternally thinking about thinking. Thank god for spam.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday October 27 2019, @01:09AM
That's what beeps are for.