Most brain activity is "background noise" — and that's upending our understanding of consciousness:
What are you thinking about right now?
Have you ever wondered why it's so hard to answer this simple question when someone asks? There is a reason. 95 percent of your brain's activity is entirely unconscious. Of the remaining 5 percent of brain activity, only around half is intentionally directed. The vast majority of what goes on in our heads is unknown and unintentional. Neuroscientists call these activities "spontaneous fluctuations," because they are unpredictable and seemingly unconnected to any specific behavior. No wonder it's so hard to say what we are thinking or feeling and why. We like to think of ourselves as CEOs of our own minds, but we are much more like ships tossed at sea.
What does this reveal about the nature of consciousness? Why is our brain, a mere 2 percent of our body mass, using 20 percent of our energy to produce what many scientists still call "background noise?" Neuroscientists have known about these "random" fluctuations in electrical brain activity since the 1930s, but have not known what to make of them until relatively recently. Many brain studies of consciousness still look only at brain activity that responds to external stimuli and triggers a mental state. The rest of the "noise" is "averaged out" of the data.
This is still the prevailing approach in most contemporary neuroscience, and yields a "computational" input-output model of consciousness. In this neuroscientific model, so-called "information" transfers from our senses to our brains.
Yet the pioneering French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene considers this view "deeply wrong." "Spontaneous activity is one of the most frequently overlooked features" of consciousness, he writes. Unlike engineers who design digital transistors with discrete voltages for 0s and 1s to resist background noise, neurons in the brain work differently. Neurons amplify the noise and even use it to help generate novel solutions to complex problems. In part, this is why the neuronal architecture of our brains has a branching fractal geometry and not a linear one. The vast majority of our brain activity proceeds divergently, creating many possible associations and not convergently into just one.
Journal References:
1.) Jonathan Smallwood, Jonathan W. Schooler. The Science of Mind Wandering: Empirically Navigating the Stream of Consciousness, (DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010814-015331)
2.) Jessica Lara-Carrasco, Tore A. Nielsen, Elizaveta Solomonova, et al. Overnight emotional adaptation to negative stimuli is altered by REM sleep deprivation and is correlated with intervening dream emotions, Journal of Sleep Research (DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2869.2008.00709.x)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @11:07PM
But this one is a paragon of clarity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @11:16PM (4 children)
This bit from the link sounded interesting:
But most of the rest of the article was filler. For example, one section goes on about using psychedelics, but this time with fMRI "to see exactly how the drugs work in the brain in real-time to treat depression." But MRI doesn't have nearly the resolution required to watch individual neurons in action, it's just looking for areas of more or less activity, still a sledge hammer relative to the delicate problem.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @01:30AM
Maybe it sounds interesting to you, but it sounds like commie bullshit to me.
Try telling that to a judge when you are facing rape charges.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @03:16AM (2 children)
"But most of the rest of the article was filler."
Just like our brains, right? I guess that proves their point then ...
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday March 05 2021, @07:53AM (1 child)
So you're saying that article was a braindump?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @12:48PM
Maybe 95 percent of it anyways.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 04 2021, @11:52PM (2 children)
As usual, this study only looked at white male brains. So any conclusions are meaningless, and we should continue to assume that underprivileged racialized people have larger more productive brains and less noise. Go NASA!
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday March 05 2021, @12:14AM (1 child)
Funny! What else did the shouty guys on TV say to you?
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday March 05 2021, @03:16AM
Offtopic and unnecessarily pedantic, I know, but... the quoted is an example of what I'd call non-clinically-morbid** curiosity.
---
not the "morbid" in the medical sense of "indicative of a disease or of an illness nature", but in the "abnormal and unhealthy interest in disturbing and unpleasant subjects".
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @12:00AM (7 children)
Anyone asks me what I’m thinking, I’d be able to answer. The only question is “do you want the truth?” Same as if they ask “how are you?” Got 10 minutes? Didn’t think so. Which I now reduce to “you don’t really want to know. How are you?”
If you’re not aware of your inner conversation, you’re not really conscious. So wake up already!
Because nobody except your therapist really wants to know what you’re really thinking.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @01:13AM (4 children)
"How are you?" Oh, how I hate that phrase. It's never really used as an actual question, it's used as a greeting, or as an acknowledgement of someone else's existence so they know the other person isn't likely to bump into them while passing in the hallway at work.
A question invites an answer. That's what questions are, requests for an answer. No one needs to ask a question for a mere greeting, because we have a word for greetings: "Hello." If you ask me a question, I feel very compelled to give you an answer, and probably a snarky one.
Like: "I yet live."
"The feds haven't caught on yet."
"One day closer to the grave."
"I yearn for the relief that death will bring."
"Although this is not Reno, I still want to watch you die."
"That is a medical question, which is a violation of HIPAA, so I will report you to HR and get you fired."
"I'm at work, so I'm fucking awful you stupid vacuous twit!!!!"
Yes, I know being annoyed at this specific thing means I might be "on the spectrum" as they say these days, but I'm so fucking glad I don't work in an office anymore and have to pass people in the hall who can't just fucking say "Hello" and be done with it. (No, I didn't say anything like the above, I just thought it really hard, while saying "fine" like everyone does, we're all fucking sheep, if all our brains are random why do we all do the same fucking thing all the time)
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @05:22AM
This is a cultural thing. In the movie Brat (brother) 2, one little bit of dialogue somehow stuck with me. Protagonist goes to America, gets taught some basic things about American interactions. One of them was when somebody asks 'how are you' - they don't actually want to know. It leads to the interesting issue that the translation of "Hello" in Russian becomes "How are you" in English, even though the two should mean two very different things.
We could call it just a sort of idiosyncrasy of the language, but in general it does seem to reveal a much larger trend of fakeness we all engage in. Fake greetings, fake smiles, fake responses, ... . I wonder where this all came from, because when you read the writings and interactions of times past - this is not how it used to be. And I wonder if this contributes to our completely dysfunctional politics. Fake interactions are undoubtedly going to politicians most able of faking it, and that's not desirable.
(Score: 2) by Muad'Dave on Friday March 05 2021, @12:38PM
I often answer "Operational".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @08:37PM
It's a handshake that verifies a cooperative disposition and checks mental state/health or that's the phrase I came up with off the top of my head. If you actually go around and say "terrible", people will proceed with questions, and likely try to help you postulate a solution or offer sympathy, depending on context. At least that's how it's worked for me, and it's dependent on context. The clerk at a quick shop during the rush hour won't question you, but you'll probably catch an empathetic glance. Naturally this isn't a universal, some people will relate, some will dodge the topic and so on, but most people are predisposed to cooperation and helping, it seems. I know this because "terrible" was my singular answer to that question regardless of my actual state.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday March 05 2021, @11:00PM
"Still alive, and that beats the alternative."
(Score: 3, Touché) by PartTimeZombie on Friday March 05 2021, @01:18AM
You must be so much fun at parties.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @10:55PM
yeah... I don't understand why "what are you thinking" is so hard to answer and that the author seems to believe that other people have problems thinking about what they thought, too.
Perhaps it is written that was a marketing aspect, to get people that can think to doubt what they are thinking, and click on the article to get exposed to ads before realizing the author is full of crap and if people don't know what they are thinking then they probably are really suspectible to advertising telling them what to buy now that its been established they don't know what to think otherwise.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday March 05 2021, @12:09AM (5 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 5, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday March 05 2021, @03:28AM
Overhead, yes. Abstracted? No way. What happens is very concrete.
My hypothesis - the brain works by the parallel distribution of the perturbations (caused by input) in a large amount of neural networks and the side of the effects coming back as the strongest wins as the reaction of the brain.
Sorta like showing a picture to a large group asking "do you know this guy" and then listening to the smaller group coming back with the closest to a positive recognition.
If the hypothesis is correct, then:
1. of course there's a massive overhead
2. this overhead is "baked in the process" thus cannot be called unnecessary. If you eliminate it, you eliminate the entire process.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @02:18PM (3 children)
The brain is more like a sensitive instrument that is picking up (responding) to inputs. The noise is what it's picking up from the outside. That's what makes tin foil hats so effective.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @09:50PM (2 children)
Tin foil hats are useless. You need lead foil hats.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday March 05 2021, @11:02PM (1 child)
Depends on whether you need to block alpha, beta, or gamma particles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 06 2021, @02:10PM
Lead foil hats wrapped in tin foil.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @12:13AM (3 children)
One longstanding hypothesis is that "rational mind" is merely making post factum feel-good excuses for unconscious decisions. This new piece of data agrees with that.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Immerman on Friday March 05 2021, @01:30AM (2 children)
Considering that pretty much every higher animal gives every indication of being conscious, many seem to be self-aware, and very few seem to have all that much "rational mind", it seems to me as though the obvious assumption is that the rational mind is a new system added to consciousness, not the foundation of it.
And it's probably not native to the drivers seat - figure that as the capacity for it was first evolving it wouldn't actually be that great at its job, while the existing instinctual and conditioning systems had been fine-tuned over hundreds of millions of years. You don't put a toddler in charge of a cross-country road trip, even if they're the most intelligent person in the car. You leave the people with long-honed skill and experience in charge, and bring the brilliant toddler out to address problems where the adults Instinct and Conditioning don't have any answers to offer.
Of course, you can also get a feedback system - the mind can offer solutions that require acting against instinct, and even involve reconditioning yourself to respond differently to stimuli. And there's of course a social aspect as well - your mind also offers you possible ways to modify the behavior of people around you, and theirs to modify yours. Over time that can easily become conditioning, and common patterns of conditioning across a society becomes culture, which can rapidly take on a Darwinian evolution of its own - with individual behaviors spreading across society as those who adopt them prosper.
Which does give the rational mind an incredible amount of power - but only what the underlying consciouness allows it. As anyone who's ever cheated on a diet could tell you. It wasn't the rational mind that demanded those cookies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @09:42AM (1 child)
I think a big part of the problem with the "rational mind" is human perception of rationality is inherently tied to things that have nothing to do with logic or rationality. Such as society, morality, money, etc.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @09:15PM
Most of what people describe as "rational" is actually just "reasonable" as in does not exceed boundaries of logic, which are necessarily fuzzy. Logic is tricky, it demands absolutes that are few and far between in our environment, and it requires precise execution of rules to predict outcomes, which would require such a degree of processing that it's nigh impossible to quantify, and it also necessarily expects perfect information. We have reasonable minds that take in stimulus from a timeline of experience and apply very loose rules to abide by.
We do not make a series of derivatives to describe the volume of an apple and its behavior on a desk which wobbles from the base by 5deg, and duly oscillates at 5hz every time someone sits down which will cause a peak and trough of forces in a negative feedback to equilibrium and whether it will fall and what the outcome will be, where it will lie on the floor given its newly distorted geometry.
We just move the apple because it's probable that it will fall since it's near the edge. Maybe we don't, because it's not worth the effort.
I mean really, if anybody achieved a truly rational mind, wouldn't they acknowledge that all life is futile and self-terminate since there's really nothing but a negative feedback loop on even the most satisfying stimuli? That for every positive stimuli every negative stimuli is neurologically weighted -2x or -3x, odds being stacked against you, and only pain and suffering are to exist in the wake of life. Wouldn't they encourage everyone to do the same? We've got good data on the heat death, so why expend any effort to live in the first place? Or maybe we should be hedonists, gorging with appetites unmitigated gluttony as absolute. Thank god we have reasonable minds with imperfect information.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Friday March 05 2021, @12:23AM
In this case, there are a handful of things we know to look for; everything else gets discounted as "noise" initially.
What we know about the brain is far less than it does; in a nice twist of logic that's one of the few things we can be certain of. The "background noise" like the UFO will disappear, once it's been identified.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @01:23AM (1 child)
Not true. It's boobs all the way down.
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 05 2021, @04:00AM
Ideally both down and up. Repeatedly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Hartree on Friday March 05 2021, @03:23AM (5 children)
Since we don't know what that "noise" is about, this assumes that it's "background".
That sounds a lot like "junk" DNA, which was called that because we didn't understand why it was there or what it was doing. It turns out it serves useful purposes in a lot of cases. Not so junky after all.
I strongly suspect this is the case here as well.
(Score: 2, Informative) by anubi on Friday March 05 2021, @04:20AM (1 child)
I consider we know about DNA that is instructions to build molecules.
And consider "junk DNA" to be data.
Ever seen the output from a disassembler?
Stretches of code that makes sense
Interspersed in numbers that seem to make no sense at all.
And incidentally, how many people hear music in white noise, recognize things in clouds, or glimpse things in the snow displayed on old analog TV sets tuned to vacant channels?
I often hallucinate in noisy environments, like answering doorbells, and no one there.
I believe noise is the dithering input needed for thought to take place, otherwise we would be completely deterministic in our thinking. That noise being the product of the firing of trillions of neurons firing asychronously. I believe our wiring diagram is much like all of our other physical attributes: similar, but different.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @10:22AM
things in the snow displayed on old analog TV sets tuned to vacant channels
Those are adverts put there by God!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @08:16PM (1 child)
Exactly. Processing audio, visual, tactile, and organ neural inputs is going to require a lot of processing. Much of that background noise will be the neural network sifting through the data to find the relevant bits. It would be impossibly overwhelming to be conscious of every thread your brain is processing, but that doesn't make it "background noise."
"Yet the pioneering French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene considers this view "deeply wrong." "Spontaneous activity is one of the most frequently overlooked features" of consciousness, he writes. Unlike engineers who design digital transistors with discrete voltages for 0s and 1s to resist background noise, neurons in the brain work differently. Neurons amplify the noise and even use it to help generate novel solutions to complex problems. In part, this is why the neuronal architecture of our brains has a branching fractal geometry and not a linear one. The vast majority of our brain activity proceeds divergently, creating many possible associations and not convergently into just one."
So at least the experts are starting to realize that disregarding certain neural activity may be a bad approach.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @08:52PM
There's also going to be discrete experiences. If you work from the Eastern view of the mind, or my interpretation of it (admittedly ignorant) there's a separation from consciousness and mind. The latter is a verbal interpretation, narrative architect and comparitor. The former is the foci of experience of all bodily function and the mind, the "silent watcher". There's verifiable neurological differences between those who practice meditation and the vulgar. I'd posit the best method to start deducing what's what is to start by comparing people that would fall into the highly enlightened class - presumably conscious to the nth degree and the vulgar. From there you can start making reducing assertions on what the mind's processes contribute to the function of the brain as observed in whatever conditions are given.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday March 05 2021, @11:08PM
The brain does a lot more than conscious rational thought. It's an essential part of the control system that runs the whole body. That might very well be what all that so-called ambient noise is about.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 05 2021, @04:06AM (4 children)
See, this is why people who've never run even a small business should not opine on big business. They just look like idiots. Consciousness is in fact exactly like a CEO. It doesn't know a tenth of every little thing that goes on, it just makes the important calls. A CEO doesn't need to go down and direct the sorting in the mail room, they just allow that they would like their mail delivered and let the mail room folks get on with things. Much like your conscious mind doesn't micromanage the muscles in your arm when you go to catch a baseball, it just says catch that baseball and lets the automatic bits get on with what they do.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 05 2021, @11:47AM (3 children)
>> A CEO doesn't need to go down and direct the sorting in the mail room, they just allow that they would like their mail delivered and let the mail room folks get on with things.
And that's why they deserve $75 million a year.
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 05 2021, @12:15PM (2 children)
No, they deserve that because they're capable of making the decisions that mean the difference between bankruptcy and billions of dollars of profit. Or, to put it in a frame of reference you'll understand, they make the decisions that mean the difference between supplying tens of thousands of jobs or none at all.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday March 05 2021, @01:16PM (1 child)
Explain then why in recent years many big businesses just a few months from bankruptcy, destined to not be saved from it, have been awarding their CEOs record bonuses? The CEO reward doesn't seem to be very well coupled to the success of the business.
Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday March 05 2021, @09:02PM
Easy, shareholders allowed corrupt or incompetent boards of directors to be seated. I would have thought that was obvious in the board's choice of a CEO who failed to deliver in the first place.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Friday March 05 2021, @01:09PM
Thank you Hazuki, for submitting an article, perhaps inadvertently, that tries to go some way towards answering the questions in my new SoylentNews sig!
Welcome to Edgeways. Words should apply in advance as spaces are highly limite—
(Score: 2, Interesting) by UncleBen on Friday March 05 2021, @05:55PM
Sounds like we're repeating history. "All this stuff we can't figure out, it must be noise."