from the features-of-the-brain-state dept.
Mental Phenomena Don’t Map Into the Brain as Expected:
Neuroscientists are the cartographers of the brain’s diverse domains and territories — the features and activities that define them, the roads and highways that connect them, and the boundaries that delineate them. Toward the front of the brain, just behind the forehead, is the prefrontal cortex, celebrated as the seat of judgment. Behind it lies the motor cortex, responsible for planning and coordinating movement. To the sides: the temporal lobes, crucial for memory and the processing of emotion. Above them, the somatosensory cortex; behind them, the visual cortex.
Not only do researchers often depict the brain and its functions much as mapmakers might draw nations on continents, but they do so “the way old-fashioned mapmakers” did, according to Lisa Feldman Barrett, a psychologist at Northeastern University. “They parse the brain in terms of what they’re interested in psychologically or mentally or behaviorally,” and then they assign the functions to different networks of neurons “as if they’re Lego blocks, as if there are firm boundaries there.”
But a brain map with neat borders is not just oversimplified — it’s misleading. “Scientists for over 100 years have searched fruitlessly for brain boundaries between thinking, feeling, deciding, remembering, moving and other everyday experiences,” Barrett said. A host of recent neurological studies further confirm that these mental categories “are poor guides for understanding how brains are structured or how they work.”
[...] No one disputes that the visual cortex enables sight, that the auditory cortex enables hearing, or that the hippocampus is essential for memory. Damage to those regions impairs those abilities, and researchers have identified mechanisms underlying them in those areas. But memory, for example, also requires brain networks other than the hippocampus, and the hippocampus is turning out to be key to a growing number of cognitive processes other than memory. Sometimes the degree of overlap is so great that the labels start to lose their meaning.
[...] Alternative approaches to studying mental categories are possible, too. Barrett, Pessoa and others, for instance, are considering whole-brain neural activity and an assortment of behaviors at the same time. “You study the whole system as its parts interact,” Barrett said. Functional categories such as memory, perception and attention can then be understood as “features of the brain state.”
[...] Each of these potential solutions has shortcomings. “But you don’t evaluate a new approach by all the questions it answers that the old one couldn’t,” Barrett said. “You evaluate it on the basis of what new questions does it stimulate.”
Journal References:
1). Tingley, David, McClain, Kathryn, Kaya, Ekin, et al. A metabolic function of the hippocampal sharp wave-ripple, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03811-w)
2). Carsen Stringer, Marius Pachitariu, Nicholas Steinmetz, et al. Spontaneous behaviors drive multidimensional, brainwide activity [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aav7893)
Patrick J. Drew, Aaron T. Winder, Qingguang Zhang. Twitches, Blinks, and Fidgets: Important Generators of Ongoing Neural Activity:, The Neuroscientist (DOI: 10.1177/1073858418805427)
3). Eisenberg, Ian W., Bissett, Patrick G., Zeynep Enkavi, A., et al. Uncovering the structure of self-regulation through data-driven ontology discovery [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-10301-1)
4). Cisek, Paul. Resynthesizing behavior through phylogenetic... [open], Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics (DOI: 10.3758/s13414-019-01760-1)
5). Tingley, David, McClain, Kathryn, Kaya, Ekin, et al. A metabolic function of the hippocampal sharp wave-ripple, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03811-w)
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26 2021, @06:26AM (4 children)
s/t.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26 2021, @07:27AM (3 children)
eescuuuse me for expecting SN to be better.
"as expected" my ass.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26 2021, @07:54AM
We mapped your brain and found a void as expected.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Thursday August 26 2021, @08:11AM (1 child)
Yes, noted. Decline in quality of submissions, and editorial favortism, of late, for nocturnal birds of pray, which very well could be a sock-puppet account. All new accounts are now suspect. In fact. all accounts are suspect. Except mine, of course. This is SoylentNews! We FuckedBeta! And we are reduced to this.
Discuss.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 27 2021, @04:28AM
Is anyone really fooled by this nonsense?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 26 2021, @08:30AM (6 children)
Once it was pointed out, it seems obvious that a neural net isn't at all like a Von Neumann machine, with discrete function blocks. We built our computers that way, in large part because the designs are relatively easy for us to understand. Makes sense that the model was larger than computer science, and has been rammed onto models of animal brains.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26 2021, @09:51AM (5 children)
von Neumann mode of computation was historically first working theory about computation, wasn't it?
Makes sense that humans have used that framework to explain how other computational systems work.
I know very little about other computational systems then von Neumanns, so hard to say something definitive.
But having done private, never to be published research in computational neurobiology since 2013, i agree that living things (not brains specifically) compute in a multitude of different ways...
Brains and neural controllers in other parts of body are weird, when one is used to CPUS, GPUS, FPGAs and FPLA's modes of computation.
How to explain it, something i cant even fit in my head at once...
I think main problem with understanding how living things process information, is that there aren't any paradigms or "unviolatable rules" inside a brain, if it works - it reproduces.
Logical consistency ( human logic) is not a priority for living systems.
So as glorious Marvin Minsky said, "brain is likely a kludge".
And we have no possibility of having a theory that wants to explain a cludge on its terms.
And theres also funny things like self-reference and self-similarity and complete disregard for types and hierarchies.
Also, concept of error, it's not really a thing that exists anywhere...
I imagine they scientists will huff and puff and eventually produce a theory that describes what brains do in terms that satisfies their need for explanation, but it won't ever be "complete" is human sense, because a mind/brain is not a finished system, its a x->f(x), until it breaks.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26 2021, @10:01AM (2 children)
PS: look at Numenta's meetings on youtube, read some of their publications.
Of all the groups that are trying to win the AGI race, they're the one that is furthest ahead (that publishes their findings openly).
Their ideas are very thought provoking, and are wonderfully mechanistic in sense that they do not accept biologically implausible explanations.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Thursday August 26 2021, @12:14PM
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/03/sander-olson-interviewed-dr-stephen.html [nextbigfuture.com]
https://www.imagination-engines.com/ [imagination-engines.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DABUS [wikipedia.org]
USPTO Rejects AI-Invention for Lack of a Human Inventor [soylentnews.org]
I need to follow up on this.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 27 2021, @07:27AM
I'll get right on that. Now let's put down the crack pipe shall we?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26 2021, @11:10AM (1 child)
this is possibly the most intriguing comment I've ever seen on this website.
I wonder if that's simply because I'm guessing too much of the underlying unsaid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26 2021, @11:44AM
its hard to know what the groups that do not publish their research are up to.
So Numenta kinda stands out here.
Josha Bach had some... godlike talks at the CCC congress about minds and how to build them, i think it was CCC33 and CCC34, you can find them on media.ccc.de searching for "josha".
What Numenta does, is very in line with his critique of the state of the art, at that time.
Although Numenta does not want to create an Artificial God (as AGI usually is presented), they want to create a subservient Thinking Machine.
(And that is where i disagree, these things must reproduce on their own and compete with humans, eventually replacing them; whats the point of creating artificial slaves... but thats just me and its rather off-topic :D )
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26 2021, @09:22AM
Top notch submission. Skimmed abstracts of the citations, have bookmarked two for Friday's reading binge. Very interesting and some of the links are very recent research. Thanks!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26 2021, @09:51PM (1 child)
The brain is not clean, compartmentalized Java code. It is Perl with state shared all over the place. This has been the code analogy I took away. Sorry, CarAnalogyGuy.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday August 30 2021, @08:09PM
To paraphrase Albert Einstein, God does not write Perl.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].