Tag: brain

Brain Compression

The visual cortex suppresses redundant information and saves energy by frequently forwarding image differences similar to methods used for video data compression.

we have now demonstrated that the visual cortex suppresses redundant information and saves energy by frequently forwarding image differences

2015-03-13: That’s clever visual cortex hacking.

“These GIFs use depth of field and graphic elements to achieve their effect, just like many classic paintings. The white lines define the plane where the screen is, creating a mental division between background, midplane and foreground. Combined with the camera’s depth of field blur, it tricks our brain into thinking that things are popping out of the screen.”


2022-02-18: Visual Stability

Despite a noisy and ever-changing visual world, our perceptual experience seems remarkably stable over time. How does our visual system achieve this apparent stability? Here, we introduce a previously unknown visual illusion that shows direct evidence for an online mechanism continuously smoothing our percepts over time. As a result, a continuously seen physically changing object can be misperceived as unchanging. We find that online object appearance is captured by past visual experience up to 15 seconds ago. We propose that, because of an underlying active mechanism of serial dependence, the representation of the object is continuously merged over time, and the consequence is an illusory stability in which object appearance is biased toward the past. Our results provide a direct demonstration of the link between serial dependence in visual representations and perceived visual stability in everyday life.

Memory Manipulation

a mild version of this would make for interesting entertainment: slip into someone else’s life for a few hours.

Neuroscientists have shown that they can plant false memories in the brains of mice. They also found that many of the neurological traces of these memories are identical in nature to those of authentic memories.

The opposite is also possible:

Chinese scientists were able to use a chemical – the protein alpha-CaM kinase II – to successfully erase memories from the minds of mice.

Human Misjudgement

so many human defects all in one place.

  1. Under-recognition of the power of what psychologists call ‘reinforcement’ and economists call ‘incentives.’
  2. Psychological denial.
  3. Incentive-cause bias, both in one’s own mind and that of ones trusted advisor, where it creates what economists call ‘agency costs.’
  4. Bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won.
  5. Bias from Pavlovian association, misconstruing past correlation as a reliable basis for decision-making.
  6. Bias from reciprocation tendency, including the tendency of one on a roll to act as other persons expect.
  7. Bias from over-influence by social proof — that is, the conclusions of others, particularly under conditions of natural uncertainty and stress.
  8. What made these economists love the efficient market theory is the math was so elegant.
  9. Bias from contrast-caused distortions of sensation, perception and cognition.
  10. Bias from over-influence by authority.
  11. Bias from deprival super-reaction syndrome, including bias caused by present or threatened scarcity, including threatened removal of something almost possessed, but never possessed.
  12. Bias from envy/jealousy
  13. Bias from chemical dependency.
  14. Bias from mis-gambling compulsion
  15. Bias from liking distortion, including the tendency to especially like oneself, one’s own kind and one’s own idea structures, and the tendency to be especially susceptible to being misled by someone liked. Disliking distortion, bias from that, the reciprocal of liking distortion and the tendency not to learn appropriately from someone disliked.
  16. Bias from the non-mathematical nature of the human brain in its natural state as it deal with probabilities employing crude heuristics, and is often misled by mere contrast, a tendency to overweigh conveniently available information and other psychologically misrouted thinking tendencies on this list.
  17. Bias from over-influence by extra-vivid evidence
  18. Mental confusion caused by information not arrayed in the mind and theory structures, creating sound generalizations developed in response to the question “Why?” Also, mis-influence from information that apparently but not really answers the question “Why?” Also, failure to obtain deserved influence caused by not properly explaining why.
  19. Other normal limitations of sensation, memory, cognition and knowledge
  20. Stress-induced mental changes, small and large, temporary and permanent
  21. other common mental illnesses and declines, temporary and permanent, including the tendency to lose ability through disuse
  22. Development and organizational confusion from say-something syndrome.

Desire modification

Obviously, the technology would be incalculably dangerous. With d-mod, local nonsatiation goes right out the window, since you can instantly dial yourself to a “bliss point” where you are just perfectly satisfied and don’t want anything else. That’s the end of scarcity. When we can decide what we want, desire becomes less important than meta-desire. What do we want to want? D-mod is like putting the parameters of the utility function in the utility function itself. The resultant “clades” of humans will be very, very different from each other, much more different than people are now. This will make human interaction very weird.

Brain Preservation

The Brain Preservation Foundation announces a prize for the first team to demonstrate a technique capable of inexpensively and completely preserving an entire human brain for long-term (>100 years) storage with such fidelity that the structure of every neuronal process and every synaptic connection remains intact and traceable.

2012-12-07: Eternal Brain. This is fascinating. It doesn’t really matter that much whether we’ll be able to reconstruct a brain from a 3D scan, brain plastination seems a much more appealing memento mori than the alternatives. Would I want my dear friends in the ground vs a urn vs a pretty paper weight? Definitely the paper weight.

2013-08-02: The real postmortem.

In the near future, a neurologist and 2 homicide detectives use experimental brain taping technology to question a murder victim about his final moments.

2014-10-09: Brain death after heart death

The largest scientific study of “life after death” and near death experiences in cardiac arrest patients (who were resuscitated) suggests that some people may sustain several minutes of awareness after the heart stops. Conscious awareness appears to have continued for up to 3 minutes into the period when the heart wasn’t beating, even though the brain typically shuts down within 20-30 seconds after the heart has stopped.”

2020-01-07: 2.5 ka brain scans

It was just amazing to think that a brain of someone who had died so many 1000s of years ago could persist just in wet ground. the first organ to really deteriorate and to basically go to liquid is the brain because of its high fat content. Axel Petzold had spent years researching 2 types of filaments in the brain – neurofilaments and glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) – which act like scaffolds to hold brain matter together. He found both of these were still present in the Heslington brain, suggesting they played a key role in keeping the brain matter together

Multiplexing vs Multitasking

Research with the population at large to date suggests that our ability to multitask is not as great as we think it is. Starner replied that he multiplexes rather than multitasks. Multiplexing means doing tasks that reinforce each other. For him, taking notes and having conversations are tasks that parallel and enrich each other. They are multiplexed. On the other hand, he doesn’t try to manage email during a conversation or while walking down the street. That would be multitasking. “If the wearable task is directly related to the conversation, the user’s attention is not ‘split’ and multiplexing can be pretty effective.”

Some combinations of tasks can be multiplexed effectively. The question is which ones.