[HN Gopher] New map of meaning in the brain changes ideas about ...
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New map of meaning in the brain changes ideas about memory
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 161 points
Date : 2022-02-10 10:41 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| novacane wrote:
| It's fascinating to see that the human brain is so adaptive, and
| that we think more linguistically than we previously thought.
|
| Maybe this is also related to the fact that we are primary think
| in our native language.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I do wonder if neuroscience may validate Chomsky's hypothesis,
| that langauge evolved and serves primarily as a tool for
| thought and not as a tool for communication, in his lifetime.
| yboris wrote:
| Anecdata: I was born in Russia but came to the US at the age of
| 11 years old. I think in English exclusively.
|
| One tidbit I read is that people who think in a foreign
| language like me are in some decision processes more-rational
| [0]. I think I don't get hung up on emotionally-stirring words,
| or get offended by vulgarities, as they feel more abstract to
| me than visceral. May be the same mechanism.
|
| [0] https://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-foreign-language-
| peop...
| PhantomGremlin wrote:
| _I think in English exclusively_
|
| But can you still think in your native language if you try
| to?
|
| I was born in the USA, a child of immigrants. So I didn't
| speak English until perhaps 3 or 4 years old.
|
| But I can still think in my native language if I really try.
| yboris wrote:
| I can think in Russian, but with a 5th-grader-like
| vocabulary I'm missing out on ways of articulating some
| things. It also takes effort. And now that I'm trying it
| out as an experiment - it feels like I have a concept/idea,
| and then I'm simply trying to narrate it.
|
| I speak Russian to parents and my brother, but it often
| feels like I have a concept I want to articulate and have
| to use a bunch of non-SAT words to vaguely gesture at what
| I want to say; or, I simply don't know a word like "easel"
| in Russian and feel like I'm playing the game "taboo" :P
|
| I think naturally I gravitated out of thinking in Russian
| since it's too much effort for no payoff. One thing I miss
| about Russian are all the prefixes you can add to a verb,
| like "drive over", "drive into", etc are accomplished with
| short prefixes: "pere-" or "v-". It doesn't sound like
| much, but when you can apply the dozen-ish prefixes to the
| word "fuck" you realize the potential English is missing ;)
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Hidden in the article is this link:
|
| https://gallantlab.org/huth2016/
|
| Honestly, this is kinda scary. Some of the concepts that are
| stored in close proximities feel like they tell... stories.
| Possibly very individual ones.
|
| For example, this is the "tag cloud" for voxel [26,35,42] right
| ("Good, very reliable"):
|
| > housekeeper, landlord, husband, wife, refused, apartment,
| husband's, parents, wife's, jail, bedroom, servant, family,
| pregnant, insisted, wives, refusing, pleaded, lawyer, ill
|
| Here's another one ([22,42,31] right):
|
| > wife, husband, afterwards, afterward, aunt, staying, months,
| weeks, slept, waited, month, leaving, leave, until, pregnant,
| decided, date, hadn't, wife's, stay
|
| Like, it doesn't seem that far from here to something like "your
| brain connects child, death and jail very strongly - did you
| murder a child?"...
|
| Of course, I'm theorizing ideas into research that I know very
| little about. But if it's true, it's hard to put back into the
| box...
| arbol wrote:
| This brain map was constructed from fMRI scans of participants
| listening to fictional podcasts called "The Moth". The fact
| these words are all grouped together suggests a high level of
| `arousal` which may be related to an emotive part of the
| story's narrative. You may very well have deduced part of the
| story.
|
| "child" does seem like an outlier when you consider individual
| words but it's the overall context that's important.
|
| Your second example highlights many words that related to time.
|
| wife, husband, *afterwards*, *afterward*, aunt, *staying*,
| *months*, weeks, *slept*, *waited*, *month*, *leaving*,
| *leave*, *until*, pregnant, decided, *date*, hadn't, wife's,
| *stay*
|
| Being able to visualise general concepts like this is one of
| the main benefits of the brain map. Reading anything more into
| it is prone to error.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| No, that's your fantasy and I wonder what dark thoughts _you_
| have that you made this leap. For example you inserted "death"
| (and for that matter "child") out of the blue when it wasn't
| even there! Out of thre 3 words you speculate about, only one
| is in the list above, two are purely your own mind's product.
|
| The first cluster seems to do with homemaking, accommodation-
| finding, living arrangements and stresses involving this.
|
| The second one is about family and processes/conflicts/stress
| around it.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| These collections remind me of Burroughs cut-up technique:
| https://languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques/wil...
| cestith wrote:
| To take a single-sentence stab at summary: It seems the brain
| stores semantic descriptions of what we perceive, and memories
| are reconstructions from those descriptions rather than retrieval
| of the actual perception.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| "Neurons that fire together, wire together" --Donald Hebb
| evancoop wrote:
| The ability to generalize patterns is the link between current
| brain-computer-interface (BCI) technology that must be
| recalibrated daily and solutions that might generalize for a
| single brain across time or even multiple brains (of which no two
| are alike).
|
| Clearly, we respond to our fellow human beings not by processing
| the activity of their 80 billion neurons, but by recognizing
| latent patterns in their expressions and the vibrations of the
| air around them (sound/speech).
|
| It looks like these models are the beginning of a path where
| software ascends that learning curve.
|
| Exciting!
| magicalhippo wrote:
| About 20 years ago I read about an experiment, where they played
| a game involving a ball with some young kids that had just
| started to learn to speak. They did a test to evaluate their
| vocabulary and played the game. Then they came back a year later.
| Again they evaluated their vocabulary, and asked if they recall
| the game.
|
| The interesting part was that the kids that had not learned the
| word ball when they first played, but since learned it, would not
| use that word when recalling the rules of the game. Based on this
| experiment, they suggested that there was a close link between
| the available vocabulary and formation of memory.
|
| I told my dad about this. He had his major in Norwegian (our
| native language) and had taught Norwegian to immigrants from
| Pakistan and similar in the 70s, and had a keen interest in
| languages.
|
| He found it very interesting, as he had read studies showing that
| immigrants who lost their native language also lost knowledge
| they learned before they emigrated. Things they had learned at
| school or university for example.
|
| So both sets of studies seemed to point to the same cause, that
| the memories formed were closely linked to the language you know
| at the time of formation.
|
| As such I'm not terribly surprised that the same seems to be
| happening with visual memories, as this article suggest. Then
| again, totally not my field.
| mike_ivanov wrote:
| "immigrants who lost their native language also lost knowledge
| they learned before they emigrated"
|
| I think that talks a lot about the quality of the study. I'd
| like to see how they exactly came to that conclusion.
| whatshisface wrote:
| People who forget things, forget things. I'm not sure if it
| needs any more explanation than that.
| Swizec wrote:
| As an ESL who grew up in Slovenia, did most of his work in
| English, and now lives in USA with full immersion[1] - the
| memory language barrier is very noticeable.
|
| Talking to my mom and sister about things that happened in
| Slovenia is easy and fluent. Talking about things that happened
| in USA is ... hard. I have to translate, I can't find words,
| the concepts make no sense, everything is awkward.
|
| Make me talk about software engineering in Slovenian and I
| sound like a bumbling fool. It just doesn't work. Every 3rd
| word is English. Entire sentences sometimes.
|
| [1] I speak Slovenian maybe a couple times per month nowadays
| bsd44 wrote:
| I think that's fairly normal. When you learn a concept in a
| language it's difficult to convey it in a foreign language if
| you don't have the vocabulary, even if you're a native
| speaker. That happens to me all the time.
| salawat wrote:
| This is likely because language uptake is most successful
| when "unrooted" to a pre-existing language framework. You're
| utilizing distinct memory/knowledge graphs.
|
| You sound like a bumbling fool because you're having to forge
| novel connections between the two recall graphs.
|
| It's why I look on awe on people like my high school Spanish
| teacher who fluently spoke 11 languages. When she got upset,
| you never knew which was going to come out!
| vanderZwan wrote:
| > _He found it very interesting, as he had read studies showing
| that immigrants who lost their native language also lost
| knowledge they learned before they emigrated._
|
| That example would be a negative aspect of it, but forgetting
| things in itself can be positive. For example, I wonder if this
| might also work for trauma and rebuilding a new life after
| migrating to a different country.
| pengstrom wrote:
| It seems intuitive that perception and memory are one and the
| same. How we perceive and how we recall is intrinsically bound to
| the neuron superstructure. Changes in one affects the other. The
| mind really is an interconnected prediction machine. Fascinating
| stuff!
| going_ham wrote:
| It is really interesting to see how these are tangled together!
|
| One simple experiment you can do is, think of a cup then a image
| pops up. That image will likely be the image of recently used cup
| or something you cherished deeply. Now after a while if you read
| "a cup" you see same associations! Of course I removed a lot of
| details, but it's really easy to verify the idea presented here.
|
| And something like CLIP[0] seems to be a good direction because
| it combines both visual and language aspect!
|
| [0]: https://openai.com/blog/clip/
| emsy wrote:
| I have aphantasia and I think of a very generic cup, akin to a
| stock image. It's only a faint image, what's more prominent is
| the concept of a cup.
| lstamour wrote:
| Likewise. I think, "can hold liquids, handheld, might be hot
| or cold," probably a white ceramic comes to mind, maybe
| something I might have seen at IKEA. No handle, no
| decorations, a cup isn't defined by those and they don't show
| up in my imagining of one. Smaller in diameter yet about as
| high or maybe a bit taller than a bowl. Bigger than a
| thimble, roughly the size of my hand, or easy to palm.
| Probably in a kitchen or on a dining table. It's all rather
| conceptual for me.
|
| What's weird for me is if I do the reverse, and instead of
| trying to jump from visually imagining a cup to associate
| other senses, if I instead think of the feeling of a warm cup
| in my hands, I can more easily imagine what it smelled and
| tasted like, and even a particular memory comes to mind too.
| But if I try to do the reverse, such as visualizing that same
| memory as a picture in my head, I can't recall the heat or
| other details, I end up thinking of either concepts (words)
| or it's like a photograph and flat, not real life. For me,
| associations from "imagery" are harder than other kinds of
| associations and don't have much impact at all. Strangely, I
| can associate positionally, though. E.g. that something is on
| a third shelf or inside a closet, and have that trigger
| memories. But I can't do so by remembering what the shelf or
| closet looked like.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It makes sense. If I'm asked to visualize a cup, I probably
| first think of an emptiness that can be filled, then I enclose
| that, while I'm enclosing it I remember that it needs a hole to
| be filled or drunk from, and an orientation so I can put that
| hole on the top and its opposite on the bottom so I can sit it
| on a table - it has become a cylinder, now I remember a
| particular, very cylindrical glass that I own that has a Norman
| Rockwell painting screened onto it, then I realize that I've
| thought the word "glass," so I get rid of the painting and make
| it plastic. Then I make it blue, probably because that's the
| first color I go to when somebody asks me to name a color.
|
| If I come across the word "cup" for a little while, I'll just
| remember that time when I tried to visualize a cup, and think
| of a blue cylindrical cup.
| dannyw wrote:
| I have aphantasia[0], when I think of a cup, no image pops up.
| I can think about the properties of a cup: it holds a drink,
| it's a physical object, and if I specifically think about what
| color or shape a cup is, I can describe it; but I never
| visualise it.
|
| I wonder how my brain works in this context. I also have
| wondered if this contributed to me being fairly good at
| programming and systems thinking; but dismal at art and
| anything creative.
|
| [0]: "https://psyche.co/ideas/i-have-no-minds-eye-let-me-try-
| to-de..."
| [deleted]
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I've read a number of times about aphantasia, but I'm still
| unsure about things. For instance, if I'm asked to think of a
| cup in my minds eye, I would say yes, I can. Therefore I
| don't have aphantasia. But it is not at all like looking at a
| real cup or a picture of a cup. It is far more liminal and
| fleeting.
|
| One bit of evidence of this is when I tried LSD a few times
| in the past, I don't get CEV (closed eye visuals), while some
| people report rich, colorful scenery. All the same, I do get
| visual impressions without actually seeing anything. For
| instance, while listening to a particular song it generated
| nothing but blackness in my minds eye, yet all the same I had
| the impression of looking at glossy flower made of hard
| glass. I was getting the interpretive conclusion of vision
| without any of the other information flow that comes along
| with actually seeing the object.
|
| When I visualize things in my mind, it is kind of like that
| too -- I can describe what I'm seeing but I don't really see
| it.
| captaincaveman wrote:
| Maybe because its a class of things, you can't visualise
| 'furniture', but you can visualise instance such as an
| office chair, or dinning table.
|
| My description is poor, office chair is also a class, but
| it not the top class ... I dunno read about this once
| anyway, didn't make it up, honest!
| ummwhat wrote:
| I don't know how much LSD you did or what your body weight
| was or anything else that might be chemically relevant. But
| I would be deeply surprised by an individual being immune
| to the closed eye hallucinations.
|
| When you look at a lightbulb for a moment and then close
| your eyes, do you get the after image? The "closed eye
| hallucinations" are just that normal after image chopped up
| in frequency space. LSD exposes the fact that a lot of what
| the brain does can be understood in terms of analog signal
| processing. The most reliable way to get a high quality
| viewing of the crystal patterns is with TV static. Baring
| that, any randomized constant texture such as a carpet will
| suffice. The reason is because random noise evenly fills up
| the entire spectrum in frequency space, so whatever
| frequencies are cut, de-phased, or otherwise affectef are
| guaranteed to be present in an image of pure noise. Another
| reliable glitch is that all lines below a certain thickness
| will tend to wobble or drift in and out of visibility.
| Again, construct a line as a really thin gaussian wave
| packet and see what happens when the high frequency terms
| pick up phase drift.
|
| LSD hallucinations have nothing to do with aphantasia.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I got vivid, rich, and colorful closed-eye imagery from
| psilocybin (20-20mg) and no open-eye visuals from it. LSD
| was the reverse -- obvious open eye visuals, no closed
| eye visuals (up to 200ug).
|
| LSD was brought up because of the specific experience of
| having visual impressions of things without actually
| seeing anything. My sober "minds eye" is like that too --
| I can describe what I've been asked to conjure, but I
| don't really see it.
| cosmojg wrote:
| Can you feel the cup? Can you imagine holding it in your
| hands, caressing the rim, scooping the inside, and feeling
| the pressure on your hands? Can you imagine your hands
| getting wet or even the pain of a thousand shards of glass as
| the cup suddenly shatters? Does it make a sound? Can you
| smell the tea? Can you taste it?
| lstamour wrote:
| Not the same person, but have a similar condition, so I'll
| take a go at it. Sample size of one here.
|
| > Can you feel the cup?
|
| No. There really isn't a specific cup.
|
| > Can you imagine holding it in your hands, caressing the
| rim, scooping the inside, and feeling the pressure on your
| hands?
|
| Yes, I can imagine these actions, but it's more about
| remembering what it might be like to feel that sensation
| again and is somewhat disconnected from the cup. I end up
| wanting to remember a different, real cup, when I might
| have done those actions. Like how I can remember when I
| last cut off circulation in my hands carrying a heavy
| plastic bag, say. I know how that feels, but it's not
| something I'm particularly good at imagining visually -
| with a mental image.
|
| > Can you imagine your hands getting wet or even the pain
| of a thousand shards of glass as the cup suddenly shatters?
|
| Not quite, and no, I can't really imagine the shattering. I
| mean, I can remember a time when a cup fell and shattered
| and sort of associate that, but just "visualizing" the pain
| or shattering seems impossible. I can play concept
| association and "imagine" the cup exploding outwards like a
| grenade, but it's not visual or concrete, it's more
| conceptual and I lose any connection to pain or feeling or
| hands and fingers. The more I try to make up without
| associating with a memory, the more abstract (verbal, less
| real) the "imagining" seems.
|
| > Does it make a sound?
|
| I can imagine sounds, and get songs stuck in my head, so I
| have some idea of how mental visualization should work for
| me, but it doesn't visually work that way. It's interesting
| that to me, just now, imagining the sound of a cup
| shattering produces an associated concept mentally than the
| reverse ... I can't easily go from a shattered or falling
| cup concept to the sound, but I can relatively easily do
| the reverse: I can go almost instantly from imagining the
| sound of a shattered cup to thinking of a shattered or
| falling cup and what that might look like or how the shards
| might feel.
|
| > Can you smell the tea?
|
| Again, thinking of smells first brings back sounds and
| memories more strongly than visuals would for me, and when
| I was trying to think of an image, it was abstract - there
| were no sounds or smells in particular and it wasn't
| something I could interact with. More of a model of a cup.
| Even thinking of the interactions or how something would
| feel, I now realize, is thinking about feelings and
| memories of feelings - that visualizing my other senses
| such as touch, smell or hearing is much easier for me than
| to visualize based on appearances.
|
| > Can you taste it?
|
| Not from the mental imagining of the cup, no. If I remember
| the sounds of when I was at a tea house, or if I pull up a
| photo of a cup of tea on my phone, then I can imagine the
| taste. But it feels disconnected to try and purely jump
| from a "visual" cup to thinking, it tastes like tea.
| Thinking of how certain foods taste does bring up memories
| and can make my mouth water imagining or remembering how
| certain foods tasted, though. Thinking of a taste can bring
| back the smells, the feeling of heat rising off a dish or
| hot plate, the sounds of sizzling, and a memory of what it
| would look like. But there still isn't really a "picture"
| and if I wasn't looking at a photo on my phone, all I could
| tell you about my visual imaginings would be words or
| concepts. I can tell that something is missing in my
| imagining because of how different it is to go from non-
| visual senses to other non-visual senses. But visuals ...
| don't have the same mental impact unless I can see them in
| front of me, e.g. on a computer screen. For others,
| remembering a layout might trigger memories of details, for
| me it is the opposite - I remember the layout of a
| flowchart by remembering which details are connected and
| then from there I can describe the diagram's layout in my
| head.
|
| But again, sample size of one here.
| cosmojg wrote:
| > That image will likely be the image of recently used cup or
| something you cherished deeply.
|
| I ended up imagining a comically ornate, little, blue, fine-
| china teacup. It's not one I've used recently. In fact, I can't
| remember ever using such a thing! But the image arose
| effortlessly so I must have seen it at some point, no? Maybe in
| a videogame or at a friend's house?
|
| I don't know; the same thing happens when I attempt this
| exercise with the words "tree" or "car" or "pencil". It's
| almost like I'm imagining my own, personal platonic ideals.
|
| On the other hand, when I think of a duck, it's a mallard
| rather than a call duck, and I definitely see more mallard than
| call ducks in my day-to-day life.
| dEnigma wrote:
| I've just imagined the most bland white cup, almost like the
| platonic ideal of a cup. None of my cups, or the cups at work,
| look like that.
| robg wrote:
| The analytics here are really interesting but the general
| framework is not new. I was doing this work 20 years ago:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16672666/
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17243357/
|
| The biggest challenge in neuroimaging remains the analytic
| techniques to show signals. Kudos to this team for those
| advances.
| sireat wrote:
| From the article
|
| " memory isn't a facsimile of past perceptions that gets
| replayed. Instead, it is more like a reconstruction of the
| original experience, based on its semantic content."
|
| I thought memories as reconstruction not recall model was an
| already pretty commonly accepted view.
|
| One of the examples were people with seemingly perfect memories
| of their lives. On closer inspection it turned these perfect
| memories were actual constant replays/refreshes.
|
| EDIT: One example I remember reading about was that Nixon aide
| who claimed perfect recall but actually he was was conflating
| multiple dates into one.
|
| So it is with us with our childhood memories, we might be
| conflating multiple occurrences into one when we reconstruct our
| stories.
| causi wrote:
| _I thought memories as reconstruction not recall model was an
| already pretty commonly accepted view._
|
| I don't see any other explanation for, for example, forgetting
| someone's name and having it disappear from every memory you
| have of that person.
| ravi-delia wrote:
| It is! This finding justifies that observation with
| neurological data.
| [deleted]
| d--b wrote:
| Wow! When you read these things, and combine that with the
| advances in AI, it really seems that understanding what happens
| in the brain is within reach.
| stupendousyappi wrote:
| IMO, if that's true, it's horrifying. I think there's a great
| risk that AGI will lead to the extinction or near extinction of
| the human race.
| tetraca wrote:
| Do you fear that one day your child might be something
| greater than you yourself ever could be?
|
| No. There is no greater accomplishment humanity could achieve
| than to make itself obsolete.
| leobg wrote:
| That was quite Nietzschean! What are ye but a bridge into
| the future.
| PhantomGremlin wrote:
| Hmmm. Maybe that's why we haven't detected any signs of an
| advanced civilization elsewhere in the universe.
|
| Steps:
|
| 1) quantum mechanics
|
| 2) semiconductors
|
| 3) AGI
|
| 4) the machines take over
|
| We're about 100 years into that progression, and we're well
| into step 2. How many years do we have left? Another 100?
|
| The machines are probably not "foolish" enough to announce
| themselves to the rest of the universe.
| 0ldskool wrote:
| then wouldn't we find an advanced machine civilization???
| felipemnoa wrote:
| Not sure why you are getting downvoted. I would say that AGI
| is even more dangerous than the Atom bomb. It will still get
| invented though, we just cannot help ourselves. And to be
| honest, I would be first in line to invent the thing if I
| could.
| cosmojg wrote:
| C'est la vie.
| captaincaveman wrote:
| Less worried about AGI and all that, more worried that taking
| away all the 'magic' of how minds work does it take away some
| of the magic of how the minds work, i.e. it could be quite
| depressing for many to think of ourselves as 'mechanistic'
| automatons. Yes that has been discussed for years, but as that
| becomes fact and with blueprints ... I dunno, I think I quite
| liked the world how it was before that!
|
| Also the more we can model the minds workings, the more some
| sod is going to exploit that for commercial benefits i.e.
| advertising, propaganda etc.
| leobg wrote:
| Not just for years. For centuries now. Wasn't that people's
| main concern about Darwin, after all? "Once it is proven that
| we have descended from apes, where does that leave us?"
| Xplune13 wrote:
| > I dunno, I think I quite liked the world how it was before
| that!
|
| I agree. I don't know why but when I read this article and
| the responses here stating how things can be related and can
| be measured, I suddenly felt this sigh? disappointment? for
| 'demystifying the mind'.
| salawat wrote:
| You just know some arsehole is going to make a read
| interface, then that'll get used for measuring, then people
| will optimize processes around it.
|
| Nightmare fuel.
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