[HN Gopher] The brain navigates new spaces by 'darting' between ...
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The brain navigates new spaces by 'darting' between reality and
mental maps
Author : XzetaU8
Score : 119 points
Date : 2025-10-08 05:51 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (medicine.yale.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (medicine.yale.edu)
| AlbertoGP wrote:
| A particularly interesting part that I did not expect from the
| title:
|
| > _Before the rats encountered the detour, the research team
| observed that their brains were already firing in patterns that
| seemed to "imagine" alternate unfamiliar mental routes while they
| slept. When the researchers compared these sleep patterns to the
| neural activity during the actual detour, some of them matched._
|
| > _"What was surprising was that the rats ' brains were already
| prepared for this novel detour before they ever encountered it,"_
| e40 wrote:
| Seems to support the idea that dreams are rehearsals for real
| life.
| usrnm wrote:
| I wish some of my dreams really were
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| This matches my hypothesis on Deja vu
|
| https://kemendo.com/Deja-Vu-Experiment.html
|
| I think it also supports my three loops hypothesis as well:
|
| https://kemendo.com/ThreeLoops.html
|
| In effect, my position is that biological systems maintain a
| synchronized processing pipeline: where the hippocampal
| prediction system operates slightly "ahead" of sensory
| processing, like a cache buffer.
|
| If the processing gets "behind" the sensory input then you feel
| like you're accessing memory because the electrical signal is
| reaching memory and sensory distribution simultaneously or
| slightly lagging.
|
| So it means you're constantly switching between your world map
| and the input and comparing them just to stabilize a "linear"
| experience - something which is a necessity for corporeal
| prediction and reaction.
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| Your work seems pretty good to me, have you seen Steven Byrne's
| blog theorising about symbol grounding in the brain?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| No I havent, I'll have to look it up, thanks for the
| recommendation.
| shomp wrote:
| I think we should be careful about materialistic reductions of
| awareness. Because some rats dreamed detours that ended up
| being correct in waking rat life, it does not follow that all
| instances of deja vu are misfirings. It's a tempting connection
| to draw, but it does not actually explain how the detours were
| dreamt to begin with, and this points to a deeper question
| about awareness in general. If I were pressed for an analogy, I
| might say something like "just because all books have ink does
| not mean that all ink lives in books." You know what I mean?
| There's a superset of experiences that cannot be easily
| explained away by caching, as tempting as it might be.
| Antibabelic wrote:
| Materialistic reduction has gotten us quite far in science.
| mallowdram wrote:
| Not exactly. We don't know where optic-flow reactions that
| integrate senses, emotions, motor systems in the slightest.
| Study neural reuse or coordination dynamics. Some
| relationship between the brain and the world that isn't
| easily found in the brain alone is responsible.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Materialistic interpretations of the world around us are
| quite literally the only useful ones. If we didn't do that
| we'd be sleeping in caves and hitting each other with heavy
| rocks.
| mallowfram wrote:
| Wrong. Materialistic only got us to a level. Now we're
| looking past materialism in neural reuse, coordination
| dynamics and ecological psychology and neurobiology. The
| causes are out there in contradictory correlations.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Literally everything is materialist. If it's not it
| either A) doesn't actually exist or B) you just don't
| understand it yet.
|
| It's inherent to the meaning of the word.
| mallowfram wrote:
| A word is a material? You can show me the brain state
| that corresponds repeatedly and with continuous accuracy
| a single word? I don't think so.
|
| You can train a computer to correspond to an individual's
| idiosyncratic brain state for their word voxels, but no
| one has yet to reduce the material to a single repeatable
| voxel state.
|
| "We refute (based on empirical evidence) claims that
| humans use linguistic representations to think." Ev
| Fedorenko Language Lab MIT 2024
|
| The problem with the materialist POV is it doesn't solve
| the most basic question of brain states. No not
| everything is a material.
|
| There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that
| require material to some extent, but are not material
| themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist
| camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are
| the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not
| even be a requirement of life. We may just be material
| sinks.
| altruios wrote:
| > There clearly are processes, like oscillations, that
| require material to some extent, but are not material
| themselves. And that's the problem with the materialist
| camp. If the oscillations, dynamically integrated, are
| the source of intel/consciousness, then material may not
| even be a requirement of life. We may just be material
| sinks.
|
| I understand.
|
| There is a however a flaw in that thinking.
|
| There is no oscillation that exists outside of some
| material/medium to oscillate. I agree it is important to
| distinguish the water from the wave. There is no light
| wave without the photon. Thus - I strongly suspect -
| there is no consciousness without the brain (or similar
| medium).
| mallowdram wrote:
| VR cannot be essential to decoding the brain as it deals in
| topological maps and affinities.
| aatd86 wrote:
| The way it is phrased, looks like a pre computed model confronted
| to real data. So... our current AIs except we have incremental
| continuous training (accumulated experience)?
|
| And dreams are simulation-based training to make life easier,
| decision-making more efficient?
|
| What kind of next level machinery is this?! ;D
| _spduchamp wrote:
| I wonder if this also relates to playing music.
| mycall wrote:
| > The same brain networks that normally help us imagine shortcuts
| or possibilities can, when disrupted, trap us in intrusive
| memories or hallucinations.
|
| There is a fine line between this an wisdom. The Default Mode
| Network (DMN) is the brain's "simulation machine". When you're
| not focused on a specific task, the DMN fires up, allowing you to
| daydream, remember the past, plan for the future, and contemplate
| others' perspectives.
|
| Wisdom is not about turning the machine off; it's about becoming
| the director of the movie it's playing. A creative genius
| envisioning a new world and a person trapped in a state of
| torment isn't the hardware, but the learned software of
| regulation, awareness, and perspective.
|
| Wisdom is the process of learning to aim this incredible,
| imaginative power toward flourishing instead of suffering. Saying
| "trap us in intrusive memories or hallucinations" is the negative
| side where there is also a positive side to it all.
| mallowdram wrote:
| Wisdom is an arbitrary concept. The drive to avoid suffering is
| built from sensory and affective affinities and networks
| funnlled into the cog-mapping motor systems. Calling this
| wisdom is simply a simplistic narrative.
| nzeid wrote:
| Yeah. Not sure "flourishing" and "suffering" form a useful
| dichotomy for "wisdom" to begin with. Life is way more
| complicated than that.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| >A creative genius envisioning a new world and a person trapped
| in a state of torment isn't the hardware, but the learned
| software of regulation, awareness, and perspective.
|
| No, it's hardware. There is no amount of 'wisdom' bootstraps
| pulling that will make you not schizophrenic.
| mallowfram wrote:
| The brain isn't hardware, it's biology and oscillation and
| integrations in optic flow. It can't be dichotomized into
| hardware or software.
| delichon wrote:
| My theory is that this darting is the mechanism of consciousness.
| We look inward and outward in a loop, which generates the
| perception of being conscious in a similar way to how sequential
| frames of film create the illusion of motion. That "persistence
| of vision" is like the illusion of persistent, continuous
| consciousness created by the inward-outward regard sequence.
| Consciousness is a simple algorithm: look at the world, then look
| at the self to evaluate its reaction to the world. Then repeat.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| Is this also the reason why darting eyes movements can be
| linked (and is predictive of or can detect) to mental health
| issues like schizophrenia, etc?
| mallowdram wrote:
| It's a mechanism of intelligence, not consciousness. Intel is
| built up from path-integration, short-cuts, vicarious trial and
| error that begins in very tiny local areas and expands to
| landmark and non-landmark navigation. This switching between
| vision and hippocampus has always been theorized about as the
| fundamental sharp wave ripple threshold of how intelligence is
| built as most mammals can do this, so it's not the "algorithm
| of consciousness".
| bmikaili wrote:
| And funny enough this gets really close to the non-dualistic
| philosophies of zen buddhism.
| bwoah wrote:
| You could probably go further upstream and make a loose
| comparison to the concept of dependent arising
| (Pratityasamutpada):
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mind-indian-buddhism/
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prat%C4%ABtyasamutp%C4%81da
| dataviz1000 wrote:
| or T.S. Eliot's `Little Gidding`
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| But why does that _feel_ like anything? I could write a program
| that concurrently processes its visual input and its internal
| model. I don 't think it would be conscious, unless everything
| in the universe is conscious (a possibility I can't,
| admittedly, discount).
| delichon wrote:
| > But why does that feel like anything?
|
| Consciousness is an attention mechanism. That inward regard,
| evaluating how the self reacts to the world, is attention
| being payed to the body's feelings. The outward regard then
| maps those feelings on to local space. Consciousness is
| watching your feelings as a kind of HUD on the world. It
| correlates feels to things.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| Sure, but that still leaves the mystery of how qualia is
| generated in a mechanistic manner.
| lanfeust6 wrote:
| Yes. Still perplexing to be thrown into the world. How is
| it that my individual experience is in this body but not
| another one? Etc
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| > But why does that feel like anything?
|
| Orchestrated objective reduction or just an emerging proeprty
| of:
|
| Our 86 billion neurons, every single one deafeningly complex
| molecular machine with hundred million of hundreds of
| different receptor types, monoaminoxidae,
| (reuptake)transporters, connections to other neurons.
| exolymph wrote:
| > But why does that feel like anything?
|
| Anthropic principle: because it does. If it _didn 't_ feel
| like anything, it wouldn't. But it does, so it does.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| This whole consciousness debate is just trumped up bs.
| yboris wrote:
| Interesting idea called _transparent self model_ by Thomas
| Metzinger, author of _The Ego Tunnel_ where he explains it
| further.
|
| The gist from my memory of 15+ years ago is that the brain
| needs to model the world and then itself within the world,
| creating a model that is transparent to itself, situated in the
| world.
| nomel wrote:
| From what...my friend say, this becomes evident with LSD.
|
| They said it clearly amplified the internal part of some visual
| perception loop, in fairly straightforward ways. For example,
| intentionally trying to see something as it wasn't (like a
| shadow as a snake) would make it be seen that way (the shadow
| would take on a clear snake appearance, and even move a bit).
|
| Some simple examples are all the face optical illusions
| (Thatcher, reverse mask, etc), that show our perception of a
| face is _in no way_ direct.
| N_Lens wrote:
| Going to new places is really therapeutic (Barring somewhere
| obviously adverse), since that 'darting to reality' creates a
| sense of presence.
|
| I often find myself lost in my mental maps in daily life (Living
| inside my head) unless I'm in a nice novel environment.
| Meditation helps, however.
| forinti wrote:
| This takes me to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Your
| physical experience of something has to be analysed in accordance
| with your mental model of it in order to attain a diagnosis (in
| the book it was a motorcycle engine).
|
| My take on this is, especially in regard to debugging IT issues,
| is that you have to constantly verify and update your mental
| model (check your premises!) in order to better weed out
| problems.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There was a neural net paper like this that generated a lot of
| discussion on HN, but that I haven't been able to find since (I
| probably downloaded it, but that teaches me to always remember to
| use Zotero because academic paper filenames are terrible.)
|
| It was about replacing backprop with a mechanism that checked
| outcomes against _predictions_ , and just adjusted parameters
| that deviated from the predictions rather than the entire path.
| It wasn't suitable for digital machines (because it isn't any
| more efficient on digital machines) but it worked on analog
| models. If anybody remembers this, I'd appreciate the link.
|
| I might be garbling the paper because it's from memory and I'm
| not an expert, but hopefully it's recognizable.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| I don't know if it is the paper you are thinking of (likely
| not) but this idea of checking predictions against outcomes is
| a very common idea in less mainstream AI research, including
| the so called "energy-based models" of Yann LeCun and the
| reference frames of the thousand brains project.
|
| A recent paper posted here also looked at Recurrent Neural Nets
| and how in simplifying the design to its core amounted to just
| having a latent prediction and repeatedly adjusting that
| prediction.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If it wasn't a thread on HN, it's probably not. I don't think
| it was LeCun. It was a long, well-illustrated paper with a
| web version.
| asdff wrote:
| It would be interesting to move beyond rats and into humans
| binned via navigating their local area through understanding of
| the street networks independent of any tooling, and those that
| can't get down the street without mapping software telling them
| what to do.
|
| Anecdotally it is striking to see the contrast as a member of the
| former group talking to people of the latter. They have truly no
| idea where places are or how close they are to other places. It
| is like these network connections aren't being made by them at
| all. No sense of scale either of how large a place is or how far
| away another place might be. I imagine this dependency on turn by
| turn navigation with no spatial awareness leads to quite
| different outcomes in terms of modes of thinking.
|
| I mean, when I think about going to a place I am constructing a
| mental map of the actual city map. I am considering geography,
| cardinal directions, major corridors and their connectivity along
| the route, rough estimates of distance, etc. My CPUs are being
| used no doubt. Others though it is like a blankness in that wake.
| CPUs idle. Follow the arrows. Who knows where north is? What is a
| mile?
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