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Our Brains Don't Work Like Computers
Roland Piquepaille writes "We're using computers for so long now that I guess that many of you think that our brains are working like clusters of computers. Like them, we can do several things 'simultaneously' with our 'processors.' But each of these processors, in our brain or in a cluster of computers, is supposed to act sequentially. Not so fast! According to a new study from Cornell University, this is not true, and our mental processing is continuous. By tracking mouse movements of students working with their computers, the researchers found that our learning process was similar to other biological organisms: we're not learning through a series of 0's and 1's. Instead, our brain is cascading through shades of grey."
And it is for this reason that I loathe comparisons of computing power to brain power. "By 2015, we'll have computers as smart as humans." What kind of bullshit comparison is that? They're two completely different processes.
That's what I heard. Even if they don't work like sequential or even parallel digital computers, I'm pretty sure that brains still compute. Mine tries, at least.
Fuck off.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yeah. That was pretty much my reaction. Seriously, I think the submitter has been in front of his computer too much.
...with floating point arithmetic. A "double" can represent a number between 0 and 1 with 15 decimals of precision, way more precise than any biological phenomenon. Computers can think like us, it's just a matter of writing the right floating-point code.
It's Roland Piquepaille, what did you expect, he's a fucktard and the only reason he's on Slashdot so much is that he has a business relationship with them.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I guess some brains just have more contrast then others...
I presume the info was a byproduct of a useful study (Cog-Neuro-Psy possibly?). I really hate it when the media picks out the And finally bit of science news stories (a la bread-landing-on-the-buttered-side, etc).
I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody. Bill Cosby (1937 - )
The article's summation is far more accurate than Slashdot. In TFA, a researcher says our minds don't work like digital computers.
The Slashdot headline says our minds don't work like computers, end of sentence.
Had TFSH (The Fine Slashdot Headline) been accurate, this would've been a mind-blowing result and in need of some extraordinarily strong evidence to support such an extraordinary claim. The question of whether the human mind--sentience, consciousness, and all that goes with it--is a computable process is one of the most wide-open questions in AI research right now. It's so wide-open that nobody wants to approach it directly; it's seen as too difficult a problem.
But no, that's not what these guys discovered at all. They just discovered the brain doesn't discretize data. Significant result. Impressive. I'd like to see significant evidence. But it's very, very wrong to summarize it as "our brains don't work like computers". That's not what they proved at all.
Just once, I'd like to see a Slashdot editor read an article critically, along with the submitter's blurb, before posting it.
I still believe in the Church-Turing Thesis... Our brains might not work LIKE computers but they don't do work DIFFERENTLY than them either.
Thank god we have someone like Roland Piquepaille to point out these amazing facts to us!
Yes, that was sarcasam!
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Are you saying that Roland would have pointed us to a somewhat useless article?!?? Piquepaille wouldn't do such a thing! Oh wait, he has for his last 80 damn stories.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
...the researchers found that our learning process was similar to other biological organisms....
That makes perfect sense, seeing as our brains evolved from other biological organisms.
Check out evolutionary psychology for some information. You'll view the world differently afterwards.
Evolutionary psychology (or EP) proposes that human and primate cognition and behavior could be better understood by examining them in light of human and primate evolutionary history... The idea that organisms are machines that are designed to function in particular environments was argued by William Paley (who, in turn, drew upon the work of many others).
Just because brains aren't binary or synchronously clocked doesn't mean much. One can create analog computers to represent shades of gray or create clockless computers that don't operate in lock-step synchronization. Furthermore, any digital, synchronous computer and simulate both shades of gray (with floating point numbers) and continuous processes (with sufficiently small time slices). Moreover, given the messiness of neuro-electrochemical systems, one can argue that it doesn't take a very precise float or a particularly dense time slicing to simulate neurons.
Some people ascribe the seeming magic of consciousness to some ineffable property of the brain, e.g., quantum mechanical effect. While other insist that its just what happens when you connect enough simple elements in a self-adaptive network.
The question is, are there neural input-output functions that are fundamentally not computable? If not, then a digital computer will, someday, reach human brain power (assuming Moore's law continues).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
That must be why I've been having so much trouble trying to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Your brain is composed of billions of individual processing units. Each of those processing units may be sort of like a stream processor (like in Cell), in that they take inputs, perform a computation, and then fire out an output (although I don't know if anyone's even determined that conclusively). However, your brain is composed of billions of those linked together in very complex ways.
Suggesting that your brain only works on one item at a time is rather naive. It is most certainly doing many things at a time.
I've come for the woman, and your head.
A brain is more like a GPU than a CPU.
I don't think the chunk of meat in my head works using digital logic; but I'd like to think my Mind does a reasonable job of it.
Natural numbers (1,2,3...), true/false, up/down...
It's not unnatural to divide everything in half, heck our bodys are mostly symmetrical; the distiction comes in where the dividing line is.
We can weight our decisions in endless ways, if someone makes a statement, our belief of that statement depends on how many times we have heard it, our trust in the stater, if it meshes with known facts in the current context.
What I wonder is how far can a human mind be pushed in terms of concepts it can grasp and control it has, can a human visualise a 5 dimensional virtual object? control emotional responses, without supressing them? hold multiple contridictary world models? accelerate long-term memory access?
Even if you think of an electronic computer, it's just hordes of electrons rushing down pathways, only reliable because the voltage levels are continually refreshed at each step, a few electrons might wander off the path, but they are replaced at the next junction. Quantum Mob Rule.
We have no clue how the brain actually works. Sure, we know how individual neurons work, but no one can explain how a bunch of neurons creates a mind.
We look around our world and notice that computers are superficially similar to brains (e.g. they can both do math), so we hypothesize that they work similarly.
However, there's very little hard evidence supporting this hypothesis in the first place, so there's no "news" in this story.
Bottom line: The brain is not just a super-powerful computer.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Dear Slashdot Editors,
Could we pretty, pretty please have a Roland Piquepaille section, so we can opt-out? I've been good all year, and it's almost my birthday, and I won't ask for anything for Christmas.
-Peter
Well, actually, it's more like "no conductor", because lots of signal loops and metaloops have stable attractors. The "conductors" are virtual, composed (hah) of the stable feedback states in the system, either biases or artifacts of the signaling transfer functions, or attenuations from repetition (learning). What fascinates me is the selforganization of the signal paths (engrams) that creates predictive models (mind) of the signal generators outside the brains (reality), including models of the models, and the modeling. That conscious self is mostly just along for the ride, a "GUI" (gestalt user interface ;) we perceive as an image of the complex states of the rest of the system.
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make install -not war
You mean lime breathing, blinking, pumping blood, and typing? I just did all of those things simultaneously.
"Thus you cannot say human brain does parallelistic operations at the same time"
Unless of course you want to be factually accurate.
Essentially what I got out of this article is that our thought process is much like google's auto-search that will guess the word you want to search for as you;re typing itm but wont know for sure until the entire word is finished.
Hm, duh?
In all seriousness though, I wonder how the curvature of the mouse shows gravitation to one side versus the other, maybe they're just a quake2 player and enjoy cirlce-strafing.
The idea is the same, and we've used it ourselves - original computer memory used pulses travelling around a waveguide as a storage mechanism. It's all very easy when there's a synchronisation you can use to read back the signal, but the brain seems to be able to pick out the patterns without the synch.
:-) pick out what one person is saying in a recorded group conversation. Humans do it as naturally as breathing.
Consider that with all our signal processing techniques, a computer can't easily (despite what "CSI" says
Some people look on the destructive power of the elements or the vastness of space as humbling, but the intricate complexity of the brain is just as impressive, IMHO.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Analog computers can be built cheap now using mass produced Op Amps. For the readout you can use a Vellman Oscilloscope which goes for about $150 US.
Yup, the "and finallys" get a little old after a while.
:)
I hope no one was using this research to acquire a PHD or MS. The "brains are not computers" epiphany has been realized about billion times already. And this research could stand to be much deeper.
I'm a little bummed about the shallow linguistics analysis. It's interesting and all, but I wish they would have really jumped into something such as pattern recognition.
I'm and interactive designer, and I tend to believe that language and interaction is based upon pattern recognition. Our brains receive data, and compare them to flexible patterns in order to make decisions. This study certainly supports that theory.
In this case, if you show a candle and a dog to a user, and tell the user to click on the candle, the user will jump directly the candle since a dog does not fit the pattern of a candle at all...both visually and verbally. However, if you present someone with a picture of a candy stick and a candle, they will hesitate upon selecting the candle since they bare verbal and visual similarities. More processing time is needed to compare intricacies.
People probably slow down and curve their mouse movement since they are still comparing patterns while they are selecting. By curving the track path, users increase tracking distance and cognitive processing time. It also allots them a circular motion which can easily translate into a last minute decision change. When people are unsure of things, they usually prepare themselves for backing out.
damn I'm a geek
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
There's a saying by neurophysiologists: "If the brain were simple enough to be understood, it would be too simple to understand itself"
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
Finally, a few good comments.
The point under discussion in this article is summed in this quote:
"More recently, however, a growing number of studies, such as ours, support dynamical-systems approaches to the mind. In this model, perception and cognition are mathematically described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional mental space; the neural activation patterns flow back and forth to produce nonlinear, self-organized, emergent properties -- like a biological organism."
The goal is to forcefully point out (using an experiment) that the one way we think about mental processing, the digital computational model, is not very useful even at the trivial level of mental signal processing.
It's interesting how all the sarcastic comments about the "biological organism" reference completely miss the point. The point is that the signal is being processed in a way that could be modeled by the way a biological organism moves through space. It sniffs here, then there, then jumps to the solution. The signal processing itself exhibits emergent properties.
The reference to the dynamical system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamical_system) is key. (I think people frequently fail to gloss the additional "al" and think this refers to some sort of generic "dynamic system"). Dynamical systems, although deterministic, are a foundational tool for developing chaos theory.
For me the interesting idea is that the default state of thought is in-betweeness. We stay jittering back and forth in an unresolved state until, suddenly, we aren't.
While the methodology is new, the observation is anything but. Details of how neurons conduct impulses (and the way they self-attenuate, adjust modulation and amplitude, etc.) has been understood for decades. There are no revelations here. In fact, computational neural-nets were a graph theoretical application of communication theory (very) loosely based on those observations -- hence the name. A neural network is a primitive model of a single neuron.
A computer is a function. For the same input, it will spit out the same output (yes, even for buggy crap like some Intel processors in the past).
:)
A brain, for the same input will have different outputs. Try asking your wife or gf if they are in the "mood". Will you get the same answer all the time? The connections in the brain constantly rewire themselves hence it CANNOT be a function.
Erm... what about rand()? fread()? time()?
When you consider that the question you proposed to your SO is fairly high-level, what about has_new_mail()? "SELECT count(*)"?
Computers only return the same value from a function if they're in the same state. The only difference there is that we can set the state in a computer. We can't load and save timestamped personalities/feelings/memories/etc. with people.
If we could, you'd likely find (IMHO) that the "function" of your SO is fixed also.
What cracks me up is the nerd infatuation with, basically, "only the trivia _I_ know are the essential things. And you're an idiot if you don't know them, no matter how utterly useless or irrelevant they are to _your_ job or interests."
No, sorry. The world doesn't revolve around you or your hobbies. There _are_ plenty of jobs for which the computer isn't the important part. It's not what makes them money.
E.g, for a lawyer it's a better investment of their time to study the laws and precendents, than to learn networking protocols. E.g., when you need surgery, better hope that that surgeon spent their time becoming a better surgeon, instead of becoming a networking expert. Etc.
For most jobs the computer isn't even as necessary as you'd think. It's at best "nice to have", but not justifying investing months into learning IT and networking protocols.
E.g., it's nice for a lawyer or doctor to have the client files on a computer instead of looking through a filing cabinet. But it's not as essential as you'd think. If you expect him/her to spend months becoming a computer expert, for something that saves him/her _maybe_ an hour per week, you need to put down the crack pipe. Then the computer would actually waste their time instead of saving them anything.
Here's another idea for you: You are there and are getting those calls not from "idiots" but from basically victims of a scam. All the "computers are easy", "wireless networking is easy" or "connecting through our ISP is so easy that grandma could do it" ads are actually marketting scams.
Computers are nowhere near that easy yet, or not without investing some signifficant time. But if your employer actually told those people "sorry, folks, it's only for IT gurus. Spend some time becoming an IT pro and growing a goatee, and then it'll be for you", then they'd lose business. Then, see above, you'd be surprised for how many people the computer isn't _that_ important.
So your employer, and a bunch of others, lied to those people to get their money. There's a name for that. It's called "fraud".
And now those people merely expect your employer to live up to those fake claims. They were explicitly told that they'll just plug it in and be online, so it's _not_ unreasonable for them to actually expect it to work like that.
Because thet's how any other industry works. If a car manufacturer told you "this model reaches 60mph in 8.9 seconds", you'd damn well expect it to live to those expectations. You'd expect that after 8.9 seconds, that car damn better be at 60mph.
Same here. If your employer told them "just pop in this CD and you'll be online in less than 1 minute", they expect that after 1 minute they damn better be online and surfing.
That's why you get those calls. Because those people expect your employer to live up to some very explicit claims.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
You know, we're all nerds, and we're all arrogant.
But what cracks me up is that the most arrogant assholes are the ones with the least skill or achievement. When you see someone harping the most about how he's uber-L33T because he knows what an IP address is, and how everyone else is an idiot... chances are it's someone who actually knows the _least_ about those. Chances are it's not a programmer who actually writes socket code, it's not a hardware engineer who's designed a network card, etc. No siree, it's a script-reader from the hell-desk that does the "I'm so l33t and everyone else is an idiot" fuss.
So you want to call people idiots if they don't know some computer trivia you know (off a list of canned answers)? Well, then being an EE and having some 20+ years of programming experience, I'll call _you_ an idiot, because you're below _my_ skill level.
Sure, you know what an IP or port number is or how to find it out in Windows. (Or can find it out on your list of canned answers.) But can you actually _use_ a socket on that port? Can you for example write a game server that listens on that port? If I gave you an old network card, can you find the right Linux kernel driver and change it to make it work with that card? Or what?
Or, ok, you do know what an IP address is. Congrats. Do you also know what a B-Tree is, how it works, and how to implement one in your code? Do you also know the difference between, say, MergeSort and QuickSort, and the influence of external (e.g., DB file on a disk) vs internal (in RAM) sorting on their performance? Can you implement either purely as, say, a state-machine driven by exceptions to signal state changes, just to prove that you actually understand the algorithm, as opposed to copying someone else's code off the net? Do you know the difference between bitmap indexes and b-tree indexes in Oracle, and can discuss when you might need one instead of the other?
Hey, it's computer stuff too. Very basic stuff too, nothing esoteric. We established already that computer stuff matters, and you're an idiot if there's something you don't know about them.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It can be shown however, that humans can solve it in certain cases, which is still more than Turing Machines can do.
No, it's not. I can easily write a program that solves the halting problem for certain special cases, for instance for turing machines without "loops".
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
For centuries, people have compared the human brain with the most advanced technology of the era : clocks in the 17th century, automatons in the 18th, Jacquard weaving machines or steam engines during the 19th, automated telephone exchanges in the 1920's, and digital computers from the 1950's on. Now it's (neural) networks, quantum computers or fuzzy logic, but the idea is the same.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal