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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.
Looks like the submitter forgot something. Lemme see if I can help him out a little:
How will this study affect your next thought? Go here to discuss it further.
There, that feels more complete.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Each neuron is like a tiny, slow analog DSP, feeding back FM around a base frequency (eg. about 40Hz in the brain's neural tract). The neurons have feedback among themselves locally, and send out some larger feedback in fiber bundles, signalling other clusters along the way. It's like a teeming kazoo symphony, without a conductor.
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make install -not war
The idea that our brains might work like biological organisms is a real breakthrough.
Next week's research topic: Do farts stink?
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
More like:
Our Brains Don't Work, Like Computers
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make install -not war
I've been waiting for a scientist to tell me that I'm capable of thinking in abstract and fuzzy terms for years. Things I can now forget thanks to the brilliant scientist:
1.) The GPS coordinates of each key on my keyboard.
2.) The streaming audio of my name and all of my friends and families name.
3.) The bio-mechanical force sequences for the hundreds of muscles used in picking up a glass every morning.
Beer will no longer render my circuits useless!
Headline: Brains More Like Neural Nets Than Traditional Programs
Who woulda thunk it.
ftp://ftp.sas.com/pub/neural/FAQ.html%23A2
'Most NNs have some sort of "training" rule whereby the weights of connections are adjusted on the basis of data.'
Insert joke about the 1980's (or 60's/50's/40's) calling). Somehow I don't think Norbert Weiner would be the slightest bit surprised.
-Tupshin
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.
Birds do not fly like airplanes, they continuously wave their wings - and do not have turbines or propellers.
Sure hope my taxes don't pay for that "research".
Does anyone *really* think that computers and the brain work in the same way ? Or even in a significantly similar fashion ?
Well, by 'processors', I assume you mean neurons. These are activated to perform a firing sequence on output connections dependent on their input connections and current state, heavily modified by chemistry, propogation time (it's an electrical flow through ion channels, not a copper wire), and (for lack of a better word) weights on the output connections. To compare the processing capacity of one of these to a CPU is ludicrous. On the other hand, the 'several' in the quote above is also ludicrous... "Several" does not generally correspond to circa 100 billion...
No-one has a clear idea of how the brain really processes and stored information. We have models (neural networks), and they're piss-poor ones at that...
The brain behaves less like a computer and more like a chaotic system of nodes the more you look at it, and yet there is enormous and significant order within the chaos. The book by Kauffman ("The origins of order", I've recommended it before, although it's very mathematical) posits evolution pushing any organism towards the boundary of order and chaos as the best place to be for survival, and the brain itself is the best example of these ideas that I can think of.
Brain : computer is akin to Warp Drive : Internal combustion engine in that they both perform fundamentally the same job, but one is light years ahead of the other.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I'll burn some karma too. In this article he hasn't posted a link to his plaguerised 'overview'. Is this a poor attempt to make it look like that no money changes hands between him and slashdot?
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
Analog computers still exist in some places, but you list discrete values. An analog computer works with an essentially continuous range of charges instead of discrete values; and it works continuously in time, instead of in discrete steps. They're very good at integrating, which is the application I used them in.
I believe that the mind is (simply?) a quantum computer, and the article seems to support that idea. The human brain utilizes a sort of general interconnectedness of things to process thoughts as dynamic probabilities of state, with conclusions only being properly arrived at after a certain ammount of calculation has occured, but with all probabilities esiting well before the completion of the thought.
Anyhow, I should probably stop rambling and go outside or something.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
...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.
The book "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins (of Palm fame) and Sandra Blakeslee is all about how the brain works, and why people's approach to AI is not going to come anywhere near emulating the brain...
Figured it was worth mentioning given the subject matter of the thread... I liked it.. good read, if a bit dry at times...
http://www.babysmasher.com
http://www.openingbands.com
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.
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
"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."
Fine, let's see the math. Let's see the trajectory calculations. How about those calculating the space? Calculating the number of dimensions the space has, and how fast that number changes over time?
40 years ago brain scientists realized that computer architecture made a good metaphor for how the brain works. (They did NOT assume there was no feedback, contrary to the article). It made a handy and productive way to look at things so they could figure out more about what was really going on.
10 years ago brain scientists realized that they could use the way cool chaos stuff the describe the way the brain works. Believe me, I know; I've been to the Santa Fe Institute twice. It worked particularly well for me because I'm essentially a signal analyst -- I HAVE to define a set of variables, estimate how well they work, and decide how many of my arbitrary variables to keep or throw out.
It's still only a metaphor. And unlike the specific specific processes described by cognitive science, the dynamic system stuff remains nebulous. It claims a mathematical legitimacy which it can really claim only in concept because the actual math of the acutal operations are is beyond the abilities of anyone making the claims. The fact that it *can* be described this way is no less trivial than the fact that processes can ge grouped according to the traditional cognitive science concepts.
Trajectories on phase space are soooooooo sexy. But if it's any good, it'll result in something more concrete than more people picking up this flag and waving it while shouting the new slogans and buzzwords. Until that happens I peg this with the study that "calculated" the "fractal dimension" of the cortex just because it has fold and folds in the folds.... so fsking what.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Modern processors do in fact, do this. They maintain statistics on the branches and go forward on the branch deemed most likely to be taken. Its based on a simple principal - if you've taken the same branch a few times before, you're likely to keep taking it from now on. Think of how loops work.
Granted, if the processor is wrong, it has to clear the pipeline and start anew (which is costly), but the benefits outweigh the negatives.
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The path planner goes slower and generates paths that are initially ambiguous when faced with multiple alternatives. That's no surprise. I'm working on the steering control program for our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, and it does that, too. Doesn't mean it's not "digital".