Spontaneous Brain Activity and Human Behavior

Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica is featuring an article summarizing an interesting and perhaps controversial paper which finds links between spontaneous brain activity and human behavior. Spontaneous, yet organized brain activity has been observed without stimulation and even in humans under anesthesia. This paper attempts to link this activity to the observed variability of human performance in even simple, repeated tasks, hoping to establish a new avenue of research into alternative brain processing theories. 'The subtraction provided a much cleaner connection between the button press and brain activity in the left SMC. Once spontaneous activity was accounted for, noise was down by 60 percent, and the signal to noise ratio in the experiments doubled. Putting this another way, spontaneous activity accounted for about 60 percent of the variation between tests. The authors say that these results show that spontaneous brain activity is more than simply a physiological artifact; it helps account for some of the variability in human behavior. In that sense, they argue for a greater acceptance of the view that our brain may have some intrinsic activity that's somewhat independent of sensory input.'"

Comments

Mind

[Cuppa 'Joe' Black]

Your mind is not in your brain. Your brain is in your mind.

Re:Mind

[BillyBlaze]

How can a physical entity exist inside a non-physical entity? Dualism may be a compelling philosophy for some, but lacking any evidence of violations of known physical laws in the brain, it's scientifically useless.

Maybe, but...

[DragonWriter]

authors say that these results show that spontaneous brain activity is more than simply a physiological artifact; it helps account for some of the variability in human behavior. In that sense, they argue for a greater acceptance of the view that our brain may have some intrinsic activity that's somewhat independent of sensory input.

While that may be the case, how does one rule out that the possibility that the activity is a delayed reaction to sensory input, rather than an immediate one? Even assuming that the anesthetization is really enough to rule out the possibility of it being the result of immediate sensory input...

Re:Maybe, but...

[marcello_dl]

> While that may be the case, how does one rule out that the possibility that the activity is a delayed reaction to sensory input, rather than an immediate one?

Might be, but if you are trying to force a "mechanical" model of the brain (which I don't assume you're doing) think about this: a degree of randomness helps avoiding stalling or deadlock situation (think about old toy cars with stupid algorithms to avoid obstacles that get stuck hitting the same spot over and over, or how ethernet devices cope with packet collisions).
On another perspective, the one of behavior, predictable patterns are weaker than randomized one, because the external world is subjected to chaotic changes and because you will never catch by surprise a competitor who's studying you. So a degree of randomness is likely an evolutionary advantage.

Besides, if there were a delay it would be quite variable not to have been yet detected as such by all but superficial analysis, so a more general theory of something random inside the brain would hold.

How sad

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

> One option it presents is that the brain is an input-output device: give it a stimulus, and it will process it and respond. The alternative view is that the brain is simply doing its own thing, and stimuli act to modulate its activity, rather than direct it.

Oh my God, this is so stupid. I bet people really argue about this.

Put it this way: does Linux respond to stimuli or do its own thing? Is there any experiment that could help us decide? Two people could know the entire Linux source code back to front and inside out, and the source of every application running on it, and still disagree over this stupid question. Don't these people have real and meaningful phenomena to investigate?

Stuck in a Strange Loop

[Strange Ranger]

According to some, consciousness and self-awareness arise out of Strange Loops

I think, therefore I am.
I realize I am, therefore I think.
But after than I'm a broken record!

Horribly simplistic to keep the post short:
Without some "spontaneous activity" injected into the strange loop that is a self-aware entity, might we not get stuck in the loop, and end up being less cognizant than a fruit fly?

Someone with a knowledge of real-world AI can flog me, but you CAN program a computer to be self-aware. It patches itself, reports crashes in it's own log, recognizes intrusions (hopefully). But without that bit of "spontaneous activity" the system can never gain an outside perspective. It can never "unask the question". So it's just as dumb as a Bach fugue playing itself on a player piano.

To sum up, it's Self Referentiality PLUS this "spontaneous activity" that is at the very core of sentience.

At least that's how I understand it. :)

Re:Random Number Generator

[Anne Thwacks]

Nope - its saying that the majority of processing is not directly connected with I/O. Which means there are other tasks that handling I/O - and this comes as a surprise to who?