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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.'"
What did they expect to happen in their experimeents? Did they expect people to simply have no brain activity?
If a brain gets new sensory input, it's going to take some time to process that information, no? When you learn something new, it often takes a lot of time to think things through, and you can continue making new connections for quite some time without any new external inputs. This happens when we're sleeping, too, so maybe this happens under anesthesia as well.
I'm not quite sure what the hell they're thinking here. Are they trying to allude to a soul?