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

Uh Yeah..

[imstanny]

They argue for a greater acceptance of the view that our brain may have some intrinsic activity that's somewhat independent of sensory input.

This has been a postulate of mine for a while. It's the only rational explanation for me thinking about sex every 5 seconds - with our without sensory input.

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.

Re:Mind

[Artifakt]

I'll give you one of the simplest real mysteries:

Let's go to a movie. We'll sit in a comfy chair, and watch Indiana Jones dodge boulders. What happens?

1. Usually, a person enters a state that can be described as focused monomania (just as Hypnosis can be described). For an hour and a half, they focus on the film so that they are unaware of anything beyond the edges of the screen. They believe the events shown are every bit as real as real life until the film is over. They jump when Ripley opens a hatch and the ship's cat pops out. They cringe when Michael Myers swings an axe. They get aroused when ... Ahem, I'll keep this within the realm of Slashdot. I don't want to think about what arouses many of you. In fact, it's very hard to enjoy a film at all without getting that deeply into it. People don't just forget their external environment, often they forget their bladders unless the need becomes really critical, or sit so still that a foot 'goes to sleep' or similar effects. It takes a real annoyance to snap many of them out of it, a cell phone ringing, loud talking, or worse (and it's perceived as a distinct annoyance to be 'snapped out of it').

2. A conscious person, typically of normal mental health, has had an out of the body experience lasting typically 90 minutes or so. The other things in life that can allegedly normally cause such an effect aren't present. There's no chemical disturbance of the brain (as from a hallucinogen). There's no physical disturbance (as from a blow to the head). There's no build up of fatigue toxins (as is sometimes used to explain sleep related mental effects). There's nothing but images, images which in the hands of a skilled artist can be so compelling that we choose to become entangled, enthralled, enraptured.

3. Now describe it in evolutionary terms: We observe some members of a species that has just developed many of its unique brain functions over the last million years. They have lived for 99.999% of that time in small groups typically numbering less than 30. The single most common predator for that entire time was members of other small groups of humans, who typically were just as virulently cannibalistic as we observe today in chimpanzees. Without any of the causes we normally consider to cause a brain dis-function, these members of that species have become totally oblivious to large numbers of strangers, not of their tribe, they have made a deliberate, determined effort to become so, and to stay in that state for an extended time.

4. The mystery is, why, after doing that once, do humans not realize what they have done, run out of movie theaters screaming, and never return?

Re:Mind

[Spamboi]

This is a tautology. Introducing concepts that are beyond what can be scientifically experienced is useless from a scientific POV, like e.g. the concept of color is useless from the point of view of counting from one to ten.

On the other hand, the concept of color is absolutely critical from the point of view of counting from one to tan.

Re:Mind

[Johann Public]

The functioning of brain processes produces the phenomenon of mind

Re:Mind

[Cuppa 'Joe' Black]

Believe what you will, pedants! Your nervous system is but an interface betwixt the shimmering perfection of mind and the karmic shithole to which you desperately cling. Wake up! Wake up!

Re:Mind

[jotok]

So, we have this idea of the "brain." When we say "brain" we'll just assume that it includes all data ever gathered about the brain by anyone on this planet, ever.

How did we get that info? Well, we used the senses we have at our disposal...but those are mediated in the brain. And they do not always reflect what we think of as "objective" reality. This is not about subjectivity; this is about our experience being distant from actual events, like how chemical data can be transmitted as either taste or as pain depending on which particular neuron binds to the stimulus molecule.

So IMO in order to say that the mind is a function of the brain you have to make a lot of assumptions about what the brain are, what the mind are, how they function, etc. I think they are obviously interrelated, but as yet poorly defined and poorly understood concepts.

testing methods

[User 956]

an article summarizing an interesting and perhaps controversial paper which finds links between spontaneous brain activity and human behavior.

This study would have been way more exciting if they had used goatse to elicit the neural response.

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.

Whah?

[yali]

First paragraph of the Neuron article (which is paraphrased in Ars Technica):

Historically, there have existed two alternate perspectives for understanding brain function (Llinas, 2001). The first conceptualizes the brain as an input-output system primarily driven by interaction with the external world. The second suggests that the brain operates on its own, intrinsically, with external factors modulating rather than determining the operation of the system. The former perspective has motivated the majority of neuroscience research, but accumulating evidence is emphasizing the importance of the latter.

Does anybody who has spent more than 2 minutes thinking about the human mind really believe that first argument? Somebody should introduce these guys to William James:

It is astonishing what havoc is wrought in psychology by admitting at the outset apparently innocent suppositions, that nevertheless contain a flaw. The bad consequences develop themselves later on, and are irremediable, being woven through the whole texture of the work. The notion that sensations, being the simplest things, are the first things to take up in psychology is one of these suppositions.

The experiment may well be scientifically interesting, but not for the reason advertised.

Bah

[ericfitz]

I wish my coworkers would show some spontaneous brain activity.

Re:Bah

[ackthpt]

I wish my coworkers would show some spontaneous brain activity.

Rules of the Office
1. The boss's jokes are always funny.
2. When in doubt, see rule 1

Are you certain you want your co-workers (or are these cow-workers?) to be funny?

I worked with someone once who was silly at the most inappropriate of times. I finally hit him (just a tap) in the shoulder and insisted he be serious. I regretted hitting him, but not because he didn't deserve it.

Re:Brain activity and behavior

[mrbluze]

Spontaneous, yet organized brain activity has been observed without stimulation and even in humans under anesthesia. This may be so, but it has also been shown that all organized brain activity ceases once on becomes President.

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?

I have never seen my brain

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything I know about my brain is mediated knowledge. Other people (lots of other people whom I never met) with specialized equipment (which I will never get to use) have been studying the brain for generations. They have formed many elaborate models about how it works, what it does, and how it accounts for human behavior. Then, they shared these models with the world (including me).

My experience of my mind, however is immediate. I sense it directly. I didn't become aware of it by being told it was there, I became aware of it by feeling it.

So, in a very concrete sense, my mind is more real to me than my brain. I have experienced my mind directly, whereas I have only heard about my brain second-hand. What sense does it make for me to believe that something which I experience moment-by-moment isn't real because of its incompatibilities between some idea of how things work which I have only experienced, and can only ever experience, second-hand?

Scientists model our experience of reality. These models are not perfect; they have gaps. We shouldn't respond to these gaps by pretending that reality has them too. We should simply recognize them as gaps and continue to study what we can.

Seems an easy question to answer.

[jd]

If system A has a direct connection to external stimulus B, and system A moves to a deterministic state for any given fixed value of B, for all B, then A is a direct I/O device. (Chaotic systems are non-predictable, but they are wholly deterministic. The distinction is important.)

If system A has a direct connection to external stimulus B, and system A moves to a non-deterministic state for at least one value of B, then A is a quantum device. (Quantum systems are the only physical systems in which true randomness can exist.)

If system A has no direct connection to ANY external stimulus, but is rather operating solely off an internal model which may or may not ever get updated from an external source, then A not only exists independent of whether B exists, but cannot ever establish by any test as to whether B exists. Within normal operating conditions, A can be treated as though it were in a pocket universe, independent and isolated from the universe in which any B may exist, and should therefore be regarded as an isolated system.

The brain may be an I/O device, a chaotic system, or an isolated system. Arguments have been given for each. One thing it is NOT is a modulated system. That possibility does not really exist. The moment the connection becomes indirect, then you run into the limitations of knowledge and certainty. If you cannot distinguish between modulation by an external cause and a change of state due to internal causes, then you can't ever know if the external exists at all. It might all be a figment of your imagination. You can't conduct any test to establish otherwise, as any test which is definitely not a figment of your imagination cannot alter the external and anything that can definitely alter the external cannot be provably not a figment of your imagination.

As for Linux, the inability to determine a future state is NOT the same as the future state being non-deterministic. You cannot produce a quantum OS using Turing logic. You CAN produce an isolated system, and some research into strong AI and machine reasoning goes in this direction, but it hasn't been terribly useful so far.

Re:Free will.

[EllisDees]

How so? Even when I'm sitting in a dark, silent room I can be thinking about any number of things that could be activating different areas of my brain. Even when I'm sleeping, my brain is still active even though it is receiving no sensory input. What's so hard to believe about one part of your brain stimulating another part, and so on and so on in all sorts of strange patterns?

Or were you just joshing us? ;)

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:Stuck in a Strange Loop

[Raenex]

At least that's how I understand it. :) As I understand it, it's all handwavy bullshit that doesn't provide any answers.

wow!

[m2943]

So you're saying that some people actually think even when they're not receiving sensory input, and that their thinking might influence future behavior? What will they think of next?

(Of course, looking at the media and politicians, perhaps people do come to the conclusion that all humans are simple input/output response systems.)

It is an over-simplification

[Christianson]

Does anybody who has spent more than 2 minutes thinking about the human mind really believe that first argument?

In the sense that it is an oversimplification, useful to establish things in a word-count limited introduction, but whose primary role seems to be to lead laypeople to grotesque and frightening misapprehensions, no, neuroscientists don't believe that first argument.

It is unquestionable that there is neural activity in the absence of sensory stimuli or motor response. It is also known that this activity is not unstructured but correlated across the neuronal population (though the significance of this fact is a point of dispute). Nor does anyone assume that this activity does not have the ability to influence the response of an organism -- neuronal activity is neuronal activity.

At the same time, the paramount task of the nervous system is to process the environment around the organism and respond to it appropriately. To be successful in the natural selection sense, you cannot ignore pain, mating signals, fire, loud noises, sudden movements, etc., and when something comes up, you must be able to formulate and implement a strategy which can actually deal with the situation that stimulus describes. Sensory experience is a huge part of neural activity, and if deprived of it long enough -- so that the only activity is the spontaneous activity mentioned above -- the brain enters a degenerate state. Or, to put it another way, you go insane.

The nervous system, then, is a massively complex system which has a baseline pattern of activity, is receiving constant input from a variety of sensory organs (even when you close your eyes, or plug your ears, you receive input from them; it's just meaningless), all of which is being modulated by "supervisory systems" (e.g, the dopaminergic and serotonergic systems) that control meta-response properties such as attention, anticipation, learning, expectation, and so on. The debate can be reduced to two issues. The first is: once you have accounted for stimulus-driven activity and the effects of the higher-order supervisory systems, does the baseline activity contribute any significant fraction of the organism's final response? And if so, is the baseline activity no more than the muddled-together echo of past stimulus-driven activity rattling around the recurrent network that is the brain and can thus be regarded as simply random noise, or is it meaningful in its own right?

The paper in question tries to address the first of these questions. Their results seem to demonstrate that a large fraction of the inter-trial variability in a motor task cannot be explained by known modulating factors such as attention, and thus can be attributed primarily to the baseline activity. Thus, baseline activity would appear to be a major influence on response. The second question remains open, and it is really the core of the issue. These results, however, go a long way towards making it a pressing issue.

The experiment may well be scientifically interesting, but not for the reason advertised.

The experiment is scientifically interesting, and for exactly the reasons advertised. There is a fundamental difference between neuroscience and psychology. One studies the operation of the nervous system, and the other studies the nature of the human mind. The basic element of study of neuroscience is spikes, of which you are never aware; psychology interests itself in thoughts, which (from the perspective of a neuroscientist) we can't even meaningfully define, let alone measure. Perhaps one day we might be able to unite the two, but at this point, a criticism of neuroscience based on psychological principles is no more well-founded than lambasting the mathematics of game theory because it runs afoul of sociological thought.

Re:It is an over-simplification

[yali]

Your analogy to math/sociology rings false. Mathematics is not an empirical science; its relation to sociology (or any scientific field) is complementary rather than overlapping. A mathematician who works on the pure math underlying game theory is perfectly safe as long as he doesn't try to draw conclusions about human behavior. If he starts doing so, then yes, he has stepped into sociology, and his statements can and should be evaluated in light of sociological data and theory.

In this case, these neuroscientists aren't just talking about spikes in the nervous system. They are talking about cognitive functions of the brain - by your own argument, they are trying to tackle stimulus-response processing, attention, anticipation, etc. So they are very much trying to address psychological issues. And therefore, they can and should be called out for setting up a psychological strawman.

As I said, the narrower read of the article is scientifically interesting. Intertrial variability in behavior can be explained by left SMC activity. The controlling influence of left SMC activity can be partitioned not only into an effect of the experimentally-controlled stimuli (well-established), but also an effect of right SMC activity (which is what is new in this study). Right SMC activity is mostly independent of the experimental stimuli. They also try to demonstrate (through some indirect inferences from null significance tests) that right SMC is independent of attention or anticipation, and seem to do so with some degree of confidence.

So why is that scientifically interesting? The authors start the article by saying there's a debate about whether spontaneous brain activity is meaningful, and they claim to be speaking to that debate. That's a lot of hot air. Instead, they should have started by saying that it has been acknowledged for at least 127 years that spontaneous mental activity (which necessarily means brain activity as well) influences behavior over and above stimulus input, and hey look, we've identified a specific manifestation of that, and for the first time demonstrated it at a neurological level of analysis. That's new and important. But it's not what they said.

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?

Re:Misunderstood, of course

[pla]

plus the task to try to think of nothing, which is quite hard

I don't think you can safely pass that off as a minor little clause in your point - The same problem this FP seems to make.

Of course we have "spontaneous brain activity" that influences our performance on certain tasks. Most of us call that "thinking", preferably about the problem, but also quite possibly about lunch or that cute tech's short skirt or about why the FSM lets good pasta get overcooked.

This seems like a non-article. No one seriously believes the human brain does nothing but react to sensory input. It just makes a good model since we have nothing but wild guesses about how our wetware really works.