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Traffic Jams In Your Brain
An anonymous reader writes "Carl Zimmer's latest foray into neuroscience examines why the brain can get jammed up by a simple math problem: 'Its trillions of connections let it carry out all sorts of sophisticated computations in very little time. You can scan a crowded lobby and pick out a familiar face in a fraction of a second, a task that pushes even today's best computers to their limit. Yet multiplying 357 by 289, a task that demands a puny amount of processing, leaves most of us struggling.' Some scientists think mental tasks can get stuck in bottlenecks because everything has to go through a certain neural network they call 'the router.'"
Have they tried unplugging it, waiting 30 seconds, and plugging it back in?
So the claim is that our brain is a field-programmable gate array (for economy and flexibility and performance) that takes time to re-arrange to accommodate different sorts of tasks.
Sounds entirely sensible to me.
But distracted me too long to get first post.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Couldn't it just be that we do not really have direct access to the raw computational capacity of the brain? There are savants and people who have trained themselves tremendously who can do arithmetric like this, using memory tricks and such. Wouldn't that be more like a hack to "reach down" to utilize the low-level capacity of the brain? The brain is nothing like a man-made computer, but doesn't the "layers of abstraction" still apply? The brain can calculate 357 by 289, but it does not naturally "understand" what 357 or 289 is, or for that matter what the high-level instruction from "me" to "multiply" is.
Emotions! In your brain!
103173
I don't see what so hard about opening a calculator and typing some numbers.
Kids these days!
How about 357 * 289 being hard is because 7 is the average size of the short term memory, and you need to remember more numbers than that to arrive at 103,173?
... the way math developed and was taught is not the only way to teach "math", this is one thing that I've learned as I've grown up. And I'm still doing much research in this area.
There are better ways to teach people how to do those computations but it requires a conceptual understanding that there is not a "Set" way of thinking about "numbers" (really our alphabet for communicating distinction and differences) linking the way we naturally think with foreign languages developed by a narrow set of minds. see: Mayan numerals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_numerals
Notice how mayan numerals rerepsent themelves as geometric objects that are easily discerned at a glance versus our our highly compressed representational notation (1,2,3,4). Mayans knew that all numbers are made of distinct geometric distinctions and hence they used simple uniform geometric objects as representation to communicate numbers "at a glance", representation _matters_ to how we think about concepts and how we can use them and map them between systems of thinking that only SEEM different on the surface.
You have to understand the numbers can be rethought as natural ratio of shape and size in the real world, when we measure things in the real world we use arbitrary ratios of an object in regards to our own visual system.
For instance 357 by 289 can be broken down to
3.57 x 2.89
What you're trying to do is limited the # of elements by changing the ratio you have to see "lots of things" as merely representations of smaller scale things and things get a lot easier once you understand this principle.
The whole way math is taught is really fucked up and made for a narrow range of particular minds that function and "Get" how our mathematical system developed. If you begin studying the history of math, you realize that representation and HOW YOU THINK about how we mathematize nature matters a hell of a lot more then just throwing stuff other people figured out at kids in a symbolic format developed for a narrow subset of human minds.
Math is just a symbolic language to communicate our observation of distinctions and differences in regards to space, matter and time in the world.
I am not expert, and this is just from a brief conversation I had in an elective class many years ago with a neural science professor but I asked how it is the brain does things in an instant that would likely take a powerful micro computer most of a day, while simple multiplication is often quite difficult for me to do in my head.
The reason he gave is that the brain works usually in a in precise manor. You have lots of different groups of neurons that your relatively plastic brain has wired up to do things like recognize certain patterns. If enough of those go high other parts of your brain proceed as if there was certainty. That works well for evaluating how hard the sterling wheel is pushing back and deciding how much more to stimulate muscles to contract. When you doing something like math though there is only a very specific correct symbol. They parallelism of the voting system breaks down and your brain how to check that all or almost all of those networks agree.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Here's an analogy to illustrate the category error people make when comparing the human brain to a computer:
"A Sony Walkman can record and play music in realtime, fast-forward and rewind, and store an hour's worth of music. These tasks require a 75 Mhz processor and 100 megabytes of memory on an iPod Shuffle. Therefore, a Sony Walkman has a 75 Mhz processor and 100 megabytes of memory."
We had a family friend (he has passed now) who could go to a railroad crossing with a train going 60 miles per hour down the track and correctly add the 7 digit (or more sometimes) numbers on each train car as the train passed.
He said that he would not "add" the numbers but allow for them thus coming up with a total more through allowing the right answer than by math manipulation like we would have to do consciously.
The whole thing was sort of spooky to behold... here we were writing down the numbers of each car and he effortlessly knew the running total. It was if he allowed his unconscious part of his brain to observe the number, add it to the running total without interfering with the process mentally and then his conscious mind would retrieve the answer from the unconscious mind at the end of the train or after 20 cars have passed or other terminating choice.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Look for a book called "FingerMath." It teaches how to use your fingers like an abacus. After you get used to it you can stop moving your fingers and just kind of "feel" the calculations. No, I never practiced it enough to get good at it. But it is a pretty good book.
Asking why we can't do three-digit multiplication quickly even though our brains is complex is sort of like asking why a toaster can't tell you ratios of voltages even though it has resistors in it. It's the difference between what a machine does and how it works. Brains are fabulously complex, but one thing they weren't built for is three-digit multiplication. Does the brain "know" how to do multiplication really really fast? Yes, of course, there are all kinds of things going on in the brain that involve multiplication. Does it know how to do it with numbers that come in through the ears, and spew the answer out through your mouth? No, brains weren't built to do that. They were, however, built (so to speak) to do much more complicated (but different) things, like recognizing threats and understanding spoken language.
I don't know how good the router analogy will turn out to be, but it's not exactly breaking news that some things need attended, more-or-less serial processing, and that mental arithmetic is one of them. The things that don't need as much attention are things that are evolutionarily old and more or less built-in. Extremely overlearned tasks can fake it sometimes. Guys like Hal Pashler and Stan Dehaene are always making progress into understanding how and why these things work, but the idea of processing bottlenecks in cognitive function is very old. The router analogy is probably a bad one, because it's unlikely that the brain's router lives in any very specific place. It's more likely a property of how the brain adapts to tasks it wasn't designed for.