Slashdot Mirror
How the Brain Organizes Everything We See
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a UC Berkeley news release:
"Our eyes may be our window to the world, but how do we make sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day? Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the brain is wired to put in order all the categories of objects and actions that we see. They have created the first interactive map of how the brain organizes these groupings."
Didn't see the 'Velocorapter' voxel. The one for 'American Bison' was pretty easy to spot however (whatever the hell that means).
Interesting, still trying to figure out where Rule 34 fits.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
one small step for a university, one huge leap for our roadmap towards simulating a brain. Another one recent example of our progress in this was the Spaun brain model ( a small one that is, IIRC 12million neurons ) which was featured on slashdot as well, and also the older blue brain project http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/
I can't wait for the moment ( within 20 years hopefully ) when we will have a full human brain simulation. the possibilities from that point are endless. Maybe our last invention!
These a priori categories exist, and are proven empirically.
Brains, brains, brains!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
.. even he didn't foresee the ability of your masters being able to literally read your mind like a book.
Is my connection slow or is it the morning after before coffee...?
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Smells a bit fishy to me: http://boingboing.net/2012/10/02/what-a-dead-fish-can-teach-you.html
Here, for the browser deficient:
Warning:This page uses WebGL, an experimental web technology. It will not work in all browsers or on all platforms. For the best experience we recommend using Google Chrome, maximizing the size of your browser window, and closing other running applications (this viewer takes quite a bit of RAM).
It's data intensive and would likely turn your iPhone into a spot welder for the second or two it would take to trash the battery. Some things need REAL COMPUTERS(TM) to work well.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Puts boobs top of the list
Technically speaking, large mammary glands are just an evolutionary trick to get the male of the species to..., Whoa! Would you get a load of those Ta-Tas!!!...
Ahem, uh, where was I, oh yeah. Female breasts are really just mounds of fat tissue... Aw jeez, those are NICE!!
Hi, I actually programmed the software that displays the brain. Let's make this clear -- this is a full blown scientific visualization software. We actually use this in our day to day research. It conveniently allows a layperson to view it on their browser, but that was not the original intention. You wouldn't run a nuclear power plant using your iphone, and we don't do our research using tablets. :-p
Second of all, I am a graduate student making 30k a year. I programmed this in my spare time as a service to my lab. If you pay me to write it for android and ios, i'd gladly do so. But I'm not paid enough to listen to ugly flames like this
Wouldn't it be far more interesting to see what the question is behind the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything?
And when found, can someone tell this to the mice? All the skull-cracking and what not, is not funny at all when your name is Arthur Dent!
Oh, wait.
What?
He is now a hobbit?
That confuses me!
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
OK genius, let's see YOU do it.
Thank you, thank you thank you thank you for this post. It seems there's always some dilettantish comment ready to be made from the cheap seats; acerbic, uneducated and entitled criticism by the inept and lazy aimed at people like yourselves who are prepared to innovate and do something useful and interesting with their time.
Oh and thanks, iamhassi, for your positive armchair encouragement. I'm sure if I was the skilled researcher responsible for this software I'd be falling over myself for the opportunity to share the results of my future work on Slashdot, with comments like yours to spur me on.
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Read the actual post. The flame is clearly aimed at the developers of the visualization software, not at google or apple.
considering the iPhone 5 has a gigabyte of ram and the equivalent processing power of a 3ghz p4 I'm sure it'll be fine, people forget how powerful this little phones are
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Read the actual post. The flame is clearly aimed at the developers of the visualization software, not at google or apple.
Correct, I'm flaming the developers for being so short sighted and naive
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
If you don't want to do the job then don't, someone else will do the research and get the credit, but doing a job half-assed and bitching that it's google and apple's fault their website wasn't setup right is asinine
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
If you want to know how the brain is wired, read Trance formation of America by Cathy O'Brien.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
If you don't want to do the job then don't, someone else will do the research and get the credit, but doing a job half-assed and bitching that it's google and apple's fault their website wasn't setup right is asinine
Your attitude that this is a 'half-assed job' is the problem I'm referring to right there. There's always plenty of your type ready to shit on other people's work at a moment's notice.
You're bitter, just because. I can understand how someone like you might see that as a valid reason to demand your money back from the developer. Thanks for your contribution!
..Mullah or Pope, Preacher or Poet, who was it wrote: "Give any one species too much rope and they'll fuck it up"?
Only Apple has the privilege to create a web rendering engine on iOS. So you're stuck waiting for Apple to make a version of Safari that allows WebGL applications to make use of this "gigabyte of ram and the equivalent processing power of a 3ghz p4".
So when can we use this to induce selective amnesia?
So what's the full-assed way to display an interactive 3D visualization using web standards?
The reason for Sardaukar86's mood is his trolling and defeat http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3339513&cid=42391603
To be fair, WebGL works just fine for iAds.
I understand that you can enable it after a jailbreak as well.
I don't know why Apple refuses to enable it -- Android and BlackBerry tablets don't seem to suffer at all from having that particular feature.
Required reading for internet skeptics
By "recent" do you mean something newer than the latest release-channel version of Firefox for GNU/Linux (Firefox 17.0.1, which is up to date as of right now according to mozilla.org) or the latest version of Chrome for Android (Chrome 18.0.1025469)?
I imagine this would be mapped from the brains of "like" individuals- not necessarily of the same sex, race, etc, but usually from one geographic area. The problem with is that maybe this is not how all brains "map" learned things, but maybe a result of western thinking/education. Perhaps native Americans, who might view trees as just as close to humans as pigs are, might have quite a different "mapping." It would be interesting to see if this was a result of how our education system is (Western species/classification) geared rather than how our brains actually group things (as in, perhaps it is a manifestation of our education system rather than inherent organizational heuristics in the brain).
Would you rather it be exclusive to PCs running web browsers capable of WebGL (and not work on iOS) or be exclusive to iOS (and not work on PCs at all)?
What is shortsighted about using the best tech available if it's available to you, for stuff *you* need to do; and then *also* making that usable for people who also have the tech available?
And do you have the faintest idea how extreme the speed differences and WebGL and canvas can be? There is just no contest. I'd rather have something usable that runs even on my mother's laptop, than something completely useless that runs "everywhere".
You seem to be missing something. These people are scientists. They get paid to publish papers. You can get the paper from Neuron, where it was published. (You can find it elsewhere too if you look.) The online viewer was just gravy, they didn't get paid to do it, they don't get any direct science benefit from it (no ad $ or citations). As a previous poster noted, this uses WebGL which isn't yet available on IOs. Given that most real science is done on real computers, and that his viewer is likely targeted primarily at real scientists, your complaint seems odd.
Web-based 3D gaming. They wouldn't get a cut.
You are confused. The job is NOT the visualization. The job is doing the research and publishing the results. The visualization is something extra that is not being paid for. If you want a different visualization, you pay for it.
Not to mention that as others have said, sometimes having better performance is more important than having it work on your toys.
It is untrue that our brain "makes sense of the thousands of images that flood our retinas each day." In fact, what floods our retinas is a single continuous image, a gestalt delimited only by the shifting field of view as well as blinking, sleeping, etc. Milliseconds later, our brain slices and dices this image, discarding most of it as extraneous to our survival.
It's like creating new highways that are only 3 feet wide and posting signs saying please ask car manufactures to make smaller cars.
They are called bike lanes or bike paths, and they do have signs telling people to use smaller vehicles.
The relations represent analysis of fMRI scans. Something like: if the subjects all have the same pattern of activation for object A and object B, then these objects must be related. While I don't deny that semantic relations in our brains must almost certainly have some physical correlate, the reverse doesn't hold: e.g., a "voxel", the smallest unit being measured, easily contains 10,000 neurons, so a lot of different patterns of processing cannot be distinguished. Also, fMRI measurements are very noisy, and using just 5 people is going to make that look like correlations. Most likely, these patterns are the artefacts of the visual learning process.
I do see use of this kind of method though: if you've got reliable activity patterns for a large group of people, you can try to make sense of the patterns in another experiment, or in a subject that wasn't classified yet, and it may help tackle other problems.
I am working on teaching mathematics using object-oriented thinking. It will be interesting to see what happens when learns arithmetic, algebra etc., and is the brain accessing the domain knowledge in which the mathematical models are used or just the mathematical model abstracting it from the natural language and then reinterpreting the result in the natural language? It seems that those who learn to ignore the domain knowledge and abstractly represent the relationship in arithmeitc or algebraic model and then express the result in a natural language succeed in learning mathematics. Such application and investigation will be very useful to change the way learn and teach mathematics.
Wow, nerd rage. His job isn't to entertain iOS and Android whiners with 3d brain models.
Take that, Noam Chomsky! //wondering about Ray Kurzweil too...
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
I wonder what part of the brain decides which Android vs iOS team to be on, and which related part of the brain flames scientists for not catering to their choice of mobile platform when making webpages.
If the WebGL version were free and the iOS version were a paid app to recover the cost of hiring a programmer in India, would that be an acceptable solution?
Semantic and Conceptual Development: An Ontological Perspective, 1979, Harvard University Press.
Frank C. Keil's web page
This paper has an excerpt of his earlier work: look for Figures 1 and 2, the predicability tree and ontological tree.
Glad to see more independent verification of Keil's work!8-))
Who knew???
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Thank you for doing this work. It's artistically beautiful. Love the semantic trees!
The whole reason we have slashdot is that people don't categorize through the same myopic self-interest. We all have a different myopic self-interest.
Nokia N900 -- WebGL is available in the stock microB browser from the PR1.2 firmware update onwards.
BlackBerry PlayBook -- WebGL is available via WebWorks and browser in PlayBook OS 2.0
Firefox for mobile -- WebGL is available for Android devices in unstable builds since early 2011.
The Sony Ericsson Xperia range of Android smartphones have had WebGL capabilities following a firmware upgrade.
Opera Mobile 12 final supports WebGL (on Android only).
The very first thing I'm going to look for is cognitive cleft of can't/won't. It'll be somewhere near penis size, which should be hard to miss if they included in their leader reels any Bourne or Bond or Bay.
The airlines and credit card companies are busy trying to brainwash the masses that Team Cool is first in line for every feature attraction. After soaking this up, it must come as a huge and unwelcome surprise to find Team Clue in the express lane when the feature attraction is momentous enough to separate the men from the boys.
The second thing I'm going to look for is the locus of trolls who culminate with a car metaphor. It'll be somewhere right beside superior glow.
I am blown away! This is some of the most impressive brain imaging I've seen.
No, it's more like pointing out that if you want to see the view from some mountain peak, 1. You are going to have to hike to the top of the peak. 2. You probably want to buy a pair of hiking boots to use on the hike. Complaints from a dumb ass in a car about the millions of car owners that are denied accesss to the view are ridiculed or ignored, and rightly so!
Social Credit would solve everything...
I programmed this in my spare time as a service to my lab. If you pay me to write it for android and ios, i'd gladly do so. But I'm not paid enough to listen to ugly flames like this :-p
Simple solution James. Release the source. Most of the knee-jerks will ignore it, but I would be surprised if you didn't get at least a couple useful optimizations passed back up to you. It's amazing too how many knee-jerk whiners crawl back into the woodwork when they are confronted with a little empowerment.
This I a very well done job. It is not often that research takes the easy while correct path to explain something while using appropiate statistics and self-explaining representations. Those claiming that brains differ, well, yes, but I haven't seen too many thinking with their thalamus...In fact those little differences may be the most important. Do you remember when those ancient Mengeles removed brain parts to try to achieve "behavioural"improvements? Well think of using a correct map and an IgG-toxin instead of a butcher knife. Besides its "interesting" achievements this has real applications. You want to distinguish is someone has been positively reinserted into the society, well give him, or better said his brain, the chance to prove it. You are taking psicological help? lets check the progresses! For funding, research and peer finding please refer to the non-profit Aging Portfolio.