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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."
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!
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
I have heard that in 20 years we'll be able to download the contents of the brain.
I heard that 20 years ago.
It was just as ridiculous then as it is now. After all, more than 30 years ago it became unreasonable to assume that AGI by algorithmic means was even possible.
I can't wait for the moment ( within 20 years hopefully ) when we will have a full human brain simulation.
Talk to me in 20 years, let me know how that works out.
Required reading for internet skeptics
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).