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Weak Electrical Field Found To Carry Information Around the Brain (eurekalert.org)
Zothecula writes: In a development that could lead to improved understanding of memory formation and epilepsy, scientists have discovered a new way information may be traveling throughout the brain. The team has identified slow-moving brainwaves it says could be carried only by the brain's gentle electrical field (abstract), a mechanism previously thought to be incapable of spreading neural signals altogether. "Although the electrical field is of low amplitude, the field excites and activates immediate neighbors, which, in turn, excite and activate immediate neighbors, and so on across the brain at a rate of about 0.1 meter per second."
Does this mean the scifi trope of using a machine to put knowledge in your head and getting years of education in matter of moments might actually be feasible?
first thing that came to my mind
at a 100 mm / second speed
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
It's MKS (meters - kilogram - second). You got a problem with that?
I have to wonder if this isn't a path to telepathy, either natural or mediated by technology.
The idea that cell phones 'heat up your brain' or cause direct brain damage is pretty ridiculous, given the energies involved.
This would seem to suggest that while actual BRAIN damage is still impossible, it's perhaps not impossible that such EMF may interfere with these just-discovered slow-moving signals and whatever they do.
Interesting data on the variety and strength of EMF we encounter daily is here;
http://www.who.int/peh-emf/abo...
Hopefully someone with a better understanding of how these compare to the "2.5â"5 mV/mm" quoted in the abstract can comment.
-Styopa
Well, it works out to just under 2 furlongs per hour. (about 1.78955 furlongs/hour) How's that?
People laugh when they see me wearing my colander but it helps me focus and the aliens cannot read my mind. -Fact.
Almost the exact same thing was demonstrated with evolovable hardware in the 90s:
http://www.damninteresting.com...
Programmable circuits were trained through an evolutionary process to perform certain tasks. At the end of the process they performed the tasks perfectly, but the actual circuits that were produced were not understandable or functional under the normal rules of circuit design, using roundabout methods for the components to effect each other that were dependent on the exact design of the model of programmable circuit they were using. Try to implement the same circuit design using other hardware and it would just fail to do anything at all.
Evolution will "make use" of anything it can, even and perhaps especially factors that no intelligent designer would ever consider.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
"Although the electrical field is of low amplitude, the field excites and activates immediate neighbors, which, in turn, excite and activate immediate neighbors, and so on across the brain at a rate of about 0.1 meter per second."
Ahhhh, body thetans. At last we have found you!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
may have some meaning. The slower brain signals must be the more thought out brain signals. How much bandwidth does each signal send? Are they coherent thoughts or just random pulses?
If this does prove to be a mechanism used by organic nervous systems to move information around the neural network (something akin to bias in an old-style electronic circuit?), we will need to create and understand a similar mechanism for silicon-based computing platforms as a necessary step towards creating true machine intelligence.
The unit is irrelevant, significant figures are what denote the accuracy of measurement. 100mm, 10cm, and .1m all have the same amount of significant figures, so the original complaint is still valid.
It's MKS (meters - kilogram - second). You got a problem with that?
Yes. Why are you mixing metric (meters, kilogram) with Imperial units (hour)? Shouldn't you be using a base 10 system for keeping time if you're going to be a pompous ass?
Does this have any implications for electromagnetic fields produced by power lines? Just a thought.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
This may lend support to electromagnetic theories of consciousness.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Nah just go full out crazy and put it in light years per fortnight. Has the added benefit of scientific notation to boot.
It's MKS (meters - kilogram - second). You got a problem with that?
Yeah, I got a problem with that. CGS forever!
For those that are unaware, centimeters-grams-seconds (CGS) was the predominant system used by scientists before Système international d'unités.
"His name was James Damore."
Meh, this doesn't seem like it's news yet.
Headline: "Weak Electrical Field Found To Carry Information Around the Brain"
Link: "The only explanation left is an electrical field effect."
They haven't actually measured or proven it yet, and it seems to conflict with existing evidence that electromagnetism doesn't influence thought.
how do we approximate this new (slow) method of data distribution within a computational system?
Raise and lower activation thresholds (or the bias nodes that you are using to mimic a dynamic threshold.)
"His name was James Damore."
Yes. Why are you mixing metric (meters, kilogram) with Imperial units (hour)? Shouldn't you be using a base 10 system for keeping time if you're going to be a pompous ass?
The hour isn't an Imperial unit.
It isn't metric either, but it is among the non-SI units mentioned in the SI. The second, along with the other units in the GP, is not only metric but also part of the SI system that most of the world uses these days.
How's that for pompous? ;)
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
I was wondering if it maybe actually lends credence to people who claim they have allergies to various types of EM.
I was wondering the same thing. Last year I was involved in the construction of a large (4 meter cube) copper-screened Faraday cage for 100Kv partial discharge testing. When we buttoned it up, I went inside and closed the door. It was oddly quiet - even though it was simply screen. At the time, I wondered if there was something to the idea that our brain was susceptible to RF energy. It was strangely peaceful and enjoyable.
Place nail here >+
heh, I'll bet they do agree -- it was most incredible indeed!
You're making the same mistake everyone does when dealing with significant figures for the first time. "100mm" is only a single sigfig, the trailing zeros don't count for anything unless followed by a decimal. If you wanted to indicate 3 sigfigs for 100mm you'd write it as "100.mm" or preferably "1.00x10^2mm".
I rarely use the ones where the power isn't a multiple of 3.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
EM sensitive people are crazy because ... (regurgitates current scientific knowledge). There never seems to be any acknowledgement here that our knowledge of how the world works has changed throughout history, and will continue to change in the future.
The correct answer is "we don't know for sure", not "ha ha EM sensitive people are crazy, lulz".
Were you really born in the first period of human history when there were no significant scientific discoveries left to make? The brain is at best very poorly understood. We shouldn't dismiss the notion just because "I like wifi and smartphones".
That's actually a bad example because:
1) 30 and 720 have different numbers of significant figures
2) A good cyclist can maintain an average of 30kph for a day. And if you want to quibble over only the best of the best cyclists, I'll point out that that single significant figure leaves a lot of leeway to fudge the distance, especially when multiplied out over 24 hours.
3) As you pointed out, seconds are the usual unit of time. You're not only using the wrong time unit, but also changing the time unit instead of the distance unit. Your original point has you changing the distance unit.
I get that you're trying to make a point about laymans terms vs scientific terms, but I think you're missing just how much they're derived from the scientific ones.
Although the electrical field is of low amplitude, the field excites and activates immediate neighbors, which, in turn, excite and activate immediate neighbors, and so on across the brain. The Field is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.
If the explanation includes midichlorians, I'm outa here.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
All I wanted to say is that in order to measure 30 km per hour, you must be measuring both 30km and 1 hour. You can't measure 30km/h in 1 second -- it'll actually take you a whole hour to measure 30 km per hour. That is all. Everything else was merely conversationally part of the examples.
You can't measure 30km/h in 1 second -- it'll actually take you a whole hour to measure 30 km per hour. That is all.
Car speedometers around the world beg to differ with that assertion.
Inches, feet, yards, furlongs, rods, hands and hogsheads are Imperial units of measurement. Everything else is in rebel units of measurement.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
...and that would be the incorrect part. That's my point. They aren't measuring anything per hour. They could. My GPS does -- says distance covered in the last hour. But the speedometer doesn't. I don't know what the measurement frequency is for a typical speedometer. I do know that it can't drop from 200kph to 10kph in less than a second, so the physical needle is, in and of itself, an average due to a physical lag. I would presume that, like a bicycle, the speedometer measures axel revolutions, multiplied by expected tire circumference. In which case, I would expect it to measure each rotation.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that Brain Waves (eg Beta, Alpha, Theta, Delta) were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century.
Different brain wave frequencies have long been associated with different mental states.
Building Brain Wave Detectors was all the rage amongst hobbyists many years ago.
Brain Waves are normally detected using electrodes on the scalp, but they also generate very weak fields which can be picked up by non-contact methods in a screened room.
Surely this is simply an extension of that research?
Instantaneous velocity
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
I always thought Transcranial magnetic stimulation was something of a quacky gimmick. I've been to a clinic where they offer this kind of treatment, for unrelated reasons. It makes the clinic much less credible in my opinion, but maybe there is something to it after all.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
I don't know what you mean by "a single instance" in this case. If you mean "instant", then that would be an infinitesemal unit of time during which you could cover in an infinitesemal distance in space (ds/dt). What you suggest is that if you plot position over time, you can't ever identify the slope of the tangent line at a given point, but of course you can do that with calculus using limits. There is no rate of change between a point and itself, but the instantaneous velocity at that point does represent an actual physical quantity, kinetic energy, with respect to the object's mass.
In a physical sense, you can't really look at "zero" time because of the continuous "analog" nature of the universe. You can look at smaller and smaller units of time, but you actually can't get to zero. On a subatomic scale, you end up hitting a fundamental limit of being able to know both position and momentum (mass*velocity) of a particle simultaneously. That's the kind of weirdness that gives you cats that are both dead and alive.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
And now you're just getting pedantic for the sake of prolonging a discussion. The bottom line is that significant figures are for expressing accuracy, and units should be picked to a standard (e.g. MKS, IPS, etc.) and/or in order to minimize the amount of extraneous zeros (e.g. don't use mm to express distances several km long).
units should not be picked to a standard. Units should be picked to the actual unit measured -- not the accuracy. Accuracy should be in significant digits. Units should be in what was actually measured. If you measured around the world one mm at a time, then yeah, use mm, because that's what you used. There's nothing wrong with more numbers. There is something wrong with expressing something that you didn't do. That's why my GPS doesn't know my speed when I'm on a steep hill, it's totally wrong.
Standards are only useful when relating to others using the same standard. That benefit comes at the cost of comprehension. That works in math, and pure math alone. It doesn't work in any applied science.
The shorter the ruler, the longer the shoreline.
The door can't be half open, just like it can't be half closed. There are threshhold effects in this world. Every time you average, you eliminate the possibility of a threshhold effect.
Instantaneous is always a mathematical construct. It does not exist in the real world. So you can call it an average, or a determination, or an expectation, depending on what you've actually done in order to calculate it. But since you didn't measure it over an instant, there's no difference between measuring ten times per second and describing the middle, or measuring three times a year and describing august. You don't know what the velocity was at that instant, because that's not actually measurable. You're always averaging over time.
If you measured 100 times per second, the object could still have suddenly come to a dead-stop for 0.005s and you'd never notice. In fact, it could have come to a dead-stop every 0.01s for 0.005s. So it could actually be going twice as fast as you measure, half the time, and be a dead zero for the other half, and you'd have no idea.
To magnify that to macroscopic levels, if I make $10'000 every second month ($60'000 per year), my average instantaneous revenue is $5'000 per month. Except I'm still broke in January, until the end of February, before I get my first pay-cheque. So I don't have $5'000 on February 1st. But you didn't look on February 1st. You looked on March 1st, saw $10'000 in my bank. From that, you can "average" the monthly, but you cannot "determine" the monthly.
And none of that has anything to do with using significant figures to express accuracy of a measurement and picking units for readability.