How the Brain Organizes Everything We See 83
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."
Won't help Randall (Score:2)
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.
Forget about Rule 34, it is 42 that matters! (Score:2)
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!
very interesting (Score:2)
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!
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Re:very interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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After all, more than 30 years ago it became unreasonable to assume that AGI by algorithmic means was even possible.
Wait, when was it ever shown that AGI by algorithmic means is impossible? What other method would the brain use to do things if not an algorithm?
You are right about the brain downloading though. Even if it is conceivable that we could possibly someday in the future have the technology to map out all the neurons in a human brain (still incredibly difficult, impossible with today's technology), the idea that we could do so without killing a person is extremely unlikely. And even if we manage to map the neur
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Start here, work your way forward in time:
cogprints.org/7150/1/10.1.1.83.5248.pdf
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I don't have a cite handy, but I have heard that in 20 years we'll be able to download the contents of the brain.
Yeah, and flying cars and fusion generators and a lot of other stuff that will probably never happen, too. Personally, I don't take much stock on anyone's predictions for the future.
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When it comes to brains I'm a layman as well, but I know computers down to the logic gates and they don't work anything like a brain. For one thing, digital computers generate rounding errors; what's one divided by three? What's the exact value of pi? A brain can lay three pencils on the table and say one is exactly 1/3 of the pile, while a digital computer will say it's 33.33333333333% and still is inaccurate. A computer can't do fractions, but fractions come easy to brains.
A digital computer is an abacus
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human brain simulation mostly be like this:
'what am I going to wear to the party?'
'I hope they like me.'
'Is someone hearing my thoughts?'
'who did this to me?'
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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!!
So Kant Was Right (Score:2)
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This does not prove the categories are a priori. There were only 5 subjects who all had similar history (upbringing in the modern western world). That is not empirical evidence, at best it is a suggestion.
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This does not prove the categories are a priori. There were only 5 subjects who all had similar history (upbringing in the modern western world). That is not empirical evidence, at best it is a suggestion.
You've added a sociological dimension, so you must be speaking of the a posteriori.
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This does not prove the categories are a priori. There were only 5 subjects who all had similar history (upbringing in the modern western world). That is not empirical evidence, at best it is a suggestion.
The fact that "moving machines" is an important category pretty much dispels the notion of "a priori categories." Or maybe there are two or so a priori eigenvectors, the next two are significant for local culture, the next 7 or so describe each person's unique expertise/skills.
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Re:Please ask google and apple to support webgl (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Re:Please ask google and apple to support webgl (Score:5, Informative)
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
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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
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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".
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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
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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!
If not WebGL then what else instead? (Score:2)
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There is WebGL and there is WebGL... The full-assed way is to do it all in the pixel shader, drawing just two triangles. Whenever I come across that and don't get any of it, I'm thinking "now that's just being an ass" :(
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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.
WebGL for free, iOS for pay (Score:2)
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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.
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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.
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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 N90
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Loading brain... (Score:1)
Is my connection slow or is it the morning after before coffee...?
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Newer than the newest (Score:2)
Fishy (Score:1)
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The truth is out there (Score:2)
Reminds me o Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Score:2)
So when can we use this to induce selective amnesia?
No necessarily how "we" see (Score:4, Insightful)
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You seem to forget that we construct a model of the outside world. This description varies between cultures. Top down processing ensures that you don't "see" what is out there in reality, you see a model your brain deems to be 'correct' given data quantity and processing constraints.
Another way to think about it is in terms of audio. An audio codec designed to encode only the necessary information for an english speaker to decode spoken english will not work e
Analog Not Digital (Score:1)
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This is a noisy map of brain activity, not meaning (Score:2)
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, a
A linguist is now out of a job (Score:2)
Take that, Noam Chomsky! //wondering about Ray Kurzweil too...
Frank C. Keil Did This In the 70's! (Score:2)
Semantic and Conceptual Development: An Ontological Perspective [amazon.com], 1979, Harvard University Press.
Frank C. Keil's web page [yale.edu]
This paper has an excerpt of his earlier work: look for Figures 1 and 2, the predicability tree and ontological tree. [rpi.edu]
Glad to see more independent verification of Keil's work!8-))
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It's interesting, and while not profound, at least it cements in the sciences a basic understanding of how the data is organized.
The brain organizes things? (Score:1)
Who knew???
Very good. (Score:1)