You Share Everything with Your Friends, Even Brain Waves
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I think they might be missing a component in their research. They are looking at people with established friendships. And they are then assuming that people gravitated to one another due to similarities, rather than the friendship causing the similarity, and I think that might largely be incorrect. The brain has 'mirror neurons' which lead us to 'mirror' the sensations we believe others are having into our own minds. If we see someone get stabbed in the hand, the neurons responsible for sensing pain in our own hands see some activation, things like that. Given the central dogma of neuroscience, 'neurons that fire together, wire together', it would make sense that people who spend a great deal of time with each other, and in similar environments, would have their brains adapt to be similar.
Now here's where we can go off the deep end. So, the brain activity mirrored into our own minds when dealing with our friends is approximate to some degree, but this research suggests that it probably gets more accurate over time. Eventually, we are duplicating the patterns from our friends minds and they are duplicating the patterns of our own. To what degree might it be said, then, that our selves are 'shared'? If our friend passes away and we consider how they might have thought about something, our ability to model that probably borders on their own ability had they been alive given a strong enough friendship.
And obviously we have many friends. Around about 100 if Dunbar's Number is a legitimate feature of our brains. So our brains are filled with these 100 overlapping intertwined networks of models of our friends... and is that it? Is it meaningful to say that if we were able to 'scrub' our mind of those influences that there would be anything left?
In the same way, I've always wondered to what degree my own internal models of my friends and family are actually mini-versions of them. Ever wondered how you know exactly what (eg.) your mother would say in a given situation?
I'd say there's still a lot of inference in your models on what goes on in them internally. They're extrapolated models from outward behavior. There are some things you don't know about them which they don't show.
Sometime even spouses discover incredible fact about their others special one decades after the wedding.
So a good simulation could carry on the make believe for quite some time undetected I think.
But given we have neurons in the heart and guts, that the chemicals we have it our body and the digestive activity affect our behavior and that discover everyday that a lot of "us" is actually made up of alien micro-organism taking a role in almost every parts of our daily lifes, including hormones management - a crucial piece of our reaction puzzles - I think it's far from realistic.
I can't wait to see the first people uploading their brain in a machine, only to discover that:
- A, it's just a copy, not them;
- B, the copy is not nearly close to the original;
- C, they feel that they are missing something but they can't express it because the missing thing helped them defining it.
I swear, we geeks love to solve perfect problems with perfect solutions.
Like the joke of the physicist that can cure a chicken, but only if the chicken is a perfect sphere in a frictionless vacuum.
> They plan next to try the experiment in reverse: to scan incoming students who don’t yet know one another and see whether those with the most congruent neural patterns end up becoming good friends.
My main question while reading the article was: does the same effect hold for "remote" friendships? Are the same patterns visible? Or perhaps a different set of shared properties appears?
The article only mentions that a description is different than a conversation:
> Dr. Ochsner offered his own story as evidence of the primacy of chemistry over mere biography. “My wife-to-be and I were both neuroscientists in the field, we were on dating websites, but we were never matched up,” he said.
> “Then we happened to meet as colleagues and in two minutes we knew we had the kind of chemistry that breeds a relationship.”
I wonder if "chemistry" travels across the net.
Then again, I know a couple of people that are just so different to be around in meatspace than online.
I guess it does to some extent but if you only have communication by text to go by it can be tricky or very different.
I've met many of my online friends in real life and it's surprising how different they seem from what my expectations are. There's still that "chemistry" but initially there's a lot of new things about them that I never considered before I have to process. It always changes how I see my online friends after I meet them. It's never been a bad thing though. I feel it's the same vice versa (real life to internet).
It feels a bit like 2 separate but oddly similar people I have to learn to associate with 1 person.
Edit: I miss attributed to Mandlebrot originally. Both like tessalation!
1 https://astudentforever.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/roger-penro...
Science made the rapid progress it did precisely because it at long last ignored "non-physical phenomena".
To me, this all or nothing attitude is what makes most humans quite dumb.
We might eventually find that the placebo effect is a measure of how bad we are at doing science
0]: http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_2/...
>>> In very remote times in India, thousands of years ago, these facts used to happen even more than they do today. It seems to me that when a country becomes very thickly populated, psychical power deteriorates. Given a vast country thinly inhabited, there will, perhaps, be more of psychical power there. These facts, the Hindus, being analytically minded. took up and investigated. And they came to certain remarkable conclusions; that is, they made a science of it. They found out that all these, though extraordinary, are also natural; there is nothing supernatural. They are under laws just the same as any other physical phenomenon. It is not a freak of nature that a man is born with such powers. They can be systematically studied, practiced, and acquired. This science they call the science of Râja-Yoga. There are thousands of people who cultivate the study of this science, and for the whole nation it has become a part of daily worship.
>>> The conclusion they have reached is that all these extraordinary powers are in the mind of man. This mind is a part of the universal mind. Each mind is connected with every other mind. And each mind, wherever it is located, is in actual communication with the whole world.
>>>> Have you ever noticed the phenomenon that is called thought-transference? A man here is thinking something, and that thought is manifested in somebody else, in some other place. With preparations — not by chance — a man wants to send a thought to another mind at a distance, and this other mind knows that a thought is coming, and he receives it exactly as it is sent out. Distance makes no difference. The thought goes and reaches the other man, and he understands it. If your mind were an isolated something here, and my mind were an isolated something there, and there were no connection between the two, how would it be possible for my thought to reach you? In the ordinary cases, it is not my thought that is reaching you direct; but my thought has got to be dissolved into ethereal vibrations and those ethereal vibrations go into your brain, and they have to be resolved again into your own thoughts. Here is a dissolution of thought, and there is a resolution of thought. It is a roundabout process. But in telepathy, there is no such thing; it is direct.
>>> This shows that there is a continuity of mind, as the Yogis call it. The mind is universal. Your mind, my mind, all these little minds, are fragments of that universal mind, little waves in the ocean; and on account of this continuity, we can convey our thoughts directly to one another.
First, he noted that some of the tests he did got results that were past random chance. But he said he didn't know why and wouldn't dare trying to make up an explanation.
Then he said something really interesting:
if we don't investigate scientifically those things, only charlatans will, and not only will we never know the truth, but the field will be filled with lies and misunderstanding, ruining the reputation of the topic. Even now, if you try to get a grant to study something like that, you bear the mark of delirium in your community, no matter how serious you are.
I figured The Times would be a little more aware of that kind of thing.
If you combined this research with the "smell dating" phenomenon, where you match based on liking each other's body odor, you could probably do some pretty amazing matchmaking for dating.
"And a sea of pulchritudinous models would have served as a lesson on how not to choose words: the ugly pulchritude sounds like the opposite of what it means, and it is one of those words that no one ever uses unless they are trying to show off.” https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/40167209-the-sense-of-...