Rat brains provide even more evidence our brains operate near tipping point | Hacker News Reader

Rat brains provide even more evidence our brains operate near tipping point

arstechnica.com

45 pointsdkoston11 comments

Ha, interesting timing! This has been my personal research topic this week, and I've been digging through the literature trying to get a sense of how thorough these experimental results are, and the theoretical underpinnings of neuronal criticality.

Here's a very nice (slightly dated, 2012) review of the subject [1]. With it's conversational tone, it's quite a breezy read, even for non-experts. For those who are jaded of power laws and criticality being bandied about willy-nilly, this article nicely digs a little deeper.

1: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fphys.2012.0016...

This seems like hooey to me. I mean power laws are everywhere, not just in phase transitions, and they seem to be struggling to identify what the "phases" are in the brain that the "power law" they claim to be observing result from. Post-hoc reasoning if ever.

Makes me nostalgic when I discovered a trove of chaos/complexity books in the college library, apparently the most represented topic in the science shelves as of 2008. Knowledgeable idiot warning. I was impressed about human brains existing at the edge of chaos. It does not go over one edge, its a system that has the opposite property of the butterfly effect: its state is buffered against impressions and strong impressions may move it to another stable state. Over the other edge: a normal brain plots as chaotic brainwaves while an epileptic plots as regular phases.

It would seem logical that this is more of “our brains can get overloaded and must shed the extra chaos” than we operate near a specific tipping point all the time. In a system that expends energy to do its job, a well designed system would try to regulate energy usage by optimizing on-the-fly and discarding activities using too much energy or energy in an inefficient way.

My vision on this: The thing is we can't say our brains operate at tipping point since we don't understand the brain fully yet. And won't for a long time. We haven't realized the full capacity of the brain yet, far from it. So, no, it most likely doesn't operate at tipping point for the majority of people.

Why should we care what you believe to be true, when you don’t provide empirical backup and no scientific method? This is less than interesting - it dilutes the discussions around the matter at hand.

1) This comment is unnecessarily mean. 2) The comment is about the limits of our understanding and how they affect our outlook, so your criticism about not providing "empirical backup and no scientific method" are a non sequitur.

It doesn't read as mean to me, it's just the truth. The OP made a claim, "So, no, it most likely doesn't operate at tipping point for the majority of people." and failed to back it up with any evidence. In fact, his premise is that this is "his vision".

Tilt_error was so logically correct in his statement, that I appreciated reading it. Clear thinking helps everyone.

That's fantastic.

Another way to think about this finding is that operating at the tipping point could be like entering a state of "flow" as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, where there is a balance of subject mastery and passion that drives great work. He writes about this in __Flow__, and it's an interesting read.

> We haven't realized the full capacity of the brain

Of course we have. Geniuses, savants, exceptional people have existed along all our history, that's the full capacity of the human brain, that's the best it can perform.

Nevertheless, the full capacity of your brain depends on genetics and training, just like, for example, your full gymnastic capacity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com