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Comment by alexmorley | Hacker News Reader

> For decades, neuroscientists have treated the brain somewhat like a Geiger counter: The rate at which neurons fire is taken as a measure of activity, just as a Geiger counter’s click rate indicates the strength of radiation.

This hasn't been true for at least 20 years. There's a classic paper showing evidence of this in 1993 (O'Keefe and Reece) in rats. And has been an active area of discussion both before and since. (Note that it's not to say that rate isn't important, but as a community no one has beleived that all the information would be encoded in rate for many years)

There's lots of good explainers here that link to relevant research: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Encyclopedia:Computation...

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They mentioned this in the 3rd paragraph: "This temporal firing phenomenon is well documented in certain brain areas of rats, but the new study and others suggest it might be far more widespread in mammalian brains."

Hilarious. We shouldn't trust rat/mouse studies, but it's typically because the mice are way LESS complicated than humans. I would expect complicated behavior in mice to be treated as a lower bound for the complexity in humans. (but what do i know, i'm just a monkey.)

There are lots of animals that can beat us at specific neural tasks. So I don't think it's helpful to think in those terms. For example, our visual short term memory is bested by chimpanzees, at least on certain tasks used to measure it across both chimps and humans.

Lowly mice likely have better olfactory capabilities than us. It wouldn't surprise me if their brains can handle some very specific things better than we do.

maybe, humans have great olfactory sensitivity and can rival dogs with some smells, but our nose is to far from the ground to be useful for many tasks and in-turn leads to lack of use and we kind of ignore it and generally don't get how to use it

https://www.livescience.com/59070-human-sense-of-smell-sensi...

>There are lots of animals that can beat us at specific neural tasks.

anecdotally - in front of us a woman with a dog is leaving the dog park, and the dog pulls in the opposite direction that the woman tries to go, and that goes for a few seconds until the woman "Oh!, you're right, today we parked there" and follows the dog.

And on 2 occasions spread in time and space i saw a racoon confidently crossing an intensive traffic boulevard (once it was Page Mill in Palo Alto and another was Geary in SF. The Geary was around 6-7pm, getting dark, high traffic, such crossing presents some cognitive challenge even for humans) following the basic procedure we are taught in childhood - check for traffic (and the racoons were checking for the correct direction), wait for the sufficient opening, cross to the middle, check and wait again, cross.

as a kid i had a cat that would look both ways before crossing the street.

I saw many times straw dogs waiting for the semaphore to go green and then walking in the pedestrian crossing when most humans weren't.

"Scholarpedia [.org] : the peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia (where knowledge is curated by communities of experts)."

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

This fills an important gap.

Agreed, that opening line suits neuroscience poorly. "For decades, meteorologists have treated the environment somewhat like a Geiger counter: the temperature is taken as a measure of energy, just as a...", it's ludicrous!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding is pretty good too.

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