To be energy-efficient, brains predict their perceptions
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
(Basically, doing one “core dump“ when you begin dating, and then having regular “radical honesty sessions“ where both of you can bring up those apparently “small“ and “unimportant“ thoughts you might have had throughout the week that, if suppressed, can turn into the seeds of resentment.)
No, my "hobby" is laying flat and loosing fat (which is done mostly by the brain burning calories AFAIK). I once gained sixpack abs this way. Unfortunately I don't have enough time to lay flat these days so I don't have the six pack any more. I also am very aware of the tricks my brain plays on me all the time and hate that.
Humans don't need to save energy any more. Energy-saving and accumulating features of a human body are an atavism doing obvious harm (e.g. inclining us towards wrong judgement) and no good in today world. We have infinite amount of calories readily available 24x7 all year round. Sugar is dirt-cheap, almost everyone has at least some fat deposits they don't need, don't want and occasionally torture themselves to get rid of.
It would certainly be great if our brains could expend as much energy as physically possible to actually power our perception and thinking rather than save it.
> It would certainly be great if our brains could expend as much energy as physically possible
That's... not how the body works. You should really talk to a med student so you don't make any dangerous health decisions.
I suspect that’s why some of the self help stuff actually works. It has nothing to do with “the law of attraction” or anything supernatural like that. It’s just that your own state is the biggest filter that determines which “frequencies” out of the spectrum of reality you perceive and which you do not.
The problem is, of course, that the world is wildly interesting. There are so many things we can see and learn and do today. You’d have to say no to all of that to keep your system clean. The very fact that you’re here on Hacker News shows that you’re probably not that kind of person. :) (Me neither.)
“Ok, stop getting on my case about it.”
“What? I didn’t say anything at all!”
“Oh… well, the you in my head was getting on my case about it.”
Awareness helps a lot.
We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
Enjoy the childlike wonder. Or don’t enjoy, not everything a child perceives is fun.
Changes at this basic level are temporarily re-writing how your neural network connects to itself, which translates to a change in how you perceive the world at the most fundamental level. It is very different from consciously trying to adopt a different perspective, as in that case there is no change to the underlying network processing everything that makes you yourself.
Some people find experiencing this malleability extremely upsetting and disconcerting, as it destroys the idea of your "self" being something concrete. This understanding is the oft-referenced "ego death", and for sure it is both exciting and terrifying.
Acid (LSD) is much stronger in muuuch lower doses and is more of a refined component - its a totally different dose scale. Doesn't mean you wont have a bad trip though, just that your stomach won't hurt lol. Buckle up. Great way to spend 500 years in an afternoon.
- https://dougnoll.com/de-escalate/nonviolent-communication-ba...
> Many people ask me about the difference between Nonviolence Communication basics and the Noll Affect Labeling System. This lengthy article explains those differences. Fundamentally, we peacemakers want to minimize human conflicts, calm people down, solve problems, and make durable agreements for lasting peace. Peacemaking and mediation help achieve these goals. Unfortunately, as will be explained, psychologists, counselors, therapists, peacemakers and mediators have mistakenly tried to create empathy through the use of "I" statements during active listening. "I" statements are important, but not for creating empathy and certainly not for de-escalating anger or other strong emotions. The inappropriate use of "I" statements comes from a misunderstanding of the work of Thomas Gordon, the inventor of active listening, and Marshall Rosenberg, the creator of Nonviolent Communication.
I highly recommend Douglas Noll's book, _De-Escalate_.
Maybe other people are better at it, but when self-interrogating and inspecting one's own vision, it just completely falls apart. https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...
Normally.
I can only speak to personal experience, but under the influence of psilocybin I find that closing my eyes and visualizing complex environments and machines -- of literally inspecting and walking through gearing systems, for instance, and rationalizing their operation -- with complex lighting, etc, leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity. It literally feels like looking into another universe, the construction of the reality simply too complex to be imagined and visualized.
I've actually felt my head to ensure I'm not overheating, contemplating the process like the mind was a GPU.
> leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity
Want a really trippy realization? All you ever see is brain activity! Sounds obvious, but most people haven't really internalized it. That's all regular perception, which feels totally real and solid, is. The psychedelic just gave you a greater ability to volitionally influence the percepts.
YES. To put it crassly, it's like your brain is The Matrix.
I was driving the other day, thinking about reaction times and had the actual tangible feeling that I was just behind 'reality' because we don't actually see, feel, hear reality we see, hear, feel the brain's interpretation of it, and so it's ever so slightly behind 'actual' (are there variations in processing speed? And how do the fringes of these variations affect one's ability to exist in society?).
We are all living a very recent, rolling memory. Operating system loaded into RAM.
We've clearly got inputs, outputs, and when working correctly, some signal processing going on in the middle.
But more like: the inputs, processing, and outputs have much more complicated relationships than this causal chain that you have described. Modern neuroscience and research into NCC have shown that the brain, obviously, is not so simple.
Amazing state, i love it!
The reality is that every individual's ability to visualize exists somewhere on a spectrum between aphantasia (complete inability) and eideticism (photographic memory).
That bicycle experiment is fun, and it certainly shows that most people are very far from the eidetic end of the spectrum.
But it can also (better) be explained by the facts that:
- people generally don't pay very close attention to any particular object, they categorize things and move their attention elsewhere (mostly to higher levels - e.g. the whole environment level)
- most people don't have a whole lot of experience with bicycles and how they work at a detailed mechanical level (anybody that does can draw a bike fairly well, from a technical accuracy perspective)
The idea of the brain operating (at least in part) as a "prediction machine" is certainly not a new one. I'm actually surprised it's taken this long for this sort of experimental confirmation and theory to become more mainstream.
There's been a number of articles on HN over the years on saccades / visual interpolation.
See: https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-s...
>The mind has a basic habit, which is to create things. In fact, when the Buddha describes causality, how experiences come about, he says that the power of creation or sankhara—the mental tendency to put things together—actually comes prior to our sensory experience. It’s because the mind is active, actively putting things together, that it knows things.
>The problem is that most of its actions, most of its creations, come out of ignorance, so the kind of knowledge that comes from those creations can be misleading.
The second paragraph is getting off the topic - or is it?
i can't speak much as to their original research efforts, but i personally appreciate the engineering-research side of what they are doing.
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head right there! The idea goes back at least as far as Hermann von Helmholtz (19th century).
There are scattered reports of lucid dreamers who take benzodiazepines. They can’t escape their dreams. They simply wake up into the dream again if they die. Everyone reported it as being terrifying. Some reported that their reality checks stopped working; double taking at a watch didn’t change the position of the hands. The world became frighteningly real. It’s likely that the guessing machine you experience during a normal dream is not operating at full capacity.
It explains everything. How people swear on their life that they saw something, ordinary or extraordinary, that couldn’t be explained by a trick of light on the eyes or anything else. It explains dreams of course and other realistic hallucinations had by schizophrenics or drug users. The simulation doesn’t just deal with the physical world, it deals with abstract things like the “presence” of a person or entity. It’s all haywire simulation.
This idea that synapses are a part of an energy optimization is fascinating. It is widely speculated that inflammation has to do with schizophrenia, and inflammation is also involved in metabolic interference. African sleeping sickness for example is a purely inflammatory disease that causes people to run out of energy and fall asleep. Perhaps schizophrenia is some kind of metabolic knob being turned down by an inflammation signal which then results in the progressive shutting down of synapses as a way to conserve energy…
I am not a lucid reamer nor to I take benzodiazepines, but I do occasionally have dreams that I suddenly realize are dreams and then wake up into another dream. Occasionally, this too results in my realizing I'm dreaming and waking into another dream, where the pattern repeats at faster and faster pace until I'm just examining the way my bedroom appears in each iteration looking for how it is wrong and trying desperately to wake up for real this time.
I can confirm that it is pretty terrifying. Fortunately for me, I've developed an appreciation of nightmares and actually don't mind it all.
Sorry, a momentary lapse of reason.
Ego-Game
I wonder if this mechanism is responsible for many shared false memories (or Mandela Effect). As an example, the spelling of the Berenstain Bears is misremembered by many, perhaps because we're so accustomed to seeing the suffix -stein in last names.
• An instant level-matched AB switching mechanism for auditioning changes
• Preferring tools which could be checked under optimal perceptual conditions, and choosing to avoid gear which did not lend itself easily to such conditions. This generally meant preferring software plugins and avoiding outboard gear unless the budget was very high (which it rarely was for my clients).
• Isolating changes and amplifying the effect to well above perceptual threshold in order to get an impression of the change before dialing it back down. (This is a standard practice, especially for mix engineers.)
Many audio engineers don't hold the same priorities, especially "audiophile" types those who advertise their "golden ears"[1]. And many customers don't want someone who acknowledges the fallibility of their perceptions. But I was confident that I was absolutely doing my best work and offering the best possible value to my clients.
[1] It's basically impossible to talk intelligently about audio in an open internet forum (including HN) because there will always be a swarm of participants who don't accept the limits of perception and their own propensity for illusion.
could you expand on this a bit? I don't see how software vs hardware could impact this, doesn't it all just go through an amplifier to your headphones at the end?
It was also more difficult to set up and compare multiple "wet" settings for hardware devices, and it was less convenient to "save" settings, take a break and come back with fresh ears (because the studio might be used for something else in the interim.)
It's possible to give yourself optimal conditions with hardware tools, it's just less convenient (and thus more expensive). I believed that giving myself optimal perceptual conditions and an ideal workflow was far more important than gear choice — especially in terms of value, but in my view even in terms of doing my best work in an absolute sense.
I would also be interested in hearing about the studio! Was it just a big place that you were renting occasionally, is it possible to rent a real room with a mastering desk? Im still renting so I can't do all those fancy room modifications yet.
Do you give mentorship/lessons?
I left the audio industry a long time ago. I love music, but I don't love audio engineering enough to sacrifice my life to it — and because there's a tremendous oversupply of labor for art-adjacent professions, that's what it takes.
Now that's a weird one, never saw that example before. I'm familiar with the subject ... yet, if you asked me to spell it, it would have been -stein.
Very interesting.
;)
(Of course, I recognize this as another instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion)
There's also a different TED talk than the one I already linked about your theory which gives a lot of interesting examples[1].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideasthesia#Neurophysiology_of...
> Ideasthesia is congruent with the theory of brain functioning known as practopoiesis. According to that theory, concepts are not an emergent property of highly developed, specialized neuronal networks in the brain, as is usually assumed; rather, concepts are proposed to be fundamental to the very adaptive principles by which living systems and the brain operate.
Whales, Elephants and many others can achieve strong degrees of said structuralization and verbalization of the "language" in their minds as well
From memory, part of the trial was the defence taking a song, suggesting what words the court would hear in it played backwards, and then playing it backwards. e.g. this clip https://youtu.be/uyIsu93zAoM?t=1123 and showing that you hear the suggested words out of the noise.
The trial was thrown out, after deciding there were words and they were subliminal, but were not deliberate. The whole situation included: "In a pre-trial motion, the judge ruled that subliminal messages were incapable of being protected speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, since they were by definition not noticeable and thus could not form part of a dialogue."
Documentary - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104140/
1: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/a...
To this day, when I trip and lose my balance for a second, I feel a shooting pain in my nose. It’s like it’s ready to start hurting again before anything touches it.
We don't live in the real world, or even the world of our perceptions.
We live in completely virtual world of what our mind anticipates the perceptions will be in some number of milliseconds.
Our body and mind are intertwined so tightly because we'd be dead.
I beg to differ. That assumes evolution is teleological, that it isn't reactive. It's like saying positive and negative feedback loops are predictive. You're diluting the meaning of "predictive" to say something that sounds deep.
- the brain predicts what its upcoming input will be,
- quantum biologists ask if the human eye is sensitive to quantum effects, and
- measuring quantum information under different bases result in a different quantum state of not only the measurer, but of the world being measured.
I wonder if it is possible that the brain uses its predictive power to change the basis under which the eye measures photons, resulting in different perceptions as well as a different reality. A bit of a crazy idea but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be the case other than if it is shown that biological sensory organs are simply not that precise.
[0]https://www.templeton.org/grant/is-the-human-eye-able-to-see...
Has it ever been done that way?
Classic control theory :)
What happens frequently is that my brain takes multiple discrete tasks and attempts to simulate each one's steps to completion simultaneously. I suddenly find myself at the front door paralyzed for five minutes, "Should I grab the trash since I'm going to go check the mail? I have to walk the dog, I can't carry all this trash while holding the dog. Where will I put the dog when I get the mail. Ok, put the leash on the dog, grab the trash... Crap, there's so much trash! Ok, just take the office trash out..."
ADHD medicine stopped working after a month. What has helped a lot is N-acetylcysteine. In fact, it's been several months and I'm comfortable saying that it has changed my life. The trainwreck thought loops give way to singular chains of focus.
Apparently, the glutamate-glutamine system is implicated in psychiatric problems. Through my research I found that GABA deficiencies can cause ADHD symptoms. GABA is produced in the gut, I have stomach problems, so this seemed feasible. I learned that NAC increases glutathione and helps regulate glutamate. The effects people report point to an effect on this system.
The Wikipedia page for NAC has many references, but this is one review of its possible uses in psychiatric problems: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341...
Amazon also stopped selling it this year because people thought it was a COVID cure.
I take at least 2g per day. Some NAC supplements have some selenium and molybdenum included, so in those cases it's important to be mindful of not taking too much of those trace minerals.
Check out the introduction of this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341...
The effect is not dramatic like a stimulant. It's more like it makes my attention stickier, and allows me to hook into long problems more easily. It doesn't "feel" like anything, just causes a noticeable change in what I find engaging. One weird effect it has had is I completely stopped craving alcohol, news and social media. I usually spend hours on Reddit when I don't have anything on my plate. I'm talking 40k+ karma, multiple posts/comments per day type of addiction. I see multi-day, multi-week gaps between comments on my account now, which is unheard of for me. I know it's a silly heuristic, but it's an example of the behavior change.
I've seen much smarter people than me on Reddit say that effects may take 2-3 days. The supplement itself is pretty cheap, and negative side effects are minimal to non-existent. I am seriously astonished that such a common and accessible supplement has had the impact it has had on me. I personally think the cost/benefit ratio is so good that warranted skepticism can be overcome with a self-experiment.
If it doesn't have an effect, then at least a person can check off the "glutamate-glutamine system" checkbox in their quest to address executive function problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glutamate%E2%80%93glutamine_cy...
While I strongly agree with the ideas of the article, the fact that you have to focus on different parts of the image to shift perception, altering the "bottom up" sensory data your brain receives, undermines at least a little the use of this example.
Those naughty bunnies, there's nothing more sexy than the thrill to have survided...
Increased energy efficiency is probably just a side effect. Allthough of course, energy optimized brains, being big energy sinks aren' that small a factor.
But than again, brains back then didn't last that long before they were eaten by predators, so I still would think it is much more important not to be eaten than to be energy efficient.
'Premature optimization', 'Deliver fast' and all that. You know the drill.
And what we think derives from so many different sources.
It explains a lot.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti