Some neurons are active when adding, others when subtracting
uni-bonn.de
uni-bonn.de
It's probably not that surprising, that other cells are active during other specific activities and inactive during others.
Anyway, it's fun seeing my old institute featured on hn.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4210637/
[2] https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0033-295X.117.1.297Patch clamp recording: you are literally sticking a needle into a single neuron and measuring it’s activity
EEG/MEG: using electrodes to measure activations of many thousands or millions of cells
It sounds like they have very sensitive electrodes that are either very close to individual neurons, and then they shift those around, or they have a lot of those sensitive electrodes and compute the location of signal sources in 3D space. The latter would be a lot more economical.
Principal Investigator See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_investigator
For humans, unlike for computers, adding and subtracting are different concepts. Think about how most people would transform "-3 + 7" into "7 - 3" and only then compute, because it's easier to "reverse" the operation than work with negative numbers.
If you learned the same thing twice, it would probably not show up as two things.
But that was a long time ago, and I wonder if the common knowledge that '7' is the most popular would sway people to avoid it. I know I do. I should re-run this.
In any case, it's clear that 7 is the most random digit, right? The other digits are either even or otherwise "nice". 7 is chaotic and unpredictable. 7 sells loose cigarettes to middle school kids. 7 will leave the shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot. Of all the digits in [1-10], it's 7 who'll more likely than not be the one who left the bathroom stall without flushing.
But one Wednesday each month, we had a massive lunch order for a local school. Hundreds of individually-boxed slices, delivered just before 11:30. The slice box was sized for a 1/7 slice of our extra large pizza. We had to use a "wagon wheel" type slicer for those. It was a huge stainless thing that must've cost a fortune.
I always wondered why it was 7 slices and not 6 or 8. The best theory I could come up with was that these slices all had to be the exact same size; no variance from sloppy cutting. And the only way to ensure that would be to specify it as an odd number to make it impractical for the normal cutter.
:-)
Also:
why was six afraid of seven? because seven ate nine
You feel like 1 - 5 are very familiar to you. You've known those numbers the most out of all of them. So you'd rather pick 5-10 which seem more spontaneous and mysterious. Your balance mechanism kicks in and you want to choose something that is in the middle. You choose seven because 7.5 is the actual middle and hey, there's a 7 in that number so let's do that.
One, seven, three, four, six, seven, three, two, one, four, seven, six, Charlie, three, two, seven, eight, nine, seven, seven, seven, six, four, three, Tango, seven, three, two, Victor, seven, three, one, one, seven, eight, eight, eight, seven, three, two, four, seven, six, seven, eight, nine, seven, six, four, three, seven, six. Lock.
—
Q: What is the most random number between one and 20? A: 17
Q: Why do you say that? A: Because it is impossible to know for sure which number will come up when you roll a die or draw a card from a deck.
Q: So why did you pick 17? A: It is just as likely as any other number to come up.
Q: But I specifically asked for the most random number. What is the most random number? A: There is no such thing as the most random number.
Q: Then why did you say 17? A: Because it is as random as any other number.
Q: OK then, what is the least random number between one and 20? A: 1
But come to think of it, is there any AI which has "opinions"? Wouldn't that take AI closer to human intelligence?
If you dig any further than this into the question, you quickly get back to the age-old question of "when is it 'real' consciousness and not just an automaton that acts and sounds conscious?"
When we say somebody has an "opinion" we often mean they have some hidden agenda why they raise their "opinion". It is not a fact but opinion. It is frequently about what should be done, and to whom, and thus is most often self-serving.
Humans are intention driven creatures which continuously try to advance their own agendas. So I wonder are there AIs which would exhibit similar behavior, trying to influence the behavior of others with their "opinions". AAnd do we need such AIs? Are they not evil?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP-Ipsat90c
TLDW: We don't pick numbers at random. At all. We're so bad at it that you can make money off this fact.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
I would doubt that. It depends on what neurons fired before it. The neurons firing before it might drastically change context. It doesn't seem like a single neuron is responsible for a single piece of information, it is rather an emergent phenomenon of combinations of neurons firing. But I'm speculating.
I mean, for once we might actually have some evidence for dualism.
This is garbage research. Nine participants took part in a study where they were prompted to do mental arithmetic adding or subtracting numbers between 0-5 while wired up with ultra-fine electrodes measuring the how frequently 585 individual neurons fired while completeing the task.
I presume at that point the data were mined for a publishable result. What they came up with was that by selecting a very small subset (~%5) of the neurons they measured they were able to tease out a result that certain neurons 'encode addition or subtraction'.
Is this real? Maybe. It's in now way explanatory. It doesn't offer any sort of model hypothesis or predictions worth testing. It's really a waste of time.
More remarkable is to actually find those neurons and differentiate them from all the others. Preferably without too much damage...