Ten Percent of the Brain Myth
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I'm overly generalizing here without much reference. If there is interest I will dig up more material.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancel_Keys
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Countries_Study
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13260239-the-truth-about...
Various cholesterol lowering drugs, statins being the most widely prescribed but certainly not the only class, show consistent relationship with cholesterol lowering and reduced risk of MACE (MI, stroke).
Plaque is made of foam cells that consume cholesterol. They grow and obstruct arteries, and eventually rupture causing critical flow obstructing events.
Blood cholesterol is different. At that point, however it got there, the build-up isn't great. I wouldn't lump statins in with the rest of your points.
One of the reasons it likely persists is that people don't have a good understanding of what their brain does on a day-to-day basis, and they don't have a good idea of just how hard some of those tasks are.
We do things like walk across a room and pick up an object, and don't really think about all the processing that goes into that.
You have an accurate and dynamic mental model of the room, your body, and how it can function. You do an enormous amount of processing just to see and recognize anything. And it (usually) "just works" and we don't have any real insight into ourselves for how it works, for how much processing effort goes into it all.
If you have someone start down the path of programming a robot to do that "simple" task, they'll have a much greater appreciation for all the things their brain does for them. Trying to precisely coordinate the actions of tens to hundreds of muscles, receiving an enormous amount of raw sensor input (the feel of the floor under your feet, etc.) that is then filtered and prioritized for high-level consumption, all the motion planning to dodge the chair in your way, etc.
We do so much for such a simple, everyday action, that it seems "easy" and "simple" when it is nothing of the kind.
That's what that "other 90%" of your brain does, you just aren't conscious of it.
It was in the 80's in France where we had a photocopied page with "the most dangerous additives". The worst was E330. 40 years later, I still remember it.
My parents had a copy from sime friends and these well educated people (dad is an engineer and mom a lawyer) checked everything against the list. Just because it was "from the Villejuif hospital".
It was a fake and E330 is citric acid, a benin product. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citric_acid
The famous list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villejuif_leaflet
Now look at those who have never consumed dihydrogen monoxide -- they haven't killed anyone.
That said, nowadays I don't consider these jokes so funny anymore, people really believe similar stuff these days and post-truth bs is used to gain real power by people without shame.
I am not even thinking about religion or homeopathy, but even benign things they read on Internet and apply to their everyday life. Nobody (exceptions exist) checks them before adding them into their routine. It is enough that Aunt Mary said that (she is an engineer after all), or your typical celebrities gazette added it to their "Did You Know That...?" section.
https://www.6seconds.org/2022/06/20/10000-hour-rule/
Related Freakonomics episode with Anders Ericsson among others about how to become an expert: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-become-great-at-just...
The claim isn't "put in 10k hours and you'll magically become an expert". It's "if you want to become an expert, you have to put in 10k hours". Necessary but not sufficient.
The whole idea of being an expert is an arbitrary social designation backed up by hogwash. We think we know what it means but it's really just hand-waving.
A prerequisite of becoming a Doctor for example is learning how to read, but that’s not considered part of the time commitment. Recursively when considering how long it takes to be an expert Heart Surgeon there is a tendency to ignore how long it takes to become a Doctor.
According to a 2019 article from Harvard Health, “10,000 steps” was a marketing term for hardware made by a Japanese company. (Not sure if the original root goes back to Japanese folklore, but the article implies it doesn’t.)
> Dr. Lee discovered that the origins of the number go back to 1965, when a Japanese company made a device named Manpo-kei, which translates to "10,000 steps meter." “The name was a marketing tool,” she says. [0]
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/10000-steps-a-day-or-few...
It's a crazy phenomenon to watch play out.
As an extreme example, pre-internet, a conspiracy theory-inclined person might randomly run across a handful of full-blown conspiracy theorists in his day-to-day life. This makes it easier for him to question his leanings, since he only observes a small minority of people going all-in on the conspiracy theory. Nowadays, a conspiracy-inclined person can easily find online communities comprising all other full-blown conspiracy theorists everywhere the world. This quickly reinforces his belief in the conspiracy, since he sees an apparent majority of people in this online community believing the myth.
Wikipedia says
In the modern era, the pseudoscientific belief in a flat Earth originated with the English writer Samuel Rowbotham with the 1849 pamphlet Zetetic Astronomy.
In 1956, Samuel Shenton set up the International Flat Earth Research Society (IFERS), better known as the "Flat Earth Society" from Dover, England, as a direct descendant of the Universal Zetetic Society.
The term flat-earth-man, used in a derogatory sense to mean anyone who holds ridiculously antiquated or impossible views, predates the more compact flat-earther. It was recorded in 1908: "Fewer votes than one would have thought possible for any human candidate, were he even a flat-earth-man."
Bill and Melinda Gates are cyborgs whose bodies have been replaced. They're trying to track everyone with vaccine microchips. (There were variations on this theme including 5G)
Michelle Obama is a man.
9/11 buildings were vaporized by a high-powered, government laser.
Chemtrails are full of heavy metal and are being used to control our minds.
Putting hydrogen peroxide in your ear can cure all sorts of things, including cancer and cystic fibrosis.
"The Jews" are disproportionately represented in the government and media and are behind the whole woke movement to punish white people.
Any number of things about George Soros and ANTIFA.
The moon landing was faked.
The list goes on and on. Every time it's something even more crazy than the last.
And I also believe that there are not that many "true" flat earthers. There is a significant amount of trolls and people who like the exercise in epistemology.
I think the reason flat earth get so much visibility is that it is one the most obviously wrong belief there is, people like to point out dumb people in order to feel smart by comparison. In fact, the meme is not the idea that the earth is flat, it is that there are people out there who believe the earth is flat. It is almost a meta-myth, I mean, what proof do you have that flat earth as a community is a thing? I know there is rather good evidence that it is the case but who bothered to check?
These kind of conspiracy theories, if you are willing to keep asking questions, almost always blame "The Jews". People pushing these conspiracy theories are, whether they understand it or not, pushing the ideas that 1: You have zero control over your government and cannot gain any control, 2: Science isn't the goal of many science institutions, and instead they are merely mouthpieces for this global cabal, 3: This global cabal even has the power of fooling your own senses, like many of these believers would not be swayed if you put them on a rocket and let them see the earth from space. These people are prone to dismissing strong evidence with hand wavey excuses like "oh virtual reality" or similar.
I would argue the point of these is to push 1: voter apathy and general detachment from the ways society can be changed and improved through their effort, 2: anti-science and anti-intellectualism sentiments, 3: "You can't trust anyone but us", 4: "The Jews" bullshit
Like bielefeld existing?
Shame that "pull up Wikipedia" is apparently still more effort for most people than "tell other people about it on social media".
In a pedantic way, it is close to the truth as most pianists use up to 10 keys at a time (a few more if you count pedals). There are many keys available to the pianist but the pianist remains constrained by their input capacity.
I remember seeing Ben Folds once slam his forearm on the keyboard as a deliberately dissonant sort of percussive stab… that was 15-20 keys with just one arm!
(Which makes no sense, when they go multiple layers..)
Computers are very fast at raw, boring mathematical calculations such addition, but that doesn't transfer to entire physics simulations or human scale activities. Think about how much time it takes a large file to download/transfer, for instance. A lot of videogame design through history and continuing through the modern day is fighting to keep the physics simulation close to real time and lot of classic videogame glitches and/or bugs are when it takes longer than real time to simulate. (With the fun that the Halting Problem tells us that we'll never be certain exactly how long it takes to run algorithms, in general.)
Many video games are and always have been pushing limits. So you'd expect many them to barely run on their contemporary hardware.
(A notable exception is Tetris. Thanks to being invented by people on obsolete Soviet computers, no western computer ever had any trouble running it.)
> With the fun that the Halting Problem tells us that we'll never be certain exactly how long it takes to run algorithms, in general.
The Halting Problem is barely relevant here: it only applies to arbitrary programs. It doesn't have any bearing on running one specific computation faster.
We've reached the edges of Moore's Law. We're starting to see the horizon where "sufficiently advanced computers" end. You might be fine with plots playing fast and loose with physics limitations and optimistically still believe tomorrow's computers will be "magic". I'm just saying that it is starting to bug me versus realism in the exact same sorts of fashion as "humans only use 10% of their brains" tropes. "Computers only use 10% of their transistors." Just like the bad human trope, it ignores that most transistors are highly specialized (an FPU is not a GPU is not a general purpose CPU).
> The Halting Problem is barely relevant here: it only applies to arbitrary programs. It doesn't have any bearing on running one specific computation faster.
We're talking about extremely arbitrary programs from stories that are being done for the first time ever. "Hacks" that no one has ever done before. "Holodeck simulations" built in magic amounts of time just on a couple of spoken sentences. Humans "diving into" computer dreamscapes and doing all sorts of human scale simulation things in some sort of "quick time" which seems to be directly in the intersection of both the "humans only use 10% of their brains" myths and the "computers run really fast" myths. Those aren't just well studied apps running standalone without human interaction and with just "one specific computation". Those are REPLs and other human input devices including speech to text to ML (?) and complicated physics calculus that isn't just add/subtract things real fast and all sorts of other things that take wall clock time and are being "programmed" for the first time, on the fly. Of course The Halting Problem applies to all of those types of scenarios.
I certainly enjoy watching/reading such magic computer fantasies when I can muster a suspension of disbelief, but I've also started to feel like most of them are written by people that have never faced the contemporary realities of computer programming and believe in a myth of magically faster computers and human interface design that doesn't exist today and pessimistically may never exist.
Even present day chips are already much faster than neurons. Oversimplified: our transistors work at (the same order of magnitude as) the speed of light; while neurons work at (the same order of magnitude as) the speed of sound.
As far as we can tell, we can just use more and more transistors in parallel, and will eventually get something that can probably run a mind much faster than a human brain can. I have no opinion on whether that's actually the case, but it seems a plausible enough assumption for a story.
> Just like the bad human trope, it ignores that most transistors are highly specialized (an FPU is not a GPU is not a general purpose CPU).
You are right for CPU-type workloads. But if your story take how present day GPUs run present day neural nets, and extrapolates from there, you could very plausibly have an architecture that runs general intelligence, uses most of its transistors most the time, but the hardware looks extremely specialised for one very specific type of computation.
(I suspect that it is battery-energy consumption and waste heat consideration that will make us not use most transistors powering our cyborgs most of the time.
We have already been seeing dynamic frequency scaling with CPUs for ages even on Desktop. Smartphones made these energy considerations even more of a priority.)
> We're talking about extremely arbitrary programs from stories that are being done for the first time ever. "Hacks" that no one has ever done before. "Holodeck simulations" built in magic amounts of time just on a couple of spoken sentences.
Doesn't sound magic at all to me. Today Dall-E 2 already produces awesome images from short descriptions, and GPT-3 can produce stories. Building a complete holodeck simulation is a straightforward extrapolation. (Yet again, I don't know whether in reality there will be a smooth road from today's technology. But it's more than plausible enough for fiction.)
The Halting Problem doesn't apply to these kinds of things at all. Dall-E 2 and GTP-3 aren't even Turing complete.
> [...] but I've also started to feel like most of them are written by people that have never faced the contemporary realities of computer programming [...]
That's most likely true for most authors, yes.
> What makes you think we reached the edge of Moore's Law? It's often been pronounced dead, but it's still going strong.
Moore's Law was formulated with specifics. It had specific goal posts. We passed those goal posts, so we moved them. You are right, we still believe that we can keep moving those goal posts. I characterized this as "we can see the horizon" (not that we've reached the current edges, but we have a decent idea now where they are), we can see that point in the (near?) future where we will eventually have moved the goal posts so far that we've either lost sight of the original goal line or we've lost sight of why we are still moving the goal posts at all.
> As far as we can tell, we can just use more and more transistors in parallel, and will eventually get something that can probably run a mind much faster than a human brain can.
Transistors still have to obey the laws of physics as we know them. The speed of light is incredibly fast, but it's still a very hard speed limit on everything we think to accomplish. Grace Hopper famously carried around wires to remind people the distance of a nanosecond. It's still shorter than you think it should be even knowing how large a light year is. Nanoseconds add up. You can use a lot of transistors in parallel but you still have to route data to and between them. Even if you are routing the data at light speed (and that's quite a feat), delays add up. There's only so much stuff you can route.
> Today Dall-E 2 already produces awesome images from short descriptions, and GPT-3 can produce stories.
Neural networks are still just Sparkling Statistics Models. They seem amazing to us humans, but in general we humans are terrible at understanding statistics and statistical reasoning. This is in large part why Casinos exist. No one expects AGI to result from Las Vegas running enough Casinos in the same place. But you swap the poker chips for pixels or stories, suddenly people expect a Casino to grow into AGI and that they can extrapolate how AGI will likely work based on Casinos that they have seen.
It's lovely optimism that AGI would look anything like today's neural networks.
But beyond that, do you have a real sense of how much wall clock time it takes for a model like Dall-E 2 or GPT-3? Even ignoring that each one was years and months of wall clock time to "train" in the first place, right now most people's interactions with these models aren't on their own hardware but on corporate-sponsored clouds of servers. Sure, it's easy to imagine a starship might have a whole cloud of servers (just for holodeck simulation alone, though?), but it's still useful to have a wall clock time appreciation for even these "simple Casinos" we've built:
Both Dall-E 2 and GPT-3 models are multiple gigabytes in size each. If you try to run one on a single device you will find out that it is not as "instantaneous" as it feels when borrowing a corporate sponsored cloud. It will take minutes just to load those full models into RAM and/or VRAM, presuming that you have enough free RAM/VRAM to accommodate the full models. (Otherwise you can expect additional wall clock time to page parts of the models in and out of RAM.) CPUs and GPUs are still amazingly fast at spinning a lot of roulette wheels, dealing a ton of poker hands, and rolling a lot of dice, but the staggering numbers of such still add up when running a model like this and it can take minutes to hours of wall clock time on a single device.
> The Halting Problem doesn't apply to these kinds of things at all. Dall-E 2 and GTP-3 aren't even Turing complete.
You don't think AGI would be at least NP Hard, much less Turing complete? The Halting Problem applies as much to NP Hard problems as Turing complete ones.
That gets back to why I brought up the videogames example. We know that "full fidelity" Newtonian physics simulation is at least NP Hard. A lot of videogame physics models is making simplifying assumptions that reduce things from "full fidelity Newtonian" to "videogame physics" that is hopefully something fun and preferably polynomial time that is easily time boxed to a reliable fraction of a frame's time so that updates are continuous with frames per second and frames per second are high enough to keep up an illusion of "real time".
It's incredible what we've been able to accomplish with "videogame physics". We should keep no illusion that "videogame physics" are not and will never be "full fidelity Newtonian physics" much less anything approaching "real world physics" simulation.
And physics simulation is just one at least NP Hard problem in a modern videogame design. Networking code has at least NP Hard problems. Rendering has at least NP Hard problems. Et cetera. They all have different mitigations/compromises/workarounds/fake-it-until-you-make-it responses to those problems, but that doesn't make the problems go away, it's just creative space for creative solutions.
Videogames have always been Halting Problem minefields and likely always will be. "Infinite" loops (an NP solution taking a deeply exponential amount of time is indistinguishable from an infinite loop, per the Halting Problem) and crashing bugs will forever be issues with videogames. Mitigating those will always be a challenge in videogame design.
You can't imagine that a "Holodeck simulation" has at least as many hard problems to (creatively) solve as today's videogames? I'm sure videogame designers would love it if polynomial time neural network model could solve videogame physics today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_functi...
> Some popularizations oversimplify the science about lateralization, by presenting the functional differences between hemispheres as being more absolute than is actually the case.[21]: 107 [22]
Sources that wikipedia uses:
[21] Westen D, Burton L, Kowalski K (2006). Psychology : Australian and New Zealand edition. Milton, Qld.: John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 9780470805527.
[22] Toga AW, Thompson PM (January 2003). "Mapping brain asymmetry". Nature Reviews. Neuroscience. 4 (1): 37–48. doi:10.1038/nrn1009. PMID 12511860. S2CID 15867592.
Both have the issue that the popular interpretation of them are great oversimplifications of models that themselves do seem to have some limited use in neuroscience, but only if you add enough caveats.
So unlike the situation with, say, flat earthers, there's some kernel of truth to it that can be misinterpreted or willfully presented in a misleading way.
One of the myths I learned early on was that the world was somehow created. Science tells us that this world did not always exist and formed over time in the past. So rather than getting dispelled, this idea is now both a myth of the past and a modern day fact as verified by scientific observation.
Notice that the referenced Wikipedia article very carefully does not say this myth has been dispelled by science. It uses its strongest suggestive statement to disagree with only a very narrow interpretation of the myth.
So, while we're sure the original intent of the mythology is misleading and inaccurate, we cannot rely on science to prove us right. Give it some time.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds to me like you're saying that as long as somebody hasn't disproved a belief, you're justified in believing it. Is this what you're saying? That seems like it might lead you to keep believing things for which you have insufficient evidence to conclude they're true, and as such would be a less than ideal epistemological tool.
Anecdotally I have seen countless examples of people being able to do impressive feats of mathematical thinking, but only as long as they don’t realise it’s ‘maths’. And as soon as they realise, it often stops working; the deeply learned negative associations sadly seem to quickly overpower any fleeting buzz of “oh I can do this after all”. I think untold damage is done in schools, instilling into kids associations of maths (or other subjects) as a thing that must be learned (for a grade, or to get a teacher/parent off their back) instead of as a useful tool they can turn to when they want to solve a problem they have.
This is unbelievably naive to use as some sort of proof, using 10% does not imply that its 10% of the physical organ. Rather 10% compared to what one could do with better training, improved lifestyle, etc. And this does not have to be purely intellectual, it can be imagination capabilities, communication skills or hundreds of other things which a particular individual did not develop fully.
If you're talking about 10% of some non-physical concept of brain "potential", then you have to define, potential WHAT? Creativity? Intelligence? Speed of thought? Hand/eye coordination? Something else deemed important? All of it? None of it? How could you possibly attach a 10% potential value to any of this unless you operationalize it down to some tiny measurable part that lose the gestalt? If we're not defining the 10% as physical brain area, then the 10% proposition seems not only unlikely true but likely meaningless, a priori.
IMO most people are hardwired to be irrational; it's their evolutionary strategy. Irrationality is bad for the system but it's generally good for the individual. You need an irrational mind to be able to come up with ideas which will resonate with the average (irrational) person.
https://interestingengineering.com/13-inspiring-einstein-quo...
Much of the human is said to be outside of the brain; many neurons, even, live outside the brain, and much "thinking" is done, for example, by gut neurons in concert with microbes with whom they're constantly exchanging chemical signals. So, in a sense, the human is in the gut, and the human is in the microbes.
The human is a leaky abstraction!
For further explorations on the permeability of the human, try Annie Murphy Paul's "Extended Mind."[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis
On the face of it, the experiment seems to have succeeded at making him extraordinarily intelligent, and also pretty much screwed up his life.
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
-- Statistician's Blues, Todd Snider.
[1] https://forge.medium.com/maslows-pyramid-is-a-marketing-lie-...
Saying that you only use ten percent of your brain is like saying we only use 33% of a normal traffic light.
Completely differently, I heard that the brain is an antenna.