Brains speed up perception by guessing what's next (2019)
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
Now, I'm supposed to be a reasonably good sight reader, or at least that's what I thought. The improv part of jazz I'm not good at but I get, but I've also tried playing from transcriptions (Bill Evans in particular), and have found I'm extremely slow at reading the music.
After thinking about it, I suspect it's because the music makes no sense to me so I can't guess what's coming ( which is what I do with classical music). So while I anticipate with classical music and just confirm after the fact/right when the note actually shows up, with Bill Evans I have to think hard and actually confirm everything.
My ears help but not much, since 'confirming' the sound is much harder with jazz than with classical music (it's unexpected , so again, there's some kind of delay between 'I hear the note' and 'ok that's right' while there's essentially no delay with classical music where my brain is kind of 'primed for acceptance'
Part of the article seems to be confirming a neurobiological basis for something quite common-sensical to me.
From how you describe your issue I suspect there are things from the more recent classical repertoire that would stump you beyond the level of Bill Evans transcriptions. Bill Evans is still at least in a relatively "accessible/listenable" harmonic idiom.
Have you tried reading through any atonal/serial works of the Second Viennese School? Or 20th century classical composers like Ligeti, Elliott Carter, or contemporary pieces like Unsuk Chin's piano etudes, or Birtwistle's "Clocks"? I'm a good sight reader too but that's where I really hit a wall. This is music that provokes a strong negative reaction in many people. In the language of the article, their sensory expectations are defied. I think to really love this music (as I really do), you will have had to grapple with and deeply internalize things about compositional structure, so that what is a theme, a countersubject, a commentary, a development, an ornamentation, a point of rhythmic or textural elaboration, etc. are all still readily evident to the ear, and thus satisfy the ear, even if it's all occuring in an alien harmonic context.
I'm fine with 'difficult' music, and I agree with you that Bill Evans is accessible/listenable - what bothers me I think is that I can't predict the actual notes (quartal, 11th, etc everywhere).
Edit: I really like ligeti.
Yeah jazz is definitely it's own language, not just an extension of classical harmony as some would have it. Classical provides a model that makes jazz highly unlikely. I'm still figuring out what I can say in words about the difference. Something about freedom vs. structure in relation to the scope of expression. But you have to get used to hearing those non-triad notes as fundamental, not just as "passing", and a feeling for what idiomatic progressions are implicated by that.
Shifting between large shifts during improv can be mentally taxing, very much the same feeling of trying to remember the name of something or someone. But just like with names, once you get that first mental hint (like a vowel), predicting what comes next just falls into place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSG9006YAeA&t=34s
And sharing your opinion on whether it bears similarities to the 'logic' of jazz, that would be very interesting to me!
The link you shared sounds atonal to me. So, you could be thinking about free jazz. Here's a YouTube video that discusses it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WhXtkMyPHU
Where I disagree with a lot of existing approaches is that given the decision to assign sounds on the basis of codons, most people assign them arbitrarily. I think that gets stuck in the postmodern dilemma, where everything is subjective so there's no basis to compare one system to another. So I wanted an approach that had logic in the loop somewhere, even if it had enough subjectivity that someone else following the same logic would come to a different conclusion.
What I hit on is convergence of emotional associations. Individual neurotransmitters are associated with particular emotions, and also particular amino acids - therefore, one can assign emotions to a subset of codons. One can also assign emotions to musical elements, hence there's a basis for assigning sounds to codons in a non-arbitrary way, with emotional association acting as the cypher between the two languages.
that's what I consider 'step two' of the process. My thinking is, someone could come up with a better logic (not using emotion as the common known element) or apply the same logic using different musical elements (assign different tones given the same emotional targets). Unfortunately, most people I asked from a music theory perspective didn't have much interest in suggesting different approaches here, so I had to work off my own subjective sense. If you've ideas what chords should be assigned to which codons, I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts there (or anyone who's into music and logic puzzles).
Here's how I actually assigned them so people get an idea: I started with pentatonic scaling (G, C, A, B and D) and four major neurotransmitters (GABA, Serotonin, Dopamine, Acetylcholine) and assigned tones to the neurotransmitters based on which 'sounded' like the emotions those neurotransmitters give. So I started from a chart like this:
GABA Gminor
GAG 337hz
GAA
Serotonin Cminor
UGG 370hz
Dopamine Amajor
UAC 440 Hz
UAU
Acetylcholine Bmajor OR Dmajor (Acetylcholine has two precursor amino acids rather than one)
UCU 494
UCC
UCA
UCG
AGU 587
AGC
But even if one accepts the logic in step two, there's probably still better ways to assign sounds. I'd be interested in any suggestions from folks with more musical theory than myself.
I don't understand your second suggestion - pitch of a particular chord would be determined by how much variation there is in pitch around it? Could you give an example of how it would work?
Jazz piano vs classical is a perfect example of this: same instrument, two paradigms with totally different idioms.
I think there's a lot to be said for conceptualising the brain as a statistical machine - it makes a lot of sense in evolutionary terms. There's a great video introduction to that idea with Karl Friston from UCL here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIu_dJGyIQI
But I think there are probably other, more human, effects dominating like the one you suggest - only listening to evidence that backs up your existing points of view, and that happens from a pretty young age! That would actually be against the idea of the Bayesian brain, which should accept new evidence and update the statistical model appropriately. Much as I find the general approach of the Bayesian brain useful, in many domains humans aren't really particualarly optimal in statistical terms...
Being friends with an immortal vampire would be a chore. "Blood tasted so much better in Sumeria", "There's nothing wrong with clay tablets for a diary, it never crashes or needs an update."
Going into a 711 to get a coffee in Taiwan you know approximately what questions they are going to ask: size, hot/cold, do you want a bag (to hang on your scooter), and do you want a receipt.
Similar with the supermarket, a restaurant, when getting train tickets, etc.
You're just building up what questions to expect next for the scenario -- if the conversation deviates from that (even with words or questions you might know) your brain has a hard time initially adapting to that.
This even happens in your native language. I'm sure all of us have said something like "Good, and you?" in response to an expected "How's it going?" or similar greeting, but the other person started with something different and it became a non-sequitur. I'd never given it much thought, but I wonder if part of the feeling of social awkwardness here is contributed by the pattern mismatch, rather than the outcomes?
A friend once answered the phone with "Hi, I'd like to speak to John in sales please" and even though (or because) I recognised his voice I was paralyzed for a moment. "But I rang you". I almost had to lie down.
"Thanks, you too!" .... <dammit!>
Anyone who has worked on voice assistants knows that computers take much longer than that to determine that someone has finished speaking. And anyone who has studied brain functions knows that it takes 100's of milliseconds for the brain to process information like spoken words.
So basically that just proves that the brain must be predicting what the other person is going to say.
I feel like that is a distinction without a difference. If they already comprehend, then haven't they basically predicted the rest?
> or that they’ve latched on to a pertinent point and don’t care to hear the rest.
This I suppose is a little different, in that they are ignoring the rest, so yeah you're right there, it may not be predictive in that case.
The visual cortex is actually providing very little information to our forward predictive models, but the model is giving a lot of information back to the visual cortex.
Lisa Feldman, a top neuroscientist and writer, goes over this topic in a podcast episode with Lex Fridman.
This is the chapter on the predicting brain, but the whole of it is worth a listen, mind blowing stuff:
Entire generations of info is now instantly at our fingertips whenever we want it, even w/ creative spins thanks to GPT models.
Language is the glue that holds up consciousness/sentience, it is intelligence. It's very hard to be intelligent without language, or the ability to understand language.
A lot of learning deficits are because of ones inability to understand the other person (Teacher, etc, or focus on them long enough to understand what they're saying), I think language itself could turn most things into AI or just I, perhaps anything that can communicate and build language could be intelligent regardless if it's silcon or carbon.
There's a lot of 'understanding' we glean from other senses, from what we see, etc... but we only know a tree is a tree because we've been told that (reinforcement learning), and because language exists to tell us that over and over again. So vision, audio, etc are all still language-based.
What is Health? by Peter Sterling is a lovely book that goes into this. Peter Sterling is a neuroscientist and the "co-inventor" of the term Allostasis (from Wikipedia: "Allostasis is the efficient regulation required to prepare the body to satisfy its needs before they arise by budgeting those needed resources such as oxygen, insulin etc., as opposed to homeostasis, in which the goal is a steady state." )
As a kid sometimes I would look around the room and pick an object to touch or pick up. Then I'd close my eyes and see if I could do it. This might involve taking several steps or even turning at the end before reaching out. There is some feedback from the feet but it's mostly open loop without vision. I could visualize my position along the way - a form of prediction.
This skill is still useful when I need to turn off a light before crossing a room or opening a door :-)
I know this is a silly thing to compare but haven't we all had huge issues with security vulnerabilities involving processors guessing what's next since like 2018? [2]
I wonder if there's any general parallels between any potential information processing system and the concept that to make it go faster you can do this. I didn't read through the whole neuroscience article yet but that's definitely the first thing that came to mind.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerabilit...
In my words, 1) The sender asks "how many X are there" (assuming that the recipient also knows that the answer is a large quantity). The recipient's mind indirectly loads and caches the concept of a large quantity. 2) The sender changes the "discussion point" to something different that also involves a quantity, however, because the original impression of the first quantity lingers, their perception may now be skewed.
Link to one such example: Studying Machine Intelligence with Been Kim - #571
A puck can pretty easily travel something like 30-40 m/s, and shots are regularly taken 4-5 meters from the net.
Goalies have, what, 1/10th of a second to track and evaluate the shot and make a qualified save. If that was pure evaluation and reaction we would be far too slow.
I also think most people who've played goalie in any sport know that you get a _sense_ for where the shot is going. High, low, left, right etc so it's not just guesswork and statistics either.
https://radiolab.org/episodes/91524-where-am-i
The section on Ian Waterman.
Another article about him - https://mcneilllab.uchicago.edu/pdfs/IW_lost_body.pdf
> Mr. Ian Waterman, sometimes referred to as ‘IW’, suffered at age 19 a sudden, total deafferentation of his body from the neck down—the near total loss of all the touch, proprioception, and limb spatial position senses that tell you, without looking, where your body is and what it is doing. The loss followed a never-diagnosed fever that is believed to have set off an auto-immune reaction. The immediate behavioral effect was immobility, even though IW’s motor system was unaffected and there was no paralysis. The problem was not lack of movement per se but lack of control.
It is guess work and statistics. Just because it happens at the level of neurons rather than as a conscious series of mathematical steps does not change what it is. It may manifest as a "feeling", but "feeling" is just a way for the conscious mind to have a referent object as the source of information which comes from subconscious thought processes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking
Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19858375 - May 2019 (86 comments)
Our brain is a prediction machine that is always active (https://www.mpi.nl/news/our-brain-prediction-machine-always-...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32395840 (270 points | 7 months ago | 205 comments)
Your Brain Is a ‘Prediction Machine’: It Predicts What the Other Person Is Going to Say https://www.learning-mind.com/your-brain-is-a-prediction-mac...
You Took the Words Right Out of My Brain - https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2014/april/...
https://www.psycholinguistics.com/gerry_altmann/research/pap...
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23273798.2020.18...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009...
https://www.earth.com/news/our-brains-are-constantly-working...
People say ChatGPT is just a next-word prediction machine. But these articles say human brains are doing the same, at some level.
And just like anything else it can be used negatively, or positively. As long as we don't use our prejudices premeditated to harm others I think it's a survival tool. But when we use them to defame groups of people who are nowhere near us then it can become negative.
Most people are desensitized to this, some psychosis is the desensity breaking. Perceiving your thoughts as beings independent of yourself.
At least in this preprint: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6516078/
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm (the BLIT story itself)
https://www.nature.com/articles/44964 (yes, its a work of fiction)
https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-o...