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Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

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Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#51

Post by tgflynn »

haberman wrote: post #12

> It is Kepecs' thesis that statistics - generated by the objective processing of sensory and other data - is the ultimate language of the brain. Every time I read stuff like this, I lose more confidence that the scientific method as currently applied, funded, and published is capable of truly conquering complex systems like the brain or nutrition. I read article after article like this one, where a prominent researc…

Saying that "statistics is the ultimate language of the brain" doesn't imply that the brain always performs statistical calculations correctly. In fact finding the true correct Bayesian answer is probably computationally infeasible for all but the simplest problems.

We already have this problem with artificial neural networks, which are still much simpler than the networks in the brain. ANN's have recently achieved significant successes and approach or exceed human performance on some tasks. They still however make mistakes and no one is claiming that they represent the optimal Bayesian solution, they are just the best solutions that we have so far been able to find.

I think the same thing happens in the human brain but can lead to behavior that is much more extremely erroneous due to the greater complexity of the brain as well as that of the domains to which it finds itself applied.

But that doesn't mean that the brain isn't based on statistical models anymore than the fact that ANN's aren't perfect means that they are not statistical models. They are statistical models but they are heuristic models, not perfect models.

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#52

Post by haberman »

steego wrote: post #44
haberman wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What shocked me was how many of these kids created internal narratives that they somehow caused the storm, or the storm was manifested as a personal lesson for them. Exactly. I would argue that internal narratives like this are inherently anti-statistical. They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. What experiment would convince you that statistics is not "the ultimate l…

I'm not necessarily convinced statistics is the ultimate language of the brain. Like you, I imagine there are a number of legacy systems in the brain that coordinate in interesting ad-hoc ways. What do you think I should read?

I don't have any reading suggestions, sorry. Psychology has a lot of interesting and useful localized results (like the list of cognitive biases I linked to before), but I don't believe any rigorous unified theory of cognition exists. At least I've never come across one.

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#53

Post by notahacker »

haberman wrote: post #34
steego wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, the time that the prophecy of a teenage girl convinced a tribe of people in present-day South Africa to kill 300,000 - 400,000 of their own cattle, leading to the starvation and death of 20,000 - 40,000 people. How does a brain built on statistics decide that this is the most rational course of action? That's actually a really good example of statistics deciding a course of action. Ask yourself this? W…

> What shocked me was how many of these kids created internal narratives that they somehow caused the storm, or the storm was manifested as a personal lesson for them. Exactly. I would argue that internal narratives like this are inherently anti-statistical. They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. What experiment would convince you that statistics is not "the ultimate l…

I'm not sure I'm convinced that statistics is the language of the brain, but I am convinced that statistical inference is one of the main reasons why individuals (and later, populations) come to believe in some highly irrational superstitions - the ones where there's no reason to assume causality at all save for correlation of rare events (particularly if we're assuming imperfect use of statistics influenced by our cognitive biases rather than "the scientific method is the language of the brain)

"This cattle-killing sounds crazy but since she was right about some other low probability events the probability of her being an actual prophet is pretty high, given the existence of prophets is not inherently improbable" and "my odds of survival are better if I follow this stupid recommendation than if I'm lynched by my fellow countrymen for ignoring it" are both statistically valid conclusions in favour of following some ridiculous food-source-decimating millenialist prophecy in certain circumstances.

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#54

Post by twinkletwinkle »

jlgray wrote: post #41
haberman wrote: post #12

> It is Kepecs' thesis that statistics - generated by the objective processing of sensory and other data - is the ultimate language of the brain. Every time I read stuff like this, I lose more confidence that the scientific method as currently applied, funded, and published is capable of truly conquering complex systems like the brain or nutrition. I read article after article like this one, where a prominent researc…

To quote wikipedia's article on statistics: Statistics is the study of the collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data. Isn't that more or less what human brains do? A neural network is just a curve fitting algorithm optimized to fit a bunch of data, that is, a statistical method. NNs are, to the best of my knowledge, a fairly good analogy for what the physical computation process of…

>Isn't that more or less what human brains do?

Sure but now what are you demonstrating. "The human brain collects and interprets data". Great paper, thanks for the contribution to science.

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#55

Post by hathawsh »

haberman wrote: post #12

> It is Kepecs' thesis that statistics - generated by the objective processing of sensory and other data - is the ultimate language of the brain. Every time I read stuff like this, I lose more confidence that the scientific method as currently applied, funded, and published is capable of truly conquering complex systems like the brain or nutrition. I read article after article like this one, where a prominent researc…

Consider hypnosis. If we could find a way to hypnotize people from many different backgrounds into believing some specific wild assertion, regardless of how much that assertion conflicts with their beliefs, that would be strong evidence against the hypothesis that statistics is the ultimate language of the brain. The results would suggest that a lower-level language exists and that hypnosis somehow taps into that language.

People get concerned about hypnosis precisely because they believe it may access a lower level of their brain that they can't control very well. People want to believe that their thinking is in fact rooted in statistical modeling rather than things they can't control.

I tend to believe our thinking is influenced by many things, including things we aren't in control of, but when we discover elements of our thoughts that we don't control, we can slowly take control of them. For example, we can slowly overcome habits and addictions.

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#56

Post by Retric »

haberman wrote: post #34
steego wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, the time that the prophecy of a teenage girl convinced a tribe of people in present-day South Africa to kill 300,000 - 400,000 of their own cattle, leading to the starvation and death of 20,000 - 40,000 people. How does a brain built on statistics decide that this is the most rational course of action? That's actually a really good example of statistics deciding a course of action. Ask yourself this? W…

> What shocked me was how many of these kids created internal narratives that they somehow caused the storm, or the storm was manifested as a personal lesson for them. Exactly. I would argue that internal narratives like this are inherently anti-statistical. They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. What experiment would convince you that statistics is not "the ultimate l…

If you set your internal P value at say .01 that seems great. Except your conducting lot's of experiments constantly. https://xkcd.com/882/ And when you do that you regularly show correlation when none exists.

Considering how many things used to be deadly, I can see people living with fairly low P values because false positives only need to be less deadly than false negatives for things to work out.

IMO, this also explains why people are risk averse. Generally, survival is more about avoid a few low probability bad events than having a long string of extra special awesome days.

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#57

Post by [deleted] »

haberman wrote: post #36
Maken wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are also applying a biased viewpoint. Your are assuming rational decision making always leads to "correct" decisions. Statistics and rationality merely work by measuring current events against your previous experiences and inferring the most probable outcome of your possible actions. That means that your previous life experiences and how you have interpreted and classified them are key in what your brain…

> Your are assuming rational decision making always leads to "correct" decisions. I didn't say anything of the sort. > The reality is that likely they are acting based on very different premises from your own, extracted from their own life experiences and those of their ancestors. That is true. That doesn't imply however that their beliefs draw solid statistical conclusion from those experiences. For example, take ri…

[deleted]

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#58

Post by drumdance »

haberman wrote: post #34
steego wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, the time that the prophecy of a teenage girl convinced a tribe of people in present-day South Africa to kill 300,000 - 400,000 of their own cattle, leading to the starvation and death of 20,000 - 40,000 people. How does a brain built on statistics decide that this is the most rational course of action? That's actually a really good example of statistics deciding a course of action. Ask yourself this? W…

> What shocked me was how many of these kids created internal narratives that they somehow caused the storm, or the storm was manifested as a personal lesson for them. Exactly. I would argue that internal narratives like this are inherently anti-statistical. They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support. What experiment would convince you that statistics is not "the ultimate l…

They attempt to give greater meaning to something than the direct observations support.

This is the disease of our time, and all times. Humans are narcissistic. We like to think that whatever we experience is extra-special.

Before he died, the evangelist Jerry Falwell used to say he believed the Antichrist was alive and walking the earth. He believed the second coming was imminent, as did many of his followers.

Think about that for a second. It's been ~2000 years since the supposed resurrection, but now is the time God will pick? Why not any one of the other 100 generations?

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#59

Post by nerdponx »

haberman wrote: post #12

> It is Kepecs' thesis that statistics - generated by the objective processing of sensory and other data - is the ultimate language of the brain. Every time I read stuff like this, I lose more confidence that the scientific method as currently applied, funded, and published is capable of truly conquering complex systems like the brain or nutrition. I read article after article like this one, where a prominent researc…

The bug here is not that humans calculate expected payoffs incorrectly, it's that they have wildly inaccurate estimates of tpayoffs and their probabilities. Subtle but important difference

Re: Our Brain Uses Statistics to Calculate Confidence, Make Decisions

#60

Post by Balgair »

haberman wrote: post #12

> It is Kepecs' thesis that statistics - generated by the objective processing of sensory and other data - is the ultimate language of the brain. Every time I read stuff like this, I lose more confidence that the scientific method as currently applied, funded, and published is capable of truly conquering complex systems like the brain or nutrition. I read article after article like this one, where a prominent researc…

> What experiment/result would convince you that statistics is not "the ultimate language of the brain?"

Reflexes, like in your knee. Your spinal cord is very much part of your brain and the pateller tendon reflex is nearly 100% with 'healthy' people. Perhaps the statistical nature of the brain comes from measuring many people to get the right sampling power for the experiment. Genetics and the stochastic behavior of life then influence these brains to behave in statistical ways compared to each other. Twins studies should bear that out as true or false.

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