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How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

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Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#71

Post by nickpsecurity »

Freaky wrote: post #68
nickpsecurity wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one is ugly. The jumping spiders have a neater look due to their colors. The really colorful ones with big eyes might not hit fear instinct so hard. Try this one I cherry-picked: http://www.arachne.org.au/_dbase_upl/spi_mm.jpg

More colourful cutie: https://www.flickr.com/photos/143940344@N06/31492457834/in/d... And a nice fluffy white one with very stubby legs: http://www.jumpingspiders.co.za/images/main/187.jpg Via https://www.reddit.com/r/awwnverts/comments/5o7nmg/my_favori... and https://www.reddit.com/r/awwnverts/comments/5lar18/floof_spi...

Those do look neat. The white one looks like the old, wise men of spiders. Haha.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#72

Post by antognini »

throwitawayday wrote: post #34
chongli wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to guess: neural networks have to operate on pixel data whereas real neurons don't. Brains and eyes have evolved in tandem. Perhaps what makes them so efficient is that the eyes handle some of the processing as a consequence of their physical shape and characteristics. Look at the eyes of bees. Very different from our own (and from the cameras we build) and perhaps very specialized to the limited set of task…

On eyes in general: the retina is not like a camera pixel array, rather, it extracts all kinds of features and detects motion: "Eye smarter than scientists believed: neural computations in circuits of the retina." Gollisch, Tim, and Markus Meister. Neuron 65.2 (2010): 150-164. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0896627309...

Yes. The retina is not so much a part of the eye as an extension of the brain into the eye.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#73

Post by pavel_lishin »

chc wrote: post #70
panxie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In English is it correct to say spiders are insects? In my native language (portuguese) it would be not accurate, as they are arachnida class, along with scorpions,mites and ticks.

It's not correct, but it's a pretty common mistake to refer to bugs in general as "insects."

And even saying "bugs in general" is technically inaccurate!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiptera

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#74

Post by mickronome »

ajkjk wrote: post #57
pizza wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe something along the lines of "our brains would overheat" - there's a small temperature window in which proteins won't denature, it takes k T log 2 joules to erase one bit of information (Landauer's principle), and our brain uses around 20 Watts of power. Maybe tin foil hats make good heatsinks.. Interestingly enough there is some evidence that the Gibbs free energy of ketone metabolism is more thermodynamically…

That hardly seems relevant. kT log 2 joules is something like 10^-7 times the energy of an electron. I seriously doubt that that is anything but negligible compared to the other operations brains are performing.

Did an estimate a couple of years ago that the brains estimated information processinh and the cost of 'erasing' the same amount of information under the assumption that all processed information is lost, it seemed to imply that the cost of forgetting is somewhere in the range 1/1000 of the amount of energy the actual information processing is thought to consume ( approx 8W )

It seems crazy that it can be that close given the miniscule energy information carries, to me those ~8mW is completely mind boggling big.

The most reasonable explanation is that my calculation was wrong, but at the time it did not appear to be the case, although it probablys is anyway :)

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#75

Post by lotyrin »

cr0sh wrote: post #56
adrianN wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blood seems to be a pretty decent cooling agent. Our muscles can generate a lot more waste heat and we manage to get rid of it.

It's probably not so much the blood as a whole, but rather the water in it (in fact, I would expect the other parts in blood would make the water less efficient for heat carrying capacity - but they also may have other advantages to that end).

Interesting to imagine this difference as a species which has evolved distinct specialized circulatory systems for cooling and for oxygenating tissues.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#76

Post by antognini »

pc86 wrote: post #15
pizza wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe something along the lines of "our brains would overheat" - there's a small temperature window in which proteins won't denature, it takes k T log 2 joules to erase one bit of information (Landauer's principle), and our brain uses around 20 Watts of power. Maybe tin foil hats make good heatsinks.. Interestingly enough there is some evidence that the Gibbs free energy of ketone metabolism is more thermodynamically…

> it takes k T log 2 joules to erase one bit of information...and our brain uses around 20 Watts of power Yet another time when my Political Science education fails me. What should I take away from this?

The brain has a fixed amount of energy it can use per second, and it takes a fixed amount of energy to erase one bit of information (which you can think of as performing a computation). This means that there are a limited number of computations that the brain can do in one second.

(I'll add that there's no need to make this argument from thermodynamic principles. Your brain has a finite number of neurons, and each neuron can only fire a few times a second, so that limits the number of computations that your brain can do per second as well. And that limit is a lot tighter than the thermodynamic limit.)

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#77

Post by pavel_lishin »

acqq wrote: post #67
ehsanu1 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The condescension isn't too helpful here unfortunately (is it ever?). You could have made your initial response a bit less condescending by saying something like: The comment mentions "Landauer's principle", which provides some explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle Here as well, you could have made your comment better if you just omitted this part: "which you'd find if you'd attempt to read…

What do you find condescending in pointing that the clear sentence with enough information was edited of its most important part and that presented as "unclear"? The way he quoted the comment, it's not even visible that "the comment mentions" like you suggest. He kept the formula of the principle and only edited its very name out. Which is a direct name of the entry in Wikipedia. What do you find condescending when t…

You are very smart.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#78

Post by acqq »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #77
acqq wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you find condescending in pointing that the clear sentence with enough information was edited of its most important part and that presented as "unclear"? The way he quoted the comment, it's not even visible that "the comment mentions" like you suggest. He kept the formula of the principle and only edited its very name out. Which is a direct name of the entry in Wikipedia. What do you find condescending when t…

You are very smart.

You too, Pavel, my dear, thanks for identifying yourself. I know you say it only because it's true.

I'm very impressed how you masterfully contributed to the discussion.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#79

Post by sqeaky »

panxie wrote: post #58
david-given wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people who don't believe that spiders can be cute: https://adlayasanimals.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/u2byv.jpg Also, I got interested and tried to find some documentation on Portia Labiata after reading Watts' book, and there's very, very little, but what he says appears to be true. They do have telescopic eyes with vibrating retinas. They do spend ages painstakingly scanning a scene before moving. They are absu…

In English is it correct to say spiders are insects? In my native language (portuguese) it would be not accurate, as they are arachnida class, along with scorpions,mites and ticks.

A good word for something that encompasses all things creepy, crawly and tiny without involving scientific classification is "bug". Most english would agree that most spiders, ants, bees, centipedes and other like it are all bugs.

This breaks down in Australia where the spiders are as big as your head or in Puerto Rico where the foot long centipedes eat bats. Those aren't bugs, those are nightmare fuel.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#80

Post by zeroer »

joshmarlow wrote: post #60
redacted wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read Blindsight by Peter Watts. Apart from being an incredible novel it gets into this question, and it's freely available from the author's site: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm Trying to avoid spoilers here, so ROT13 - Gur nyvraf rapbhagrerq va gur abiry ner abg pbafpvbhf, naq uhzna pbafpvbhfarff vf cerfragrq nf na ribyhgvbanel fvqr rssrpg / zvfgnxr juvpu erdhverf hf gb jnfgr uhtr nzbhagf bs cbjre guvaxv…

I really can't communicate how awesome Blindsight is. Have you read the sequel?

I only made it through one third of the sequel. I thought the quality had taken a dramatic step down and couldn't bring myself to finish it.
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