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Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next

#41

Post by ThrustVectoring »

objektif wrote: post #37
ben7799 wrote: post #33

This is hugely noticeable playing/practicing/learning music. Just yesterday playing guitar.. I was fighting playing the wrong note cause my brain was guessing that was the next note because so often in so much music it would be. It was something like 3 notes that are in a particular scale and my brain really wanted to play the next note in the scale instead of the correct next note. In all activities our brain intern…

Isnt this an example of reflex though, as opposed to prediction?

No, it's pretty clearly prediction. People play music by hearing what they're about to play, and then their body does whatever it needs to in order to make that sound happen.

Re: Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next

#42

Post by erikpukinskis »

This reminds me of the work John Carmack did when he was writing QuakeWorld, which in 1996 was quite playable on a 56k modem! He started off predicting 300ms of lag on the client side, but it was too glitchy when the correction came in. He landed on a more conservative strategy, and his writeup is a touchstone of Computer Science lore for me:

https://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/johnc-log.aug.htm

I wonder if you could design a game around this by drawing BOTH the predicted motion and a ghost image of the last known verified server position of players, and then deliberately introduce 500ms of latency. The gameplay would then be about tricking your opponents into thinking you were going somewhere you're not.

Re: Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next

#43

Post by ThrustVectoring »

wpietri wrote: post #28

How timely! I recently attended a nephew's soccer game. Having never played, I didn't really know what was going on. It seemed to me that I had a much harder time perceiving what happened; I was forever asking someone to tell me what they saw, even though I was looking at the same thing. If a lot of perception is predictive based on previous experience, it makes sense that I felt like I was half blind.

Your perception system doesn't report some sort of fixed reality. It surfaces the information that is most relevant to you and what you want to do. For example, better batters playing baseball will literally perceive the ball as larger.

Re: Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next

#45

Post by buzzert »

ben7799 wrote: post #33

This is hugely noticeable playing/practicing/learning music. Just yesterday playing guitar.. I was fighting playing the wrong note cause my brain was guessing that was the next note because so often in so much music it would be. It was something like 3 notes that are in a particular scale and my brain really wanted to play the next note in the scale instead of the correct next note. In all activities our brain intern…

I play Dance Dance Revolution competitively and it’s extremely important there as well. A lot of people ask me how I’m able to “read the notes that fast”. The answer is always that you build an intuition about what patterns follow certain patterns, and that you never read each note individually.

It’s a great combination of some of the sensations you get from playing music, and executing things well in a video game.

Re: Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next

#46

Post by rzzzt »

sk0g wrote: post #39
rzzzt wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People actually disappear when you aren't looking, to lower simulation overhead.

So aggressive culling will solve global warming and food shortages. Dibs not being tasked with building the culling into earth's engine!

Building the BSP tree takes ages.

Re: Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next

#47

Post by ta1234567890 »

frereubu wrote: post #21

This ties in quite nicely with Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIu_dJGyIQI There are so many strands of neuroscience that show predictive coding now. There's a really nice example in the use of common vs unusual words in sentences. If you're using fMRI to scan someone while they read these two sentences: The jam on the motorway made everything slow. The jam on the motorway made e…

Cool! This sounds similar to koans: "a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment."

If you explore the meaning of language enough you'll realize it doesn't really make sense.

Everything is based on context and assumptions that we take for granted when communicating. But if you dig deep enough (and it's really not that deep anyway), you'll notice that pretty much anything you say or write can be interpreted in multiple different ways, which means there's no one absolute meaning to any expression of language.

Meaning comes from interpretation, which is subjective and unique to the person doing it.

Interesting exercise: for a day or a week, make an effort to think how anything that someone else says to you is actually true - asume they are always right and think about how to justify it. It's really amazing, at first it's really hard, but then you discover you can always just interpret what they say in a way that fits your views.

Re: Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next

#48

Post by ben7799 »

sk0g wrote: post #38
objektif wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isnt this an example of reflex though, as opposed to prediction?

I would say muscle memory more so, considering how much practice guitar takes.

Is muscle memory even a thing though?

Whatever "muscle memory" is, it's in your brain.

It's when you've done something so many times your brain has pathways for it so you can do it unconsciously.

It's like riding a bike. There are like 10 things going on at the same time and you don't even think about them once you know how to ride a bike.. your brain is doing a lot of the work in the background.

Heck even using your balance to walk around is the same thing.

Re: Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next

#49

Post by hobofan »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #42

This reminds me of the work John Carmack did when he was writing QuakeWorld, which in 1996 was quite playable on a 56k modem! He started off predicting 300ms of lag on the client side, but it was too glitchy when the correction came in. He landed on a more conservative strategy, and his writeup is a touchstone of Computer Science lore for me: https://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/johnc-log.aug.htm I wonder if you co…

This existed in Guild Wars PvP. The game had a similar motion prediction system (and I think most multiplayer RPG games do), and when teams landed on laggy servers they were often uniformly laggy for everyone in the match, and you were able to use that to confuse the enemy if you were a bit more experienced.

Re: Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next

#50

Post by mamon »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #40
ben7799 wrote: post #33

This is hugely noticeable playing/practicing/learning music. Just yesterday playing guitar.. I was fighting playing the wrong note cause my brain was guessing that was the next note because so often in so much music it would be. It was something like 3 notes that are in a particular scale and my brain really wanted to play the next note in the scale instead of the correct next note. In all activities our brain intern…

Guessing what's next is the only way the brain knows how to play music. If you aren't hearing the music you want to play correctly, you cannot play it. A lot of music education gets things pretty messed up by ignoring this factor. Highly relevant to all this is Hal Galper's approach to jazz education. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_7DgCrziI8

In similar fashion people that are deaf and cannot hear their own voice eventually start speaking with strange manerisms, too loud, to quiet, weird intonation, etc. But I don't think that's about predicting what comes next, it's more about feedback loop allowing you to control your movement better.
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