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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

#71

Post by soulofmischief »

p1necone wrote: post #70
soulofmischief wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can make unambiguous sentences: "I walked one mile today." Unless context specifically indicates the very rare possibility that walked is personal shorthand for another activity, it's a pretty unambiguous statement.

I can think of two different ways to interpret that sentence. 1: They went for a walk as a single activity on top of their regular daily walking, and that walk was a mile long. 2. They walked a total of 1 mile throughout the entire day, including regular walking around the house/office etc. I do agree with the sentiment though, there definitely are plenty of unambiguous sentences you can say in everyday conversation.…

That's pretty good. But then knowing that ambiguity, I could craft a statement like, "I walked a mile on the treadmill today."

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

#72

Post by IAmGraydon »

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

I don’t think this is the same thing as guessing what’s next. He’s just talking about developing a powerful aural imagination, just as excellent painters have to envision the scene they’re painting. That said, prediction certainly comes into play when you’re listening to someone else’s creation.

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

#73

Post by hawaiian »

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!

Unfortunately, this will not work. The simulation just deletes food and materializes CO2 and waste matter in line with expectations.

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

HiroshiSan wrote: post #20
teeray wrote: post #9

> Imagine picking up a glass of what you think is apple juice, only to take a sip and discover that it’s actually ginger ale. Even though you usually love the soda, this time it tastes terrible Even brains aren’t safe from speculative execution vulnerabilities

This happened to me drinking soda water, I thought it was just regular old tap water, went to take a huge sip and immediately spit it out in disgust. I normally hate soda water, but that time I especially hated it.

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by nvrspyx »

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…

In psychology/neuroscience, many refer to this generally as heuristics. It’s astonishing how much the mind relies on these heuristics from aspects like language (as you’ve pointed out) to visual perception. Many think the main purpose is to speed up processing tasks and require less “resources” so that cognitive load is freed up for other things. One of my favorite examples of this is how car drivers seem to fall into a sort of “auto-pilot” mode freeing up resources to think about random things like what you’re going to eat for dinner once you get home.

I think the ELI5 way to look at it is pattern recognition and then using those patterns for not only prediction, much like ML models, but also in other things like physical actions, emotional response, etc.

Many theorize it is that these heuristics are trained and the “path more taken” is the default. It’s when a stimulus doesn’t fit that path that the brain has to decide whether:

1. Is something wrong with this?

2. Is this a new path I need to start paving to speed up future processing?

Whether or not that second choice is made is dependent on lots of things co-processing at the time: Emotion, attention, attitude, etc. How much that path is paved is also dependent on those things.

This idea is fundamental to areas of study like symbolic systems at Stanford [1]

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_Systems

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

#77

Post by harry8 »

cr0sh wrote: post #23
HiroshiSan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened to me drinking soda water, I thought it was just regular old tap water, went to take a huge sip and immediately spit it out in disgust. I normally hate soda water, but that time I especially hated it.

If you wanted to mess with a person, other substitutes could be vodka or white vinegar. Note you could do the same for a vodka drinker; it gets more interesting if they're already in the bag...

I once saw a man get another man falling down drunk at a residential college (frat house equiv?) bar serving him water while being convincing it was 100% pure and tasteless alcohol from the chemistry lab. (De-ionised water, probably). Served from a conical glass beaker with hushed tones, "I don't want to get kicked out for this so don't tell anyone." The full con-job. They were and are friends and it was utterly hilarious. The drunk guy was not insulted nor upset in the aftermath and still tells the story.

Falling of the stool, uproariously laughing drunk. Someone else who was in on it (I wasn't, I was getting drunk for real on beer) produced an old Nintendo Game 'n watch where the water drunk guy got the top score of any of us. Apparently being drunk like this didn't affect his reaction time at all. No hangover, Immediately sobered up post-reveal and claims he felt totally drunk. (Then almost immediately drank a family sized rum or something - kids those days, sheesh).

It'd be great if you could get that enjoyable drunkeness feeling like so as easily as by pouring booze down your neck...

"Ladies and gentleman, pivot your startups, go!"

"We're the world leaders in getting neural nets drunk, then making them classify with a hangover..."

Yeah I'm sorry, hasn't been a great week...

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

#78

Post by wazer5 »

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…

I'm not surprised neuroscientists can measure it, I about fell over upon reading that sentence.

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

#79

Post by avinium »

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…

Thanks for linking this - had never seen it before. Fascinating to look back into the annals of gaming/software history to see the birth of ideas that we now take for granted.

Also interesting, on an unrelated note:

> Romero is now gone from id. > There will be no more grandiose statements about our future projects.

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

#80

Post by ta1234567890 »

soulofmischief wrote: post #71
p1necone wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of two different ways to interpret that sentence. 1: They went for a walk as a single activity on top of their regular daily walking, and that walk was a mile long. 2. They walked a total of 1 mile throughout the entire day, including regular walking around the house/office etc. I do agree with the sentiment though, there definitely are plenty of unambiguous sentences you can say in everyday conversation.…

That's pretty good. But then knowing that ambiguity, I could craft a statement like, "I walked a mile on the treadmill today."

Exactly, and if you keep going, you'd notice you need each time a longer, more precise description, which at the same time, paradoxically, opens the door for more ambiguity.

In that example, the first context is English language, then knowing who I is, then what a mile is, and a treadmill and today. All of those are contextual. Even mile. How long is a mile? Like any physical measure, it actually varies, because it is defined relative to something else which varies. The meaning of English language has also varied over time, that sentence might not make any sense to someone reading it in 20 years. And then when is today? May 7, 2019 - which is also a relative measure of time and not even that precise.

And then finally, what if you were lying? Did you really walk a mile today? How can I be sure? And how can you be sure I understand the same meaning from the words you say or write?

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