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Ask HN: Teach me something new

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Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#171

Post by exikyut »

andbberger wrote: post #147
SemanticStrengh wrote: post #122

Very few people know the potent facts about the brain: * your neurons are not in your "brain" 90% of your neurons are not in what you generally denote by brain. They are in your cerebellum. The cerebellum has a distinct neural architecture, that difference is in fact clearly visible with the najed eye. A very poor simplistification would be to call it our GPU. * the spinal cord is huge and is structurally a contiguou…

this is a terrible list of 'brain facts'. they're not interesting or constructive to a larger understanding, and analogizing the cerebellum to a GPU is naive and misleading to the point of being insulting. working neuroscientist don't think about consciousness, we look at neurobiology, develop experimental techniques to allow imaging of ever larger numbers of neurons, try to understand how the brain computes. I don't…

*Puts mr bucket of water back where they came from*

FWIW that's not how you argue, that's just letting all the air out of the balloon.

As for your arguments, IMHO humans are fundamentally wanderers, and we stumble on discoveries and accidental solutions to problems as much (if not more often) than we intentionally set out to understand or achieve something. Given the expanse of the brain, the theoretical paradox of a scanner trying to scan itself, and the post-discovery nature of how we structure and organize things, I think we'll only make progress once we fully let go a bit.

Not to a stupid extreme, of course - unhinged conspiracy theories are as useless as trying to build load-bearing insights from drug experiences, IMHO - but just scientifically accepting that we'll never truly understand how we tick until we accept the wild nature behind it. We are not nearly there yet.

I liked the GP comment.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#172

Post by adamdusty »

Timwi wrote: post #159
tailung wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, I think that if you are aware (mindfulness) about your thought patterns you can steer them, and usually what you think you become, because your thoughts drive actions. In my personal experience practicing self awareness has helped with this. I understand that there are factors outside of our control, but what goes on within us can be controlled to some extent with effort and time.

You cannot control physics though. What goes on in your brain is entirely just physics. We have a subjective impression of control, but that too is only the result of physics.

I dont think you can just blanket it under physics. Plenty of controllable systems exist specifically due to physics.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#173

Post by subroutine »

andbberger wrote: post #147
SemanticStrengh wrote: post #122

Very few people know the potent facts about the brain: * your neurons are not in your "brain" 90% of your neurons are not in what you generally denote by brain. They are in your cerebellum. The cerebellum has a distinct neural architecture, that difference is in fact clearly visible with the najed eye. A very poor simplistification would be to call it our GPU. * the spinal cord is huge and is structurally a contiguou…

this is a terrible list of 'brain facts'. they're not interesting or constructive to a larger understanding, and analogizing the cerebellum to a GPU is naive and misleading to the point of being insulting. working neuroscientist don't think about consciousness, we look at neurobiology, develop experimental techniques to allow imaging of ever larger numbers of neurons, try to understand how the brain computes. I don't…

Here's an interesting fact about the cerebellum: it has more neurons than the rest of the brain combined, and as far as we know, all it does is help with balance a bit. There have been cases studies of people with a fully ablated cerebellum, and they can still walk, just a bit unsteadily.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#174

Post by compressedgas »

contingencies wrote: post #95
illwrks wrote: post #26

Almost everything around you has been designed by another person, or teams of people.

Any piece of engineering design is a statement. By the designer without the user. - MSM

That is from Michael S. Mahoney (1939-2008)

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

https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/Mahoney/

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#175

Post by maayank »

mikelevins wrote: post #28

I've described this on HN before; forgive me if you've already seen it. I have chronic migraine. It sounds worse than it is; I rarely suffer attacks anymore, and when I do, they're usually mostly harmless, as in the case I'll describe below. Contrary to popular belief, migraine is not a headache. It's something a little more like an epileptic seizure. Intense headaches are one common symptom, but there are a lot of o…

> has led me to adopt the working hypothesis that many of our cognitive experiences are more complicated than we tend to assume, and that they're often made up of several more or less independent processes

After finishing my CompSci degree I was bored and did some first year psychology degree courses and that was also one of my main takeaways (I don’t mean it was an original take, just one of the main takeaways I remember from these courses).

See for example split brain individuals[0] where the connection between the two hemispheres is severed/damaged - up to a point this was a common surgery to treat epilepsy a decade ago.

Patients seemed fine on first glance, but ultimately there were interesting incongruences [1]. I’m probably doing injustice to the description of the experiment so please read the linked page, but essentially they created a situation where each eye saw a different image (e.g. one related to chickens and another to snow) and then asked to choose with different hands from a set of pictures the picture most related (e.g. an egg or a snowman). The right hand (connected to the right hemisphere and thus the left eye) chose one thing connected to what the left eye saw and the right hand chose another.

Let’s say the left eye saw snow and the right saw chickens. The most interesting part is when the patients were asked about their choices, since only the left hemisphere can talk (the speech center). So they explained why the left hand chose something correctly, but made up some unrelated explanation about their right hand choices (“eggs are white like snow”)! In other more horrific terms, the right hemisphere had some level of thinking/reasoning going on but could not speak since it now had no mouth.

So, in healthy individuals there’s definitely syncing between the two hemispheres and different centers going on, but as any complex system I’m sure there are hiccups.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain

[1] https://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors/split_brain.htm

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#176

Post by newyankee »

mettamage wrote: post #59

I have tinnitus. Before I had tinnitus I could simply use earplugs. Problem when I sleep: when I use earplugs it presses in my ear and it aggrevates my tinnitus. Solution: - Bose QC 35 - Earplugs Now the earplugs don't get pushed in and don't aggrevate the tinnitus. The bose QC 35 gets pushed onto whatever is directly outside your ear, which is a bit uncomfortable but fine. This is my new earplugs setup and it works.

I have hearing loss in both ears which runs in family. Tinnitus is just a serious side effect that I somehow manage. I was hoping that a biological solution to hearing loss would be available by 2020, but even with some hope a lot of projects are running late. Guess most of the approaches want to convert stem cells/ molecular sources etc. to hair cells inside the cochlea. I really hope something is available within 20 years and I can experience normal hearing.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#177

Post by exikyut »

golergka wrote: post #137
idrios wrote: post #119

In drug development, a lot of the engineering goes into making sure the pharmaceutical compound -- having been developed -- actually reaches the target area of the body. If the compound is a relatively large particle that needs to get into the blood stream, a nasal spray might result in the compound being deposited at the bottom of a person's lungs without ever getting absorbed. If stomach acids break the chemical do…

> a nasal spray might result in the compound being deposited at the bottom of a person's lungs without ever getting absorbed Is it also true for cocaine and other similarly ingested substances? Are coke users walking around with garbage in their lungs?

FWIW chubbyemu on YouTube has a community tab, it's generally full of memes but maybe a question like this could work there. Not entirely sure.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#178

Post by franciscop »

mikelevins wrote: post #28

I've described this on HN before; forgive me if you've already seen it. I have chronic migraine. It sounds worse than it is; I rarely suffer attacks anymore, and when I do, they're usually mostly harmless, as in the case I'll describe below. Contrary to popular belief, migraine is not a headache. It's something a little more like an epileptic seizure. Intense headaches are one common symptom, but there are a lot of o…

So really out there, but I've just watched "Your Lie in April" anime and the piano artist has some kind of anxiety attacks while playing the piano, and the symptoms are very similar to what you describe; suddenly things turn gray under-water-like and start turning and his view/hearing of what he's playing disappear, see min 1:32 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41tIxqieC0c

I couldn't find any illness associated to the condition of not being able to hear yourself/the notes disappearing while playing, but what you are describing, losing yourself while reading as the world closes around the words in a kaleidoscope-style prism, sounds really similar.

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#179

Post by SemanticStrengh »

subroutine wrote: post #173
andbberger wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is a terrible list of 'brain facts'. they're not interesting or constructive to a larger understanding, and analogizing the cerebellum to a GPU is naive and misleading to the point of being insulting. working neuroscientist don't think about consciousness, we look at neurobiology, develop experimental techniques to allow imaging of ever larger numbers of neurons, try to understand how the brain computes. I don't…

Here's an interesting fact about the cerebellum: it has more neurons than the rest of the brain combined, and as far as we know, all it does is help with balance a bit. There have been cases studies of people with a fully ablated cerebellum, and they can still walk, just a bit unsteadily.

> There have been cases studies of people with a fully ablated cerebellum, and they can still walk, just a bit unsteadily. ? I had heard the cerebellum is responsible for predicting the next token in a sentence (reminiscent of language models) but you're saying language is not impaired without a cerebellum?

Re: Ask HN: Teach me something new

#180

Post by exikyut »

Nick87633 wrote: post #66
mncharity wrote: post #6

Consider arm sized, hand sized, fingernail sized, and pinched-fingers "tiny" sized. About 1000, 100, 10, 1 mm. Tray of cookies, hand-sized cookie, chocolate chip, and tiny crumb - yum. Now zoom 1000x, taking tiny sized to arm sized, and they become 1000, 100, 10, 1 um. Call this microview, with microscopic microorganisms measured in micrometers. A grain of salt is sized like a cardboard box, a head hair like a hand-s…

Feels like a good VR experience or magic school bus episode would help solidify this! Or maybe time for this adult to make some dioramas.

Let me know when you have the 1:1 µm-scale beach ball setup on the horizon!

(I wonder what existing structures you could paint.)

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