Myths about how the brain works
nautil.us
Myths about how the brain works
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Re: Myths about how the brain works
#2> The 21st century is a time of great scientific discovery. Cars are driving themselves.
These are the first two sentences of the article and already I'm skeptical. I'd say the self-driving cars are mostly a product of recent technical inventions and not scientific discovery - the scientific discovery happened mostly in the XX century, with discoveries which made integrated circuits, or lasers (for lidar) possible.
The deep learning concept itself did not "discover" anything, it's just a technical contraption that happens to work well for some classes of real-world problems. Granted, there were some maths advances in the eighties and nineties that made current SLAM possible, but again, new math is not "scientific discovery".
Re: Myths about how the brain works
#3There are lots of popular tropes of how our brain works and I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list. However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works - having done a neuroscience degree, my one take home was that when it comes to modelling the brain against our conscious experience - we really don't know anything.
Re: Myths about how the brain works
#4> The 21st century is a time of great scientific discovery. Cars are driving themselves. These are the first two sentences of the article and already I'm skeptical. I'd say the self-driving cars are mostly a product of recent technical inventions and not scientific discovery - the scientific discovery happened mostly in the XX century, with discoveries which made integrated circuits, or lasers (for lidar) possible. T…
Wish someone had told me that I wasn't doing real science before I started in academia, would have saved me a lot of time and effort.
On a more serious note, seems like weird gatekeeping of what constitutes scientific discovery and what doesn't.
Re: Myths about how the brain works
#5> The 21st century is a time of great scientific discovery. Cars are driving themselves. These are the first two sentences of the article and already I'm skeptical. I'd say the self-driving cars are mostly a product of recent technical inventions and not scientific discovery - the scientific discovery happened mostly in the XX century, with discoveries which made integrated circuits, or lasers (for lidar) possible. T…
You're being overly pedantic over the exact difference between "scientific discovery" and "technical invention", a discussion which is completely irrelevant to the article.
That line isn't even important to the article, it's just a bit of flowery language intended to frame the subject of myth vs. fact.
Re: Myths about how the brain works
#6There are lots of popular tropes of how our brain works and I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list. However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works - having done a neuroscience degree, my one take home was that when it comes to modelling the brain against o…
I'm upvoting your comment but can you clarify on left brain/right brain? I thought split-brain/callosal syndrome showed us that a lot of our ideas about left brain right brain functional divide were true.
Edit for clarification: I was not expecting folks to respond to this by linking split-brain experiments; I am specifically referring to split-brain experiments showing us that our ideas about left brain/right brain were correct. This was in reply to "I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list" -- I want to know what this person thinks, thanks.
Re: Myths about how the brain works
#7> The 21st century is a time of great scientific discovery. Cars are driving themselves. These are the first two sentences of the article and already I'm skeptical. I'd say the self-driving cars are mostly a product of recent technical inventions and not scientific discovery - the scientific discovery happened mostly in the XX century, with discoveries which made integrated circuits, or lasers (for lidar) possible. T…
You're being overly pedantic over the exact difference between "scientific discovery" and "technical invention", a discussion which is completely irrelevant to the article. That line isn't even important to the article, it's just a bit of flowery language intended to frame the subject of myth vs. fact.
Besides that, much academic work has to be done before the industry can use those ideas to achieve said technological advances.
Re: Myths about how the brain works
#8There are lots of popular tropes of how our brain works and I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list. However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works - having done a neuroscience degree, my one take home was that when it comes to modelling the brain against o…
I'm upvoting your comment but can you clarify on left brain/right brain? I thought split-brain/callosal syndrome showed us that a lot of our ideas about left brain right brain functional divide were true. Edit for clarification: I was not expecting folks to respond to this by linking split-brain experiments; I am specifically referring to split-brain experiments showing us that our ideas about left brain/right brain…
See Ian McGilchrist’s 2009 book The Master and His Emissary:
> McGilchrist digests study after study, replacing the popular and superficial notion of the hemispheres as respectively logical and creative in nature with the idea that they pay attention in fundamentally different ways, the left being detail-oriented, the right being whole-oriented.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
Re: Myths about how the brain works
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm upvoting your comment but can you clarify on left brain/right brain? I thought split-brain/callosal syndrome showed us that a lot of our ideas about left brain right brain functional divide were true. Edit for clarification: I was not expecting folks to respond to this by linking split-brain experiments; I am specifically referring to split-brain experiments showing us that our ideas about left brain/right brain…
See Ian McGilchrist’s 2009 book The Master and His Emissary : > McGilchrist digests study after study, replacing the popular and superficial notion of the hemispheres as respectively logical and creative in nature with the idea that they pay attention in fundamentally different ways, the left being detail-oriented, the right being whole-oriented. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary
Without listing the actual misconceptions some people have, it's hard to say 'the left brain/right brain divide' is a misconception since I was already aware of this understanding that they just observe in different ways, not that "left brain is creative and right is logical". I grew up with the internet, though, so my understanding didn't solely originate from grade school science books that might be simplifying this phenomenon.
Re: Myths about how the brain works
#10There are lots of popular tropes of how our brain works and I'd agree with this author that they are oversimplified and generally incorrect - I'd add the left brain right brain divide to the list. However the author appears to be arguing from a position that they (or someone) actually know how the brain works - having done a neuroscience degree, my one take home was that when it comes to modelling the brain against o…
I had the same reaction to parts. This in particular:
> So why does the myth of a compartmentalized brain persist? One reason is that brain-scanning studies are expensive. As a compromise, typical studies include only enough scanning to show the strongest, most robust brain activity. These underpowered studies produce pretty pictures that appear to show little islands of activity in a calm-looking brain. But they miss plenty of other, less robust activity that may still be psychologically and biologically meaningful. In contrast, when studies are run with enough power, they show activity in the majority of the brain.
Another, more relevant reason, is that brain-scanning studies are in their infancy.