A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness • Hacker News Board

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#21

Post by tyingq » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 1:50 AM UTC

namenotrequired wrote: post #14

asab wrote: post #6

I have also seen this example, where a man blinded by strokes still avoids obstacles and recognizes emotions, without any conscious awareness[1]. Is this the same phenomenon? [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/health/23blin.html

It is the phenomenon called blindsight, mentioned in this article. (Edit: but not explained, so your question is reasonable)

For reference, from the article:

"Sara Ajina, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford who studies visual awareness deficits such as blindsight—a residual, unconscious “sight” in people with damage to the brain’s visual system..."

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#22

Post by the8472 » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 2:01 AM UTC

Xenograph wrote: post #16

> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cog…

> his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill

Is it? I thought the brain has specialized parts for identifying faces (hence prosopagnosia) which makes this more of an automatism than higher reasoning.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#23

Post by komali2 » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 2:03 AM UTC

andai wrote: post #18

Xenograph wrote: post #16

> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cog…

Sometimes I read about split-brain experiments and wonder, if my brain were to split, which side I'd end up on?

What even is I though?

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#24

Post by war1025 » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 2:05 AM UTC

bitbckt wrote: post #17

TwoBit wrote: post #13

I knew an older woman who had a hard time remembering freeways by their numbers but could remember them all by their names (e.g. "Santa Ana" freeway instead of "5"). That seemed odd because to me the number was the name, so why be any different?

They weren’t always numbered. Up north, there are still people who refer to Highway 40 as Lincoln Highway. I’ve heard a couple of LA natives say that’s an explanation for SoCal’s affinity for calling them “the 5”: they switched from “the Santa Ana”.

> there are still people who refer to Highway 40 as Lincoln Highway

This is interesting to me because here in Iowa, the Lincoln Highway is "old Highway 30". In the 60s they rerouted Hwy30 about a mile south of the existing Lincoln Way so they could make it 4 lane and avoid towns.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#25

Post by kovac » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 2:08 AM UTC

I don't understand how these experiments lead to the conclusion separates higher cognitive functions from consciousness. I fact I don't see anything that necessarily she'd any light into the roots of consciousness here. Can someone explain how the results of the experiment lead to that conclusion? This looks to me like, if it were a computer program, encoding/decoding of the symbols seems to be messed up for a largely contiguous block of symbols. Like you get jumbled up weird shapes when you feed the wrong encoding to a program.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#26

Post by eddytrex_ » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 2:14 AM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #22

Xenograph wrote: post #16

> In contrast, when shown numbers with embedded faces, the number’s effect apparently swamped that of the face: RFS reported seeing neither; everything looked like spaghetti. Yet an EEG still showed the characteristic N170 spike for registering faces. Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious. This deficit shows high-level cog…

> his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill Is it? I thought the brain has specialized parts for identifying faces (hence prosopagnosia) which makes this more of an automatism than higher reasoning.

Yeah, I remember learn that in this playlist https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyGKBDfnk-iAQx4Kw9JeV... very cool

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#27

Post by djhaskin987 » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 2:57 AM UTC

> That he could still interpret letters, Schubert says, lends support to the idea that the brain has a specialized module for processing numbers.

This makes a lot of sense to me. I have almost no trouble at all remembering long strings of numbers, but I have the opposite problem with names. I cannot remember names to save my life unless I use them on a daily basis. I feel like this is a flip-flop from how most people process information. It seems to me that lots of people are very very good at remembering names and have a hard time remembering numbers. some people look at me offended when I forget their name as if the only reason I would ever forget their name was because I didn't like them. It's very embarrassing. When I show I can remember numbers or lines of code just by looking at them once, people are amazed but then move on.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#28

Post by randcraw » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 3:11 AM UTC

kovac wrote: post #25

I don't understand how these experiments lead to the conclusion separates higher cognitive functions from consciousness. I fact I don't see anything that necessarily she'd any light into the roots of consciousness here. Can someone explain how the results of the experiment lead to that conclusion? This looks to me like, if it were a computer program, encoding/decoding of the symbols seems to be messed up for a largel…

I think RFS' loss is a little deeper than ablation of a contiguous block of symbols, since characters and numerals aren't likely to be represented sequentially in the brain they way they are on keyboards or ASCII. I agree with your conclusion otherwise. I see no connection to cognition in what the scientists explored.

Specifically, RFS' loss was specific to both encoding (recognition) and decoding (writing) of only those numerals that have no analogs among letters (not 0 or 1) had failed in RFS. Presumably this implies that the neurons that map the visual coding for numerals 2-9 in the cortex to and from their underlying concepts were lost. However the concept of each numeral persisted, so RFS could learn replacement glyphs and map them to the concepts, thereby using them as equivalents to numerals 2-9.

So I agree with you, this seems like only selective damage to the V2 or V3 portions of the visual cortex used strictly to encode/decode numerals 2-9. I too see nothing related to higher cognition or consciousness, at least in the early stage of RFS' disease mentioned here.

Methinks the author at Science Mag who summarized the work got a bit carried away in seeking cosmic revelations therein.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#29

Post by randcraw » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 3:20 AM UTC

djhaskin987 wrote: post #27

> That he could still interpret letters, Schubert says, lends support to the idea that the brain has a specialized module for processing numbers. This makes a lot of sense to me. I have almost no trouble at all remembering long strings of numbers, but I have the opposite problem with names. I cannot remember names to save my life unless I use them on a daily basis. I feel like this is a flip-flop from how most people…

I too. If a name is unfamiliar to me, even if it's no more than 5-6 letters long, I can't for the life of me recall it. But I can remember random sequences of numerals up to length 12. Why?

I wonder if there's some term for this malady, like 'literophasia' or 'numeraphilia'? I wonder too if it occurs equally as often in both genders. I would guess not.

Re: A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness

#30

Post by sinuhe69 » Sun, Aug 02, 2020, 3:27 AM UTC

kovac wrote: post #25

I don't understand how these experiments lead to the conclusion separates higher cognitive functions from consciousness. I fact I don't see anything that necessarily she'd any light into the roots of consciousness here. Can someone explain how the results of the experiment lead to that conclusion? This looks to me like, if it were a computer program, encoding/decoding of the symbols seems to be messed up for a largel…

My understanding is he could see the numbers but failed to recognize or make sense of these pictures.He wasn’t aware of the letter pictures anymore and could not associate them with the “numerical symbols” stored in his memory (if our brains do it this way). But with the stored symbols he still can do mental math so his higher cognitive function must be at least partly intact. Using the computer program metaphor we can say his input routine for numbers is scrambled but the other calculation routines remained intact.

My guest is because we do math, our brain create the association for not only the numbers but also what we do with these numbers (maths routines). And because we don’t work with numbers all the time (we also can do symbolic maths), it’s necessary to separate the numbers with its meaning to accomplish these feats. If I would “program” our brain, it’ll be much more efficient to separate the recognition routines with the higher-function routines because we need to adjust the recognition routines all the time due the (slightly) different fonts and hand scripts of all the people.