91–100 of 142 posts
As a person who used to be a super genius then turned 40 and is now only a regular genius aging has been very hard to get used to.
Don’t worry. By 60 you’ll remember being a super genius again — with increasingly convincing evidence.
Being an "aging brain" myself I can totally relate to this. I've been a relatively obsessive photographer (i.e. visual diary) since digital cameras were practical, i.e. over 25 years now. 238K photos in the collection so far, and I can actually find things in it. And I've more than once found that an anecdote I've been telling has been incorrect, precisely in a "melded memories" kind of way. It happened at this sort…
I wonder how much of this is directly related to age (biological aging), and how much is just someone's brain becoming "full" due to more memories getting added every year? It seems that memories must be stored as embeddings with single multi-neuron assemblies (cortical columns?) storing multiple embeddings as a kind of contents-addressable memory that is able to keep memories distinct due to the very high dimensiona…
I see this kind of "interconnecting ideas" of my current years as somewhat connected with "fuzzy memory". It's like, when I retrieve data, it's not as precise, and sometimes I get neighbouring data, but that can actually of use.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The brain does not have the Von Neumann bottleneck. Unlike most current digital systems, the brain doesn’t have a separate memory registry it needs to pull from. Engrams, that is, the physical trace of a memory, are not stable through life. They start out in the hippocampus, but as the stimulus recedes in time without reinforcement, it moves away. No evidence exists though that the memory is encoded in one set of cel…
Hijacking your post with a dubious segue because I’m itching to bounce these thoughts off somebody: I’ve been consuming a lot of talks / writing recently about “enactive” pictures of how our brains function. From what I gather, recent studies have called into question the entire idea of real world concepts being “represented” by an area of the brain at all. While it’s true that atandard fMRI-style snapshots of brain…
It's akin to how the saying goes, that when we argue, we need to reach the same wavelength where the other one is to reach an understanding.
In communication studies or sociology or linguistics or one of those fields, there's the idea that communication is about making pacts about meanings, and finding the common ground to understand and delimit the message.
In a sense, from that basing, one could argue that understanding can be seen as an act of harmonizing. I think there's something universal in it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The brain does not have the Von Neumann bottleneck. Unlike most current digital systems, the brain doesn’t have a separate memory registry it needs to pull from. Engrams, that is, the physical trace of a memory, are not stable through life. They start out in the hippocampus, but as the stimulus recedes in time without reinforcement, it moves away. No evidence exists though that the memory is encoded in one set of cel…
Hijacking your post with a dubious segue because I’m itching to bounce these thoughts off somebody: I’ve been consuming a lot of talks / writing recently about “enactive” pictures of how our brains function. From what I gather, recent studies have called into question the entire idea of real world concepts being “represented” by an area of the brain at all. While it’s true that atandard fMRI-style snapshots of brain…
Yes, I fall more towards the camp that a lot of our cognitive models, built from times when we didn’t have the resolution of understanding we have of the capacity of even a single neuron, and before we knew how astrocytes played a role, suffer from being an abstraction describing an abstraction. They are not tethered in the dynamics of the molecules and cells that give rise to the behavior, but rather from an interpretation of observed behavior.
This paper from the field of chronobiogy is one I’d recommend that helpfully contrasts this:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00393...
>In circadian research, the models are not proposals regarding the basic architecture of circadian mechanisms; rather, they are used to better understand the functioning of a mechanism whose parts, operations, and organization already have been independently determined. In particular, circadian modelers probe how the mechanism’s organized parts and operations are orchestrated in real time to produce dynamic phenomena—what we have called dynamic mechanistic explanation.
And what you’re describing, the enactivist description of cognition, (and 4E cognition more broadly as a framework), is one way the neuroscience community is trying to move past these issues.
Few things that give me confidence these are the right track:
1. Circadian rhythms are evolutionarily ancient. Bacteria have em. Plants have em. But different molecular tools shape very different clocks, though the same 24 hour cycle is being tracked. 2. The way these rhythms are generated is not through some central system that broadcasts the information to other regions. Instead, it’s instantiated in every cell in the body, and the behavioral rhythm is due to the synchrony between cells. Resonance absolutely plays a role, and has been well documented. The brains role, via the suprachiasmatic nucleus or SCN, is to orchestrate this synchrony, but it is not the source of the rhythms. 3. This slow rhythm definitely regulates cognition (time of day effects in learning, memory formation, recall etc are well documented), but turns out, the molecular mechanisms by which the clock responds to light hugely overlap with the molecular mechanisms of learning in the synapse, and even more recent work has shown clock proteins are actually in the synapses and synaptic activity affects the clock.
All this points to nested oscillators with cross frequency coupling, and even better, because this is all grounded in actual molecular dynamics, there’s plenty of falsifiability. The phase amplitude links are best established for the faster rhythms, the famous “brain waves”. Highly recommend György Buzsáki‘s work on this:
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/32/2/423.short
What’s missing is going down into lower frequency rhythms, and testing how exactly they all couple. We have a lot of the pieces, but no single experimental paradigm that has looked at the full sweep over different times in the same organism. It’s not easy to do, but we’ll get there.
Clock disruption, depending on how you do it, has huge impacts on time perception, cognition, memory, aging AND consciousness. As that data and evidence gets more and more saturated, I hope we see more studies account for chronotype and the internal dynamical state of their test subjects when assessing outcomes.
Obviously I’m biased (also did chronobiology in school), but hopefully I’ve left you curious. Happy to answer more questions all this may have set off.
Being an "aging brain" myself I can totally relate to this. I've been a relatively obsessive photographer (i.e. visual diary) since digital cameras were practical, i.e. over 25 years now. 238K photos in the collection so far, and I can actually find things in it. And I've more than once found that an anecdote I've been telling has been incorrect, precisely in a "melded memories" kind of way. It happened at this sort…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hijacking your post with a dubious segue because I’m itching to bounce these thoughts off somebody: I’ve been consuming a lot of talks / writing recently about “enactive” pictures of how our brains function. From what I gather, recent studies have called into question the entire idea of real world concepts being “represented” by an area of the brain at all. While it’s true that atandard fMRI-style snapshots of brain…
Ooh thanks for the hijack! It’s so much easier to talk to someone who isn’t stuck in a picture of the brain from the 1980s. Yes, I fall more towards the camp that a lot of our cognitive models, built from times when we didn’t have the resolution of understanding we have of the capacity of even a single neuron, and before we knew how astrocytes played a role, suffer from being an abstraction describing an abstraction.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can confirm. This "aging brain" regularly and vividly inserts my child into memories created before they existed.
I think that's because memories really are highly compressed, with the average complex memory (of a grand day out, for example) being compressed into at most a paragraph of text's worth of information. Everything else is made up of context. For example, having no photographic memory, I can remember the general "feel" of the innards of an antique shortwave receiver I used to have as a kid. But almost all of that is co…
Our model of the world, and this includes "memories" is very highly compressed, and extremely lossy. We reconstruct everything from what neurons activate when we recall something, so it can also be like a corrupted zip, where we don't access everything required in the moment. This can be affected by sleep, stress, hormones, etc.
What is quite interesting is when we try and recall something and can't, but the subconscious processing continues and you recall it later.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just throwing out an idea: I recently stumbled upon an old-school website where someone is uploading a photo of their day (almost) every single day since 1998. Came across screen captures of the original Everquest (SO COOL) and other games, photos of anime/cosplay events, city shots, family, friends, etc. Really fun for them, and fun for people who like me who still enjoy surfing the web. edit: Screencap of an Everqu…
When my mom was still alive and relatively new to a smartphone (at age 80) I decided to send her some sort of relevant picture every day via Whatsapp, to get her used to communicating that way. Sometimes it was a real stretch to come up with something. But yes, this forces you to evaluate your life from that viewpoint "surely something was interesting today? Let's keep a picture of it". Even if it's just what I'm hav…
This is one thing for all of the pairs of genuine friends doing this, but I also have two friends who I introduced to each other exactly once, and who have never spoken since, who have a 6 year snap streak together, and both of whom have streaks like that with dozens of other people, many of whom are virtually strangers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When my mom was still alive and relatively new to a smartphone (at age 80) I decided to send her some sort of relevant picture every day via Whatsapp, to get her used to communicating that way. Sometimes it was a real stretch to come up with something. But yes, this forces you to evaluate your life from that viewpoint "surely something was interesting today? Let's keep a picture of it". Even if it's just what I'm hav…
I'm not sure if you are in this demographic, but a lot of people I know born in 1999-2003 or so in the US used snapchat as a primary method of communication for many years, and a large part of it was keeping up "snap streaks" of sharing one photo a day with many different friends. This is one thing for all of the pairs of genuine friends doing this, but I also have two friends who I introduced to each other exactly o…