Mid-morning. You had an abbreviated
breakfast and read the paper. Carol has been talking to Mary Lou and is now
finishing breakfast. You and Carol are heading to Max and Erma’s on I-71 to
meet Mary Lou for lunch, then you are returning to leave Mary Lou to her
shopping.
0928
hours. Carol still has her rash and it still doesn’t look like poison ivy but
she didn’t want to try on clothes having it. Even the doctor didn’t write
poison ivy on her medical papers (which was strange to us), just ‘rash’. The
pills are working. – I just found this on BBC Future.
** **
18 August
2014
How
to speak the language of thought
By Tom
Stafford
Health Science & Environment Brain Neuroscience Sleep
We are now
beginning to crack the brain’s code, which allows us to answer such bizarre
questions as “what is the speed of thought?”
When he was asked, as a joke, to
explain how the mind works in five words, cognitive scientist Steven Pinker
didn't hesitate. "Brain cells fire in patterns", he replied. It's a
good effort, but all it really does is replace one enigma with another mystery.
It’s long been known that brain cells
communicate by firing electrical signals to each other, and we now have myriad
technologies for recording their patterns of activity – from electrodes in the
brain or on the scalp, to functional magnetic resonance scanners that can
detect changes in blood oxygenation. But, having gathered these data, the
meaning of these patterns is still an enduring mystery. They seem to dance to a
tune we can't hear, led by rules we don't know.
Neuroscientists speak of the neural
code, and have made some progress in cracking that code. They are figuring out
some basic rules, such as when cells in specific parts of the brain are likely
to light up depending on the task at hand. Progress has been slow, but in the
last decade various research teams around the world have been pursuing a far
more ambitious project. We may never be able to see the complete code book,
they realised, but by trying to write our own entries, we can begin to pick
apart the ways that different patterns correspond to different actions.
Albert Lee and Matthew Wilson, at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) first helped to set out the principles in 2002.
It progresses like this. First, we record from the brain of a rat – one of our
closer relatives, in the grand tree of life – as it runs a maze. Studying the
whole brain would be too ambitious, so we can focus our recording on an area
known as the hippocampus, known to be important for navigation and memory. If
you've heard of this area before it is probably because of a famous result
which showed that London taxi drivers developed larger hippocampi
the longer they had spent navigating the streets of England's sprawling
capital.
While the rat runs the maze we record
where it is, and simultaneously how the cells in the hippocampus are firing.
The cell firing patterns are thrown into a mathematical algorithm which finds
the pattern that best matches each bit of the maze. The language of the cells is
no less complex, but now we have a Rosetta Stone against which we can decode
it. We then test the algorithm by feeding it freshly recorded patterns, to see
if it correctly predicts where the rat was at the point that pattern was
recorded.
It doesn’t allow us to completely
crack the code, because we still don't know all the rules, and it can’t help us
read the patterns which aren't from this bit of the brain or which aren't about
maze running, but it is still a powerful tool. For instance, using this
technique, the team was able to show that the specific sequence of cell firing
repeated in the brain of the rat when it slept after running the maze (and, as
a crucial comparison, not in the sleep it had enjoyed before it had run the
maze).
Fascinatingly, the sequence repeated
faster during sleep – around 20 times faster. This meant that the rat
could run the maze in their sleeping minds in a fraction of the time it took
them in real life. This could be related to the mnemonic function of sleep; by replaying
the memory, it might have helped the rat to consolidate its learning. And the fact that
the replay was accelerated might give us a glimpse of the activity that lies
behind sudden insights, or experiences where our life “flashes before our
eyes”; when not restrained, our thoughts really can retrace familiar paths in
“fast forward”. Subsequent work has shown that these maze patterns can run backwards as well as forwards
- suggesting that the rats can imagine a goal, like the end of the maze,
and work their way back from that to the point where they are.
One application of techniques like
these, which are equal parts highly specialised measurement systems and
fiercely complicated algorithms, has been to decode the brain activity in patients who are locked in or in a
vegetative state. These patients can’t move any of their muscles,
and yet they may still be mentally aware and able to hear people talking to
them in the same room. First, the doctors ask the patients to imagine
activities, which are known to active specific brain regions – such as the
hippocampus. The data is then decoded so that you know which brain activity
corresponds to certain ideas. During future brain scans, the patients can then
re-imagine the same activities to answer basic questions. For instance, they
might be told to imagine playing tennis to answer yes and walking around their
house to answer no – the first form of communication since their injury.
There are other applications, both theoretical science, to probe the inner
workings of our minds, and practical domains such as brain-computer interfaces.
If, in the future, a paraplegic wants to control a robot arm, or even another person, via a brain interface, then
it will rely on the same techniques to decode information and translate it into
action. Now the principles have been shown to work, the potential is
staggering.
Selected and edited from BBC Future,
18 August 2014
** **
You wonder, in reference to myself, if decoding
and translating is an action. It is. And, just as importantly, it is an action
of free will and a level of acceptance on my reality on your part. – Amorella
1005 hours. These notes in the blog as
well as drafts of GMG.One and Two are circumstantial evidence of your existence
as a ‘guide’ into my heart and mind and
soul too if it actually exists. – rho
You had a good lunch with cookie desserts at
Max and Erma’s. After dessert Carol and Mary Lou began to talk in earnest so
you politely excused yourself for the car and computer. – You drove on the
McDonalds at the Tanger’s Outlets on I-71. They will shop an hour or so then
Mary Lou will drop Carol off. Let’s go ahead and work on Dead Three. – Amorella
1314 hours. Sounds good to me.
You have two hundred and thirteen words of
descriptive introduction and lead in to the meat of the segment. How do you say
what you have to say in some five hundred and fifty words? – Amorella
1735 hours. We are at Kroger’s on
Mason-Montgomery for bakery bread and eggs. You ask a good question Amorella. I
got into the Introduction; it took me about an hour to write those 213 words. I
feel they are needed to set the stage. I don’t want to abruptly go into an
analogy. Here is my intent – divide the work up into five parts: 1, Before; 2,
the Dead; 3, the Living; 4, Beyond. That is about 137 words each, let’s cut it
to 120 words for each part of the Basket. Still, from Merlyn’s viewpoint that
leaves the implication that ‘An Unknown Being’ is left to carry the Basket as
well as an analogy that covers Everything in physics and metaphysics as far as
the books are concerned. Alas, I can feel my mind tightening up already, not a good
sign. The first part flowed from the keyboard; the time was taken in choosing
the right words. I would rather the rest of the segment have that same nuance
description and discovery from Merlyn’s perspective. (1752)
You had Papa John pizza for supper and you
watched the latest episodes of “Unforgettable”, “Manhattan,” plus NBC and ABC
News. – Amorella
2119 hours. Homer and Sam made the
best pizza tonight. Actually the whole crew at our local Papa John’s does a
great job, at least that is our opinion.
You want to share the photo of the purple
heather you describe in the opening of Dead Three but no more of this, boy. We
wait until you complete and proof the chapter before dropping it in the blog. –
Amorella
2139 hours. I understand. Hubris.
No, boy. Enthusiasm can be better spent
writing than displaying what is not complete. – Amorella
2141 hours. I get pumped when stuff
comes rolling out in letters, words and sentences. Clumping content into paragraphs
is icing on the cake. Time is the humbling agent. You write something thinking
it is the greatest work since sliced bread then the next morning you read it
over thinking, what the hell was I thinking. Trite crap, that’s all it is —bullshit.
I worry that is what I have so far in terms of analogy, but I will play it out
first before letting it go.
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