- cross-posted to:
- science@beehaw.org
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How long before EMI sues them for copyright infringement?
“Please drink a confirmation can to hum this song to yourself.”
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How anyone holds onto the notion that our minds aren’t simply squishy, organic computers is beyond me.
I guess you could say that but brains are orders of magnitude more complex than any computer. Saying that they’re “simply” organic computers is a huge understatement.
A TI-82, an Apple II, and a 48 core Xeon rack Server are all simply computers. It isn’t insulting the rack server to declare that it and an Apple II are both simply computers, despite their orders of magnitude difference in processing power, capacity, utility, etc.
Humans are far too self-important and self-reverential. We think too much of ourselves. Just barely smart enough to split the Atom, after a couple hundred thousand years of build up throwing rocks and sticks at each other in the dirt, yet still dumb enough to immediately want to use it to boomie boom rival monkey tribe, ooh ooh, aah aah!
No. The human brain is not 1 and O. It is “analog” meaning the state can be any number between 1 and 0 because neurons are fired biochemically and linked to each other in multiple connections. This means the human brain or any animal brain can carry, process and store more info than any computer yet invented for the given size and mass. Non-biologists don’t know how complex biological sytems are. Go and google about the rotor-stator system of bacterial flagellum. That’s right, some bacteria have an electrical motor to propel themselves, long before humans invented the electric motor.
Neurons are very much binary. They receive enough simulation to fire or they don’t. They don’t fire with variable strengths.
Brains are literally just biologically grown electrochemical computers.
They fire at different rates are though.
Any logic gate will fire a different rates depending on how frequently it’s fire conditions are met.
Still binary.
That’s just plainly wrong. If neurons are “activated” (the binary analogy) it starts firing, but at varying rates depending on how far above it’s threshold the activation happened. A bit like an activation level to frequency converter, but non-linear.
True but they are rates of events, which could be said to be 0 for nothing and 1 for a spike.
That being said there are definitely some things in the way neurons behave that are not very binary, from the potentials driving ion flow to the way certain proteins act. Complex on amazing levels but I’d say it’s stil just a gloopy predicting computer.
It’s true. You a neuroscientist?
Anybody who believes that out brains are simple organic computers seriously needs to try acid.
Complex but still organic computers. What else would they be? Soul vessels?
soul vessels
Let me know if they are, I need to respec pronto
Devil’s advocate: Maybe acid just disables the “noise filtering” part of you organic computer.
Is the song Brain Damage?
Another Brick in the Wall Pt I according to the article. Woulda picked comfortably numb or something personally.
They actually don’t specify what part so it’s probably part II (aka. the most well known Pink Floyd song for some reason).
The clip almost makes it sound more like part of the intro to Run Like Hell, though, to my ear at least.
I mean it’s a pretty song that people like to sing along, but they don’t know what it means.
The first part is the intro to part I. The second part is too ambiguous to know. It’s just the vocals saying “another brick in the wall”. I didn’t actually know there were two clips originally, so the second one is somewhat interesting.
Maybe the listeners thought of other songs while listening to it ?
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I hope they allowed them to get high first. That’s a Pink Floyd requirement.
I’ve always found listening to Pink Floyd is enough of a high already, personally!
Nick: Hey does anybody wanna come see The Wall with me on Saturday night? Thought I might try an experiment—see it straight once.
Ken: Don’t do it! You’ll regret it, man. Trust me.
– Freaks and Geeks
That’s how I feel about it too
Yeah only way to enjoy their music
Woah. This is pretty wild. I wonder if they could record the sound of my brain exploding while reading this article 🤯
Did you listen to the clip? It’s barely recognizable as any song.
I did, and it’s absolutely incredible. Keep in mind that the audio was recorded by sticking electrodes on a person’s brain, no speakers or anything. The fact that it is recognizable as music is amazing, but the fact that you can actually hear individual words is totally mind-blowing.
It’s recognizable only if you know what it’s supposed to be. I don’t think anyone could hear that and say “hey, that sounds like Another Brick in the Wall”. I feel like the brain fills in what’s missing and almost forces it to match the same pattern in our head. So it’s definitely cool, but still clearly a science in its early days.
Having not heard the song since I was maybe four, I was annoyed that they gave me the intended lyrics before I played it. I agree that most readers will be primed to hear it correctly despite sounding only new-age trippy on its own.
They didn’t give the intended lyrics. They just provided the name of the song I believe. Which happened to also be the lyrics. The second clip is a little more compelling as it includes vocals, so with that, it’s definitely interesting.
That’s where I disagree, it’s not recognizable as music - at least not without prior prompting.
Make sure you’re listening to the clip towards the middle of the article. The one from the top is unrecognizable to me.
Middle one is slightly better but far from music. It’s not mind blowing to me. If I didn’t have the suggestion I’d not guess this even a song.
I find hard to say that any sound is far from music when music itself has no definition and varies immensely from percussion to electronica to dub to country to opera. There’s that guy that plays songs with just whips. Something is music as long as you think it is really.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Scientists have reconstructed Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall by eavesdropping on people’s brainwaves – the first time a recognisable song has been decoded from recordings of electrical brain activity.
The hope is that doing so could ultimately help to restore the musicality of natural speech in patients who struggle to communicate because of disabling neurological conditions such as stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – the neurodegenerative disease that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with.
Although members of the same laboratory had previously managed to decipher speech – and even silently imagined words – from brain recordings, “in general, all of these reconstruction attempts have had a robotic quality”, said Prof Robert Knight, a neurologist at the University of California in Berkeley, US, who conducted the study with the postdoctoral fellow Ludovic Bellier.
It contains a much bigger spectrum of things than limited phonemes in whatever language, that could add another dimension to an implantable speech decoder.”
The team analysed brain recordings from 29 patients as they were played an approximately three-minute segment of the Pink Floyd song, taken from their 1979 album The Wall.
This year, researchers led by Dr Alexander Huth at the University of Texas in Austin announced that they had managed to translate brain activity into a continuous stream of text using non-invasive MRI scan data.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
They picked the right song for it. This technology will be used to ensure compliance.
Yeah, I’m chalking it up to a blinding idealistic need to help, that those quoted seem so excited by this. On its face, yeah, this stands to do an untold amount of good for those who for one reason or another are unable to communicate. In addition to the toys they’re talking about, like composing music (and I suppose other forms of art) from imagination rather than instruments/tools.
I find research into the ability to mechanically read and monitor thoughts to be a little horrifying. It’s too much of a boon to think somebody wouldn’t use it, and it’s the last thing nobody could access.
On the plus side this technology only works because the early brain processing for perception is well mapped out and straightforward to pick up.
We’re a long way from this to them being able to see that I’m thinking “I hope they don’t find my wife’s corpse in the back yard”.
Now do Keep Talking
