Posted by giuliomagnifico 15 hours ago
Turns out Tukey is visualizing looking at a tape, while he counts, while Feynman imagined himself talking to himself, so he couldn't speak while counting but Tukey couldn't read while counting
>By that experience Tukey and I discovered that what goes on in different people's heads. when they think they're doing the same thing - something as simple as counting - is different for different people. And we discovered that you can externally and objectively test how the brain works: you don't have to ask a person how he counts and rely on his ownobservations of him-self; instead, you observe what he can and can't do while he counts. The test is absolute. There's no way to beat it; no way to fake it.
>It's natural to explain an idea in terms of what you already have in your head. Concepts are piled on top of each other; this idea is taught in terms of that idea, and that idea is taught in terms of another idea, which comes from count- ing, which can be so different for different people!
>I often think about that, especially when I'm teaching some esoteric technique such as integrat- ing Bessel functions. When I see equations, I see the letters in colors-I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel func- tions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light- tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.
[1] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/1/Feynman.pdf
Thankfully these days she can get herself to sleep. But I miss it sometimes
If you play in an orchestra, you might have the visual memory of the conductor and their time signature motions helping you along.
The somewhat jarring tick tock of a digital metronome can also be encoded into a sort of background track that plays more or less automatically in your head.
Or on the other side of the spectrum, most DJs learn to "feel" beat counting and phrases, more or less by feeling. After a while, your head kind of goes "1,2,3,4" by itself, and the phrases of the songs "feels" like they're about to come, then they come.
If you're in the market for another "wait I thought everyone did it X way?!" surprise look up aphantasia where some percentage of people can't mentally "picture" items and there's a whole spectrum of vividness. I've yet to find someone not surprised by this no matter where they are on the spectrum.
Some people can switch back and forth between both readily, and use them for different purposes. Some people read only in one or the other mode.
You might wonder how I read and it's a bit like how you can watch an intersection and know what to do without verbalizing "there is a bike", "there is a car". You just get the situation and understand it. Sentences are like that as well.
I know what you mean. I don't typically sub-vocalize, but when I run across a particularly beautiful bit of prose I slow down in order to hear it in my head. If I'm on my own I might read it aloud.
Their long term goal was to abolish sleep by making one hemisphere of their brains sleep at a time, leaving the other to be awake. Supposedly this would allow them to work more and have more sex. In reality, they all simply went insane, committed pointless murders, and ended up in prison.
As it happens, dolphins and whales do this so as to not drown, and they consequently have an underdeveloped hippocampus and take 3x as long as primates to learn the same things.
Long story short: don't mess with your sleep or you might start a murder cult.
Or: don't select members that are really into bicameral mind ideas
In my extremely limited experience, some crazies are into split brain thinking, and some crazies have symptoms of split brains
It was terrifying 20 odd years ago to read this kind of thing, but it's amusing in light of all the obsession with productivity hacking in Silicon Valley that I could almost see someone with a YouTube channel doing this on purpose to try and be able to accomplish simultaneous tasks a normal person would be tripped up on by the need for a normal brain to produce a single consistent narrative.
I remember a story about people who stutter not stuttering while singing.
Just trying to read your post while counting at a consistent pace I associate with roughly 1 second per number, it didn't feel like I was reading words but instead scanning them and understanding them after the fact from memory. Usually when i read I hear the words 'in my head' but not while counting at the same time.
I can have one interpretation and one generative task running at the same time.
The sentence below will be written when I'm counting to 60
Let me try counting while writing, it's hard with tons of mistakes and typo (like switching count with write), it's also demonstrably slower with this whole sentence taking more that 60 count. Verbalizing the count is way harder and I need frequent stops to gather my thoughts
Reading and counting is harder for me. I can do it, but it's tiring. Those feel like they share lanes to me.
Sort of like: I think what I will type then when I start typing I start counting.
I do not generate what I type while I count, but think of it before I do it.
ironic )
A sentence can be coherent in the formulaic sense, but complete nonsense as far as words. I immediately notice that it's incorrect, but I don't have the ability to fix it at that moment.
> "Dad, why did he steal the biycle?!?!"
> ".... what?"
I think I still can't read a non-trivial text aloud while trying to make sense of it at the same time. I need the two streams just for one text.
And it's not like pilot/controller conversations are about weekend BBQ plans. It's as information dense as possible without sounding like a METAR report.
If you've ever seen a dance music DJ (Tomorrowland is streaming on Youtube right now!) - that's exactly what many of them do.
To DJ a continuous mix as is the norm for this style - generally you'll have headphones on, but only covering one ear. You'll listen to "currently playing" though your right ear, through the venue sound system (well, it's monitors). You'll also be listening to "up next", on the other record/cd/mp3 deck, through the headphones to your other ear. And you'll work the pitch slider, trim controls etc and hopefully produce a good mix!
Not everyone does it like this, some have the headphones permanently on and mix in stereo both tracks at both ears. Or split ears, headphones only - that is an option on the usual Pioneer mixers. But it's surely the most common mental image of a club DJ to have them holding their hand to their headphones on one ear only, I'm sure!
1. Mix them together into one mono channel and send that to both ears.
2. One in each ear.
3. Make separate mixes for each ear. For each ear's mix make one of the sources louder than the other, picking a different source to make louder for each ear.
4. Like #3, but also add delay in each ear's mix to the source that is weaker in that ear.
#2 is generally better than #1. Personally I'd find it annoying because it is very unnatural, but it makes it a lot easier for the brain to separate the sources, makes it easier to focus on one and ignore the other if you need to do that, and prevents the auditory masking you can get when two sources are in same place in your perceived audio space.
#3 fixes the masking problem with #1 but #2 still because it is still easier to focus when you need to. Also, in each ear the weaker signal is unnatural and the brain expends some effort to filter it out, which is fatiguing over long periods.
#4 is by far the best. It solves the long term fatigue problem from #3 because our auditory system is built to expect a weaker version of anything one ear hears first to arrive shortly later at the other ear, and automatically filters it out instead of having to do it at a higher level. The delay shifts the perceived source of each voice to somewhere outside the head instead of somewhere inside, which is more natural, which is much less fatiguing than the "one voice" per ear approach (the brain almost always does more work when something seems unnatural).
Many military planes use #4, as do some Airbus models.
And anecdotally, this headline feels like it's confirming something already well-known. I once did a presentation for a software team visiting the US from South Korea and their translator was real-time translating my words into Korean for them. The translator had an earpiece in and so did the clients. Once I adjusted to it, it became very natural to present and interact this way (but it was certainly weird at first).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_the_Miraculous
It works best with pieces with a lot of ostinato (repetition/vamp) and Bach's Little Fugue in G minor was and is one of my favorites. Really fun to play too, though i get tripped up as soon as the feet get involved. Also, Utopia by Astral Projection (that whole album Trust in Trance 3 is great for this).
Bonus points to mentally visualizing something in time with the music (I like orbs whirling around like atomic orbitals). You can really tie up much of your mental processing this way and I find it much easier than traditional zen meditation, trying to bring focus back to eg. breathing.
Little fugue: https://youtu.be/ddbxFi3-UO4
Trust in trance 3 playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_mHhgZDphEanJgP6zSz...
There is a difference between conscious experience and what's going on in the background.
You can achieve the former, without the latter, by doing time slicing. Spending a small amount of time processing stream A, then dropping that and processing stream B for a moment, then swapping back. Just like how a single core CPU can process multiple threads.
Proving the brain is continuously processing and encoding multiple streams simultaneously is an interesting finding that helps us better understand how our brains handle multitasking. That’s absolutely something worth studying and understanding, even if the headline discovery “feels” obvious. It the precise mechanism that’s interesting, not the effect the mechanism produces.
So a bit harder for me. I can focus on work and follow some podcasts but not speak and at the same time listen to a full parallel convo.
I do believe brain to brain communication exists from experience too. People will be quick to call it schizophrenia and indeed it can be maddening because it evidently reuses your neurotransmitters for information propagation. That includes dopamine and can lead to the same issues some diagnosed people have, but actually a couple at the same time.
Without visual hallucinations but the brain gets a bit taken still, since it has to share processing. So it can induce adhd like symptoms, loss of phantasia, nucleus acumbens becoming nucleus incumbered :D, impaired motivation, etc.. But it is transient and you can argue it within yourself with some amount of relief. If you notice and start a loop of wondering where it comes from you are toast though.
Anyway, probably saying too much. You have to experience it. Probably someone playing with AI and neurochemistry. Still can't figure out the actual transport system. It does not make much sense from a wavelength point of view. Even if merely HF acoustic waves (since they can be more directed) not quite sure. Should ask whoever big galaxy brain created the havana effect... \sarcasm
At the same time people already know publicly how to decode brain signals and turn them into movements and Computer Interface actions. So the brain is not a complete blackbox. Some people might be further along...
Anyway... we will know eventually what is this all about..
brains smell/decode info that we don't have an actual odor (but receptors) for.
it's also why (some) pets and animals react to their human's mood/attitude and short-, mid-, long-term stress (and other) hormone levels.
some people get their energy drained by persons that they are not even aware of being in proximity (e.g. dad got home after work while child is wearing headphones). it can become a matter of good or bad resilience, too, and some brains can develop defence mechanisms by mere exposure while others can't, which is likely (definitely) entangled in/with hormone metabolisms.
The brain isn't a computer with a single CPU - just because computers are built that way doesn't mean the brain is.
Ie it's only surprising if you start with an erroneous computer based model of how the brain works.
The paper is interesting in that it looks at a core interesting issue - which is how conscious attention is managed given we know that behind the scenes it's 'everything all at once'.
More specific from the mere ability to process multiple sensory streams in general.
If you couldn't process multiple streams ( I see nothing special about speech - note parsing speech is potentially different from thinking over the top - ie the difference between hearing and listening ) simultaneously it's hard to see how you'd last 5 minutes.
Have you ever listened to music while simultaneously writing a comment on hacker news - and managed the split cognitive load effortlessly?
We have so many "hacks" that the brain encodes to do the least work possible that I don't know if we could ever truly know what the brain would be capable of.
My issue is that I can't stop processing other speech streams. It seems other people can tune out conversations around them when talking to a person but I have to hear every word