[HN Gopher] Neurons might contain something within them
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Neurons might contain something within them
Author : nahuel0x
Score : 86 points
Date : 2021-04-16 19:22 UTC (2 hours ago)
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| andyxor wrote:
| "Finding numbers in the brain" by C.R. Gallistel:
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...
|
| Edit: also see his article on this from 2015 "Here's Why Most
| Neuroscientists Are Wrong About the Brain"
| https://nautil.us/blog/heres-why-most-neuroscientists-are-wr...
| seesawtron wrote:
| I am not sure that is the ferret experiment mentioned. However,
| this [0] one might be.
|
| [0] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/45/14060
| nabla9 wrote:
| Mainstream neuroscientists don't find it outlandish at all.
| Gallistel is 80 years old and that might not explain why he has
| not kept up with neuroscience in the last 10-20 years.
|
| Single neuron is very complex beast. They seem to be more similar
| to multi-layer perceptrons with multiple nonlinear steps. When
| neuron adapts that's memory single neuron level.
| zeeshanqureshi wrote:
| Reminds me of The Prometheus Rising
|
| _William James, father of American psychology, tells of meeting
| an old lady who told him the Earth rested on the back of a huge
| turtle.
|
| "But, my dear lady," Professor James asked, as politely as
| possible, "what holds up the turtle?""It's no use, Professor,"
| said the old lady "It's turtles-turtles- turtles, all the way!"_
| dhosek wrote:
| The Turtles thing predates James (and was probably originally
| rocks): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
| zeeshanqureshi wrote:
| I know, the original source is obscure on that one.
|
| I've also heard that the anecdote (mentioned in PR) didn't
| involve William James and that it was Bert Russell talking to
| the lady.
| bmitc wrote:
| I never tire of hearing these apocryphal turtle stories.
| They're just hilarious to me.
| slver wrote:
| Each neuron contains within itself a nanostructure whose
| resonance acts as an antenna both for receiving quark vibration
| frequencies and transmitting back to them for synchronization,
| effectively forming a communication protocol with higher
| dimensional string structures.
|
| In higher dimensions our common thoughts are aggregated into
| massive socially-shared hyperbrains, each of which is segregated
| from the other based on both cultural and genetic similarity
| between specimens (mostly of the same species). Hyperbrains form
| a trie predicated on the commonality of our toughts and the
| closer you move to its roots, the closer you get to our
| biological origins, until eventually all species merge at the
| root.
|
| Our individual biological brains then acts only as secondary
| devices similar to how L1/2/3 CPU cache is to the main memory of
| a computer. We use our brains to think only when the
| communication bridge is unstable, or when our experiences cannot
| be matched into compatibly vibrating wavelets in the hyperbrain.
| Our brains are also an anchoring devices of the self. While the
| hyperbrain encodes the shared memories and experiences of entire
| groups of specimens, our brain is a "diff" between the personal
| and the communal.
|
| OK, anyway, I had fun making some stuff up, it's not like I
| understand anything this article says.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| So this is what HN is doing now? I thought this shit was left
| for reddit.
| meowface wrote:
| I think it's not too implausible that something like this could
| be real in the distant future. Most would rely on the
| collective biological-abiological-hybrid hyperbrain(s) for most
| things most of the time, but (biological or otherwise)
| individuals or sub-collectives/colonies would also narrowly
| specialize and rely on local processing when they believe their
| specialized cognition/ideation is more effective/efficient than
| deferring to the collective. Or when they just want some
| privacy.
|
| Entities would be able to seamlessly "context switch" between
| the different scales of shared memories/knowledge/mental
| models, from universal to individual. Hopefully with some
| rigorous isolation so that only you can ever access your
| individual mind. Maybe also some vandalism mitigations for
| those who might want to mess with the universal Neurapedia.
| Plus some kind of hardware switch that can fully cut the
| connection at a moment's notice, in the event of some neural
| 0-day or DoS.
|
| In practice it might be infeasible to make it both seamless and
| safe from adversarial risks, but people said the same of
| Wikipedia. Though, the consequences of a manipulated Wikipedia
| article are probably a little different from the consequences
| of a manipulated neural interface/network.
| brahyam wrote:
| Wow! I was really into it right until the end. What an amazing
| imagination. Thanks for putting that together and sharing your
| creativity.
| samstave wrote:
| Well crap - I thought this was amazing. :-(
|
| Are you sure (y)our hyperbrain didnt make you write this?
| fnord77 wrote:
| I was hoping you'd tie this in with some occult/pseudoscience
| stuff. Some people would gobble that up.
| slver wrote:
| Frankly I'm almost gobbling it up myself as I type it.
|
| I guess I'm gullible.
| mmazing wrote:
| You channeled Deepak Chopra for a minute there, glad you
| recovered though!
| teclordphrack2 wrote:
| Thanks, now someone is going to take this and start scientology
| 2.0.
| chmod775 wrote:
| I expected to find a reference to some sci-fi book at the end
| of this.
| slver wrote:
| Well, no book, but I might as well write one, why not :P
| why_Mr_Anderson wrote:
| Beautifully written. Now all you need is to open store on Etsy
| with some crystals and similar junk :)
|
| On serious note: I wonder if there is a generator somewhere for
| this kind of BS. I have bookmarks for several (corpo lingo,
| resume, progressive newspeak, etc.), but not for this new age
| style.
| Sporktacular wrote:
| That ferret experiment sounds ghastly. Am picturing it in some
| quack's garage for some reason.
| dcanelhas wrote:
| The ethical review board is just a piece of plywood with a
| thumbs up drawn on it.
| kneel wrote:
| People can't fully perceive their own consciousness, stop trying.
| choeger wrote:
| There was an article here lately that basically stated it would
| be surprising if DNA, RNA or some similar mechanism wasn't used
| for storing long-term information because it is so well-suited to
| the task. Is this more then pseudo science?
| plumsempy wrote:
| I don't know but sounds likr assassin's creed.
| Geee wrote:
| The blank slate theory is obviously incorrect, but I'm wondering
| if the information in baby brain is genetic or transferred from
| mother's brain during pregnancy.
| neom wrote:
| It doesn't seem outlandish to me that the neuron would contain
| information about itself from the time it was
| formed/programed/activated// about what it is, how and when it
| should fire, etc. given the complexity of the neural networks, it
| would be more strange than not that the neuron wouldn't have some
| form of metadata? (Mostly thinking about the relationship between
| minicolumns and the neuron and the neural network at large)
| ajuc wrote:
| It was already accepted neurons store numbers (weights on each
| input for example). How is this different?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| If I understand the article correctly, the suggestion is that
| it is not primarily the synapse (connection between neurons)
| that is storing the "number", but something in the central part
| of the neuron. IANAN (I Am Not A Neuroscientist).
| ketralnis wrote:
| The subtitle is
|
| > Neurons might contain something incredible within them.
|
| but the HN title right now is
|
| > Neurons might contain something within them
|
| I guess there's some intensifier filter that removes "AMAZING"
| and "INCREDIBLE!" and "10 REASONS YOU'LL BE SHOCKED". But I like
| to imagine that people previously thought that neurons were
| entirely hollow
| kazinator wrote:
| Obviously, it means "something newly noteworthy in them".
|
| Not the stuff you already know they contain, like cytoplasm and
| a nucleus and other cell materials.
| ddevault wrote:
| In either case, it's a bad title. It should be rewritten to
| avoid clickbait.
|
| Edit: sigh. To quote the guidelines:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
| linkbait; don't editorialize.
| kuroguro wrote:
| IIRC the submitter can re-edit the title and it doesn't filter
| them the second time. The edit button disappears after a while
| tho.
| darig wrote:
| "Might" means the exact same thing as "Might Not"
| bobthechef wrote:
| "they're committed to the Aristotelean idea that there is nothing
| in the mind that was not first in the senses. [...] The problem
| is that there are no sensory receptors for times of day and for
| interval-durations. A duration doesn't feel like anything--it's
| ineffable."
|
| Where does Aristotle actually say that time is known as an object
| of the senses? I assure you he never says this. For Aristotle,
| time is the _measure_ of change with respect to succession. Time
| is not a "thing"!
|
| Tabula rasa doesn't mean that mental faculties don't exist.
| That's not what it means for something not to be in the mind that
| was not in the senses.
|
| The interviewee is silly in his hostility toward Aristotle,
| especially given the basic lack of understanding.
| cabalamat wrote:
| The article says:
|
| >With one caveat: whatever it looks like, it has to be apparent
| that its form gives it the functional properties of the
| polypeptides (the class of molecules that DNA belongs to).
|
| But DNA isn't a polypeptide.
| zosima wrote:
| No, but it's a polymer. From the context, I guess that was the
| word aimed at.
| guscost wrote:
| Uh oh, better upgrade the neural networks, and quit using all the
| GPUs to mine Ethereum, otherwise we'll never get the AI overlord
| we deserve!
| seesawtron wrote:
| There are two schools of thoughts as to where "memory" is stored
| in neuronal networks. The larger group of neuroscientists believe
| it is at the synaptic level, as huge amount of research has shown
| how synapses change when they undergo Long Term Potentiation
| (LTP) or Long Term Differntiation (LTD) which relate to increase
| and decrease in synapse size while undergoing learning. The
| former correlates to strengething of a synaptic connection and
| the latter to the opposite.
|
| Gallistel, Hesslow (PI of ferret study, [0]) and colleagues
| constitute the second, relatively smaller, group of
| neuroscientists who believe synapses are only an "effect" that
| one sees as a result of learning. The true mechanisms are either
| hidden in the nucleus, cell membrane or somewhere inside the cell
| [1]. This group so far has only very few substantially convincing
| experiments and more hypotheses. The ferret study [0] is one such
| experiment in this direction which was published in 2015. I am
| not aware of any more data to prove any of the hypothesis.
|
| But of course even the inherent mechanisms that guide synapse
| formation and alteration are in the end guided by proteins
| "inside" the neuron. To me it seems these two groups are looking
| at the same idea at different steps of the memory learning
| pipeline.
|
| [0] https://www.pnas.org/content/112/45/14060 [1]
| https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2101/2101.09774.pdf
| snewman wrote:
| In general in biology, when there is long-standing dispute as
| to whether a certain system relies on Mechanism X or Mechanism
| Y, my impression is that the answer almost invariably turns out
| to be that X, Y, and previously-unsuspected Z all play a role.
| 1996 wrote:
| Good take.
|
| Here:
|
| - X=neural network geometric configuration,
|
| - Y=individual synapses due to the various neurotransmitters,
|
| - Z=cytoskeleton (already suspected to play a role)
| pishpash wrote:
| I think it's a bit more than looking at different steps, it's
| about what's fundamental architecturally vs. not. The synaptic
| side is saying the internals aren't fundamental, in the same
| sense that you can have ANN's that are nothing but weights and
| connections. Gallistel is saying the weights and connections
| aren't fundamental, or at least trivial compared to a state-
| storing/state-processing machinery inside. Maybe both exist,
| but either one being more fundamental or important than the
| other is a salient conceptional difference.
| nine_k wrote:
| I wonder why both mechanisms could not be in place
| simultaneously.
|
| E.g. brain can run on glucose or on ketones; muscles can run on
| oxygen producing CO2 or without it producing lactic acid, etc.
| The body has a number of alternative mechanisms, this may be
| another such pair.
| seesawtron wrote:
| Synapses are formed outside the neuron in the extracellular
| space (ECS), at the end of axon terminals called "boutons"
| which are essentially storehouses for vesciles which are tiny
| packages containing neurotransmitters. The internal
| mechanisms of the neurons as well as ongoing biochemistry at
| the location of a synapses "guides" the transfer of proteins
| necessary for strenghening of removal of these synapses.
|
| So its possible that both mechanisms occur simultaneously,
| there's just not enough evidence to clearly understand these
| (yet).
| kgc wrote:
| Why not both? These ideas seem compatible.
| andyxor wrote:
| as for 'storage of durations' mentioned in the interview there
| is a well known paper on "time cells" in the hippocampus [0] by
| Howard Eichenbaum et al. which doesn't seem to refer to
| Purkinje cells (which only exist in the cerebellum [1]).
|
| There is significant evidence for temporal memory maintained in
| the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex [2], just like grid
| cells[3] in the hippocampus used as coordinate system for
| spatial and abstract navigation [4] while time cells facilitate
| "navigation" in temporal dimension.
|
| [0] Hippocampal "time cells" bridge the gap in memory for
| discontiguous events https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21867888/
|
| [1] Basic anatomy of human memory
| https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wsu-sandbox/chapter/parts-...
|
| [2] Time cells in the human hippocampus and entorhinal cortex
| support episodic memory
| https://www.pnas.org/content/117/45/28463
|
| [3] Grid cells: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Grid_cells
|
| [4] Time (and space) in the hippocampus
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235215461...
| pishpash wrote:
| Truly, I believe there are multiple architectures for
| information processing in the body, and not only in the
| brain/neurons. Think of the computing landscape where you
| have a salad bowl of ANN's implemented on TPU's, some GPU's,
| some specialized ASIC's, DSP's, some CPU's. There is no
| reason to believe efficient information encoding through
| evolution ends up with one architecture. It's going to turn
| out to be as varied as the differentiated cells in the body,
| though there may be some unification in foundational units at
| the equivalent level of transistors of something, maybe some
| molecular machinery that stores a bit or activates a switch.
| Presumably that's what Gallistel is looking for. It does seem
| wasteful for a whole neuron to be the basic unit of
| information processing, so I agree there should be something
| more atomic inside.
| seesawtron wrote:
| That is an interesting line of thought. Cortex and non-
| cortical regions are somewhat different in terms of their
| cell types composition which could inherently support
| different computation and learning mechanisms.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Nice story, but actually it is superconductors that lurk
| inside, with absurdly high critical temperatures.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.05602
| janniks wrote:
| Oops -- now we have to rewrite all those Artificial Neural
| Network libraries!
| pvarangot wrote:
| So this article is saying something like: modern neuroscience
| thinks that the "storage" mechanism is based on connections but
| maybe there's more like "secondary memory" on each neuron that
| can also store "facts"?
|
| I can see the connection thing. It's like circle
| -> ball -> -- -> lightbulb white -> light _/
|
| Here circle and white come from a group of neurons firing when
| the electrical stimuly from the eye hits them and that particular
| group from a lot of lower level "concepts" fires the white and
| the circle.
|
| Is someone saying that maybe a single neuron can "store"
| something like "white"?
| [deleted]
| notanote wrote:
| I only see one claim backed by experiment: "The ferret-
| experiment shows that the measuring of--and then storage of--a
| maximally-simple experiential-fact (the duration of the
| interval between two simple events) occurs within a single huge
| cell (neuron) in the cerebellum. It also shows that subsequent
| single-spike input to this cell triggers the reading-out of
| this memory into a simple behavior: an appropriately-timed
| blink."
|
| The huge cell is a Purkinje cell. I don't remember much about
| neuroscience, so I hope someone else can elaborate.
|
| Later on the interview suggests that every single neuron could
| store megabytes of information, but this seems more like
| conjecture to me.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _16) Would mainstream neuroscientists raise their eyebrows at
| the idea that numbers are somehow stored inside cells and
| retrieved from inside cells?_
|
| > Most of them would think it's about the craziest, stupidest,
| and most implausible idea they ever heard suggested.
|
| Luckily, there are computer scientists!
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