[HN Gopher] Some neurons are active when adding, others when sub... ___________________________________________________________________ Some neurons are active when adding, others when subtracting Author : gmays Score : 54 points Date : 2022-02-16 18:14 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.uni-bonn.de) (TXT) w3m dump (www.uni-bonn.de) | Taniwha wrote: | it's not surprising of course - if only because most addition and | subtraction involves small sets of disjoint memorized number | facts | air7 wrote: | I haven't read the article, but isn't such a statement | tautologically true? Because neurons exist in all abstraction | levels of the thought process, if you compare any two distinct | processes, you're bound to find (by the fact that they are | distinct) some neurons that fire during one and not the other. | floxy wrote: | What about adding a positive number to a negative number? | lorenzfx wrote: | The PI was also involved in an earlier study [1, 2], that found | "Jennifer Aniston neurons", i.e., neurons that get activated when | the proband gets shown an image of Jennifer Aniston, but not | activated when shown the image of another celebrity. | | It's probably not that surprising, that other cells are active | during other specific activities and inactive during others. | | Anyway, it's fun seeing my old institute featured on hn. | [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4210637/ | [2] https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037 | %2F0033-295X.117.1.297 | firebaze wrote: | This is only true for a large subset of people, I'd bet 80:20 on | :) | candlemas wrote: | I want to know what happens when you are asked to pick a random | number. How does the brain work that out? | asddubs wrote: | I read somewhere a long time ago that when asked to pick a | random number between 1 and 10, people are way more likely to | pick 7 than anything else | function_seven wrote: | I've confirmed this experimentally. (As in, I asked a bunch | of people to "pick a number from 1 to 10"). | | But that was a long time ago, and I wonder if the common | knowledge that '7' is the most popular would sway people to | avoid it. I know I do. I should re-run this. | | In any case, it's clear that 7 is the most random digit, | right? The other digits are either even or otherwise "nice". | 7 is chaotic and unpredictable. 7 sells loose cigarettes to | middle school kids. 7 will leave the shopping cart in the | middle of the parking lot. Of all the digits in [1-10], it's | 7 who'll more likely than not be the one who left the | bathroom stall without flushing. | irrational wrote: | It's easy to draw a shape with 3 (triangle), 4 (square), 5 | (pentagon or star shape), 6 (2 overlapping triangles), 8 (2 | overlapping squares), 9 (3 overlapping triangles), and 10 | (2 overlapping pentagons) sides; but a seven sided shape? | Screw that. | function_seven wrote: | You just reminded me of something from when I worked at a | pizza place. Most of the time we sold pizzas cut the | normal way. Either 6, 8, or 10 slices using a circular | cutter. The normal style you might have in your kitchen. | | But one Wednesday each month, we had a massive lunch | order for a local school. Hundreds of individually-boxed | slices, delivered just before 11:30. The slice box was | sized for a 1/7 slice of our extra large pizza. We had to | use a "wagon wheel" type slicer for those. It was a huge | stainless thing that must've cost a fortune. | | I always wondered why it was 7 slices and not 6 or 8. The | best theory I could come up with was that these slices | all had to be the exact same size; no variance from | sloppy cutting. And the only way to ensure that would be | to specify it as an odd number to make it impractical for | the normal cutter. | tobr wrote: | A pentagon is one of the hardest things to draw well. | irrational wrote: | Draw a five pointed triangle (use the golden ratio if you | can't do it by hand) and then connect the points. | Pentagon! | dkersten wrote: | > five pointed triangle | | :-) | irrational wrote: | Oh, right. In my mind a 5 pointed star is made up of 5 | triangles, each in a 1.618 ratio, so I mixed up star and | triangle in my mind. | derrasterpunkt wrote: | Your username fits you well, sir. | noobly wrote: | I guess there's more to the story of why 6 is afraid of 7.. | sorokod wrote: | When asked to "pick a number" or "pick a random number" why | should people avoid the popular 7 or 17 ? What property you | are expecting them to hit when you ask this question? | | Also: | | why was six afraid of seven? because seven ate nine | function_seven wrote: | Well when someone is asking me for a random digit, the | last thing I want to be is _predictable_! To avoid the | shame and embarrassment of being basic, I go with 2. Or | maybe 9. Depends on my mood. | sorokod wrote: | Maybe if you ask for an unpredictable number, you might | get different answers. | outworlder wrote: | That might explain why Data's lockout code in that particular | TNG episode has so many "7" on it :) | | One, seven, three, four, six, seven, three, two, one, four, | seven, six, Charlie, three, two, seven, eight, nine, seven, | seven, seven, six, four, three, Tango, seven, three, two, | Victor, seven, three, one, one, seven, eight, eight, eight, | seven, three, two, four, seven, six, seven, eight, nine, | seven, six, four, three, seven, six. Lock. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rERApU26PcA | polishdude20 wrote: | I wonder if it's a feeling like this: | | You feel like 1 - 5 are very familiar to you. You've known | those numbers the most out of all of them. So you'd rather | pick 5-10 which seem more spontaneous and mysterious. Your | balance mechanism kicks in and you want to choose something | that is in the middle. You choose seven because 7.5 is the | actual middle and hey, there's a 7 in that number so let's do | that. | 323 wrote: | It's well established that 17 is the most random number between | 1 and 20. | | https://www.livejournal.com/poll/?id=961998 | sorokod wrote: | Not very well. The brain evolved in environment that encourages | the assumption that events are dependent. The concept of | independent events is not natural to us. | thecoppinger wrote: | I imagine by finding a number with some sub-conscious relevance | in that moment, then convincing our conscious self that it's | random. | junon wrote: | I'm literally the furthest thing from a neuro expert but I | feel like we do this with a lot of things. Over-confidence is | a pretty on the nose example. | throwamon wrote: | This may indirectly answer your question: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tP-Ipsat90c | | TLDW: We don't pick numbers at random. At all. We're so bad at | it that you can make money off this fact. | kensai wrote: | Fascinating! I wonder if multiplication/division is just a | combination of these neurons or again some other. | JackFr wrote: | It's not. | | This is garbage research. Nine participants took part in a | study where they were prompted to do mental arithmetic adding | or subtracting numbers between 0-5 while wired up with ultra- | fine electrodes measuring the how frequently 585 individual | neurons fired while completeing the task. | | I presume at that point the data were mined for a publishable | result. What they came up with was that by selecting a very | small subset (~%5) of the neurons they measured they were able | to tease out a result that certain neurons 'encode addition or | subtraction'. | | Is this real? Maybe. It's in now way explanatory. It doesn't | offer any sort of model hypothesis or predictions worth | testing. It's really a waste of time. | 323 wrote: | Not that surprising. | | For humans, unlike for computers, adding and subtracting are | different concepts. Think about how most people would transform | "-3 + 7" into "7 - 3" and only then compute, because it's easier | to "reverse" the operation than work with negative numbers. | csee wrote: | Any way to see what's going on inside one of these neurons while | it's spiking for a particular calculation problem | pwdisswordfish9 wrote: | It would have been strange if brain activity looked exactly the | same while performing different tasks. | | I mean, for once we might actually have some evidence for | dualism. | heurisko wrote: | I wonder if it is also plausible that these neurons are not | showing as active for calculation purposes, but instead active as | they are triggering the human emotion to loss aversion. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion | 323 wrote: | Loss aversion has a bit of a reproducibility problem, as stated | even in your link. | | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00426-018-1013-8 | | https://osf.io/en9qj/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-02-16 23:00 UTC)