Thread

Surprisingly complex waves reveal the brain's inner workings

251 points · 96 comments · ibobev

Loading the complete thread in the background. This saved snapshot is available now. Refresh

vatsachak · 1790797844 · focus · HN ↗
I wonder what the "waves" in LLMs are; The global firing patterns that can help us interpret what the weights are doing en-masse
1. tomrod · 1790798732 · focus · HN ↗
  I thought this research had already been done and published by Anthropic. <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language-model" rel="nofollow">https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
2. altruios · 1790800505 · focus · HN ↗
  Care to define 'waves' in this context?
  I suspect, if our conscious experience === the waves created by neuron's firing, that the hum of the GPU when running a LLM doesn't have the dynamic range to meaningfully talk about having a conscious experiences.
  But that's armchair conjecturing.
3. randomImmigrant · 1790809346 · focus · HN ↗
  Why would you assume waves with LLMs? What about the structure or function of an artificial neuron prompts you to hypothesize they generate continuous waves in a bunch of nested frequency ranges?
  1. peddling-brink · 1790827106 · focus · HN ↗
    > "waves"
    OP was postulating that there might be higher order patterns we can see arise out of underlying LLM mechanics.
    randomImmigrant · 1790828269 · focus · HN ↗
    But there is no LLM mechanics. You can certainly take measurements along the neural net and show a wave like pattern of activation. But no such wave can be measured in the hardware. An artificial neuron is really doing nothing to produce physical weave behavior that’s measurable.
    jibalt · 1790851465 · focus · HN ↗
    Just as the "neurons" are virtual, the "waves" would be virtual. They aren't talking about physical waves produced by the hardware. Likewise the LLM "mechanics" are virtual--it's nonsensical to say they don't exist.
    randomImmigrant · 1790865790 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah no. “Virtualizing” isn’t some math function that will automatically preserve dynamics after it is applied.
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790855921 · focus · HN ↗
    Brain waves are due to feedback paths and dynamics - oscillations etc, but LLM connectivity is far simpler. In an LLM there is a strict bottom-up one-way flow of information, with no looping. There is no way for a higher up layer to affect a lower down layer, whether directly or indirectly.
pessimizer · 1790798159 · focus · HN ↗
This is what Walter J. Freeman III* spent his career working on, surprised he wasn't mentioned. I used to be very obsessed with him.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Jackson_Freeman_III" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Jackson_Freeman_III
Nonlinear brain dynamics as macroscopic manifestation of underlying many-body field dynamics, <a href="https://arxiv.org/html/q-bio/0511037" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/html/q-bio/0511037
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070609235302/http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20070609235302/http://sulcus.ber...
-----
[*] No, not that guy; the son of that guy.
1. t23414321 · 1791072383 · focus · HN ↗
  Is it similar to magnetic fields on the Sun ?
dadjoker · 1790798642 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
ElijahLynn · 1790798684 · focus · HN ↗
Wow!!
“The work coming out is moving this from ‘Are they relevant?’ to ‘This is a major motif of how the cortex processes information,’” said Earl K. Miller(opens a new tab), a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
rdtsc · 1790798732 · focus · HN ↗
> Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain's Inner Workings
From my ignorant point of view I can't quite make sense of the title. Brain is probably the last organ one would be surprised to find complexity in. I can see "surprisingly complex wave reveal spleen inner workings" being a good title, like "wow, we though it was a dumb blood filter, but look what we found!" kind of a thing. But for the brain isn't the default assumption that has it complexity we haven't figure out yet.
1. teiferer · 1790800943 · focus · HN ↗
  > But for the brain isn't the default assumption that has it complexity we haven't figure out yet?
  I thought AGI, um I mean "super intelligence", is just around the corner, so we have essentially already cracked it, just needs some fine tuning? /s
  1. dang · 1790805484 · focus · HN ↗
    Could you please stop posting low-quality comments, such as snark, flamebait, and provocation? Your account has unfortunately been doing a ton of this lately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
    If you wouldn't mind reviewing <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
    teiferer · 1790838507 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks for taking care of this site and watching over posts not in line with the guidelines. I agree that I might have gone a bit too far lately and will try to improve. Starting by pausing for a week.
    I must say though that I'm a tad surprised that it was my posts in particular that got called out. I have been reading around a bunch earlier today and came across lots of posts arguably worse than mine. (Could this have to do with me having mentioned HN in a recent post?)
    Anyway, not an excuse, I should to some soul searching. Sorry.
    dang · 1790911247 · focus · HN ↗
    It's such a frequently asked question that, come to think of it, it probably belongs in the FAQ! The answer is (1) yes, there probably are lots of other comments breaking the guidelines much worse than yours were, and (2) no, the reason I responded to you but not them is nothing specific to you (such as your having recently said something about HN). Rather it's that I simply haven't seen those other posts.
    We don't see everything, and we can't moderate what we don't see. Actually, we don't even see 10% of what gets posted to HN; there's far too much. Also, we read the site in all kinds of random-access ways, so even when some of those other comments-that-deserve-to-be-moderated are proximate in the same thread, we won't necessarily know about them.
2. panabee · 1790801796 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
paimapi · 1790798924 · focus · HN ↗
Bit of a sensationalist title - EEG/iEEG measurements have led to worthwhile clinical outcomes but also are an avenue for bunk pseudosccience so it pays to be careful whenever you see the words 'brain waves' paired with some large claim.
More accurate, much less sexy title: Intracranial Recordings Uncover Spiral and Concentric Brain Waves During Memory Tasks" (study completed only on small cohorts of epilepsy patients performing constrained memory tasks).
No inner workings revealed or laid bare, just another piece of evidence contributing to a small part of the debate in cortical electrophysiological studies on whether or not some data measures can be discarded as the downstream, messy noise of the neurons firing or actual, high-fidelity signals of activity
1. teiferer · 1790800298 · focus · HN ↗
  Of course any science coming out that observes things that LLMs don't have is not going to find much excitement on HN. It would mean to face reality that LLMs are merely child toys compared to the real deal which is the human brain.
  1. paimapi · 1790800595 · focus · HN ↗
    I think skepticism is healthy for the vast majority of sensationalized titles especially those coming from corporate entities. You'll very often find me in those OAI/Anthrop threads being very critical of their claims.
    I like applying that same rigor to articles like this one. This is not a revolutionary discovery, it is a possible, un-replicated new avenue that could become revolutionary with enough of an evidence base. But there are many dozens of these same kinds of discoveries published all the time often leading to dead-ends (which is actually great since that's another rabbit hole you no longer have to chase - here's to null findings!)
    In the same way you shouldn't accept PR regurgitated by so-called 'independent' journals when they come from corporate and government institutions, the same rigor should be applied to PR from universities seeking grants
  2. dang · 1790805355 · focus · HN ↗
    "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  3. jibalt · 1790851321 · focus · HN ↗
    People here seem pretty excited by this (more than it warrants, IMO).
    That week off and soul searching is definitely warranted.
2. Animats · 1790803315 · focus · HN ↗
  And still all slow stuff, 4 to 12 Hz. There must be something in the brain that clocks faster, but nobody seems to have found it yet.
  1. LoganDark · 1790803455 · focus · HN ↗
    I wouldn't be so sure that the brain necessarily clocks faster than that. I think it's more likely that faster chains of thought are defined by the flow of the wave rather than its frequency.
  2. mr_toad · 1790806152 · focus · HN ↗
    Seems to be pretty much in line with human reaction times?
  3. TeMPOraL · 1790807710 · focus · HN ↗
    It's way out of my area of expertise, but my suspicion is that all these 4-12 Hz waves bouncing around in a 3D structure may be interfering to produce signals that tick much faster, and some functionality of the brain is clocked on that.
    There's this thing called "scissor effect", where when you have two wavefronts colliding at an angle, you get an apparent wave that moves much faster than either of the input waves - if you do that with light, you can trivially exceed the speed of light. Now this isn't an information-carrying wave, but I believe you can still use this phenomenon as a "virtual clock", to synchronize a bunch of independent receivers to act on a frequency faster than the real, interfering clock signals.
    Well, that, or the brain is just such a mess that it acts as a spread-spectrum source and none of the high frequencies are above the noise floor.
    EDIT: and of course a little background research after writing this comment revealed it's already settled (through more invasive probing) that the human brain has elements operating in kilohertz range - the mystery isn't whether this happens, but how it adds up to cognition and consciousness.
  4. ACCount39 · 1790809153 · focus · HN ↗
    The brain doesn't seem to be fully synchronous. It doesn't have to have a faster "clock tree" if a lot of the low timescale activity is inherently async.
    It's not at all how humans build computational devices. But humans run digital signals at gigahertz rates and do intelligent design. Nature doesn't do either.
    I suspect that there are numerous advantages to silicon computation that biological neurons can't touch, but the brain is no slouch either - it was optimized for millions of years to be good for what it does. It's very good at what it does - sometimes because of, and sometimes despite its architecture.
    It's honestly amazing that the brain even works as well as it does, given how slow neurons are. I suspect that distributed population coding that seems to be endemic in neural networks can also serve as a workaround for neurons being unreliable, slow to recover and subject to fatigue.
    randomImmigrant · 1790827542 · focus · HN ↗
    > if a lot of the low timescale activity is inherently async.
    But it isn’t. Every neuron runs the core circadian transcription-translation feedback oscillations. Every neuron is on a roughly 24 hour loop, synchronized by the master circadian oscillator, a clump of about 20k cells called the Suprachiasmatic nucleus.
    The faster oscillations nest under that one, including the oscillations in firing rates.
    Jet lag is when the synchrony and phase hierarchy breaks. Shift work does the same.
    Now the brain doesn’t have a fast global clock like a chip. But that’s very much part of the evolutionary design. It’s not very energy efficient to have a fast global clock. And in a system like the brain, what purpose would it serve? In the brain, timing is information. You want the slow arrival of some signal to be slow so you can actually assign some meaning to it. A fast global clock would throw those gaps away.
    In fact, there are neuromorphic and RACE logic chips that dump the global clock for the same efficiency reasons.
    ACCount39 · 1790839987 · focus · HN ↗
    Being clocked by the day-night cycle is very much not low timescale.
    randomImmigrant · 1790865718 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes. But you don’t want synchrony in low timescale in a system like the brain, where synchrony in long time scales is constantly being negotiated between the cells, and kept in sync with the environment.
  5. rhyperior · 1790816297 · focus · HN ↗
    What makes you think that a clock-timing analogy even applies to brains doing work?
  6. randomImmigrant · 1790827983 · focus · HN ↗
    Gamma waves go up to 100 Hz.
    But speed isn’t all that useful, here. Neuronal activity is slow, but you can cancel it out, and control it mid firing. You have subdendritic and sub-axonal processing, so you can shoot off a signal, then tamp it down as it’s traveling, or ramp it up for some stretches of your axon, etc. Getting message fastest from cell A to cell B isn’t what we’ve needed. Rather, you get rich information that can have all kinds of impacts on cells along the way.
  7. b00ty4breakfast · 1790832627 · focus · HN ↗
    what makes you think that brains are comparable to man-made computers in this regard?
3. plastic-enjoyer · 1790805520 · focus · HN ↗
  >also are an avenue for bunk pseudosccience so it pays to be careful whenever you see the words 'brain waves' paired with some large claim.
  What makes you make such an accusation?
  1. Scrapemist · 1790806966 · focus · HN ↗
    His brain waves
  2. paimapi · 1790807404 · focus · HN ↗
    this was the first web search result for brain wave pseudoscience:
    <a href="https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/brain-wave-pseudoscience/" rel="nofollow">https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/brain-wave-pseudoscience/
  3. jibalt · 1790850407 · focus · HN ↗
    Numerous well known facts.
4. bbor · 1790808087 · focus · HN ↗
  Idk… I follow EEG science pretty closely now that the BCI industry is exploding post-DL, and this seems like a very accurate title.
  Inner workings are indeed being uncovered; what would that look like, if not this…? We’re not going to find, like, a blueprint hidden in there somewhere with marginalia from god. Spiral and concentric brainwaves sound pretty damn compelling and specific, not just a tweak of our definition of noise in this data.
  A better piece of evidence is that this is quanta. I’ve literally never seen a sensationalist or inaccurate or less than fascinating article make it to their site. I’m gonna need a ton more critique from randos on HN to seriously consider that this might be the first.
  BTW, hug your loved ones, y’all. EEG has been mostly bunk applications for consumers/non-scientists for years, like “biofeedback” therapy, but we are now extremely likely to see the first polygraph that actually works in our lifetimes, not to mention all the other crazy shit. Imagine how seriously things change when every government can load a truth-telling helmet into every cop car :(
  On the upside it’ll make for some wild HCI someday, perhaps, if we make it that far. The scene from Westworld S04 (my favorite piece of lost media) with Dolores creating a 3d narrative world with words and gestures that matches what she’s envisioning comes to mind, for one thing… the dream.
  1. cpill · 1790821104 · focus · HN ↗
    wow, they made a forth session of West world...?
5. pedalpete · 1790812234 · focus · HN ↗
  I work in neurotech and specifically with EEG, some would find it surprising that I 100% agree with this take.
  When we understood the world of fluid-dynamics, we looked at the body as blood going through a pump delivering materials (oxygen, minerals, etc) to different parts of the body. We though to ourselves "we know how this works!".
  Then we discovered electricity, slapped our collective foreheads and said "oh! It's electrical!" now I get it.
  We still don't.
  Let's learn what we can from what we can and use this knowledge to our benefit, but let's not assume we understand the underlying mechanisms just because we can find correlations.
  1. randomImmigrant · 1790827297 · focus · HN ↗
    Well put!
    We’re finding out though that the brain is, yes, a fluid dynamic system, an electromagnetic system (though we know way less about the magnetism that we’d like), AND a mechanical system. Wonder how many more ands we’d have to add by the time we figure it out.
  2. TeMPOraL · 1790842838 · focus · HN ↗
    We were not wrong, though. Major functional component of the body is the pump pushing around a fluid that distributes materials around the body. Electricity is another functional layer. And on top of the fluidic layer, it turned out many of the disributed material aren't inert building block, but chemical signals and machines, too.
    I think the main error is in people trying to explain a complex machine through one mode of "how it works". The second error is people trying to accuse other people of doing that.
    Today, anyone with half a brain and an ounce of interest could look at any of the large machines that operate in their environment - buses, trains, construction equipment - and quickly discover that such machines have fluids being pumped, air being pumped, mechanical linkages and electric circuits used for both power delivery and control, many or all of these things having - at a higher level - feedback loops designed in for autonomous control/self-balancing, and of course there's a whole economic and social layer on top, that's key to explaining why the machine works the way it does.
    Why wouldn't it be any different with the human body?
    pedalpete · 1790850734 · focus · HN ↗
    The point is not that these ideas were wrong, but that they were incomplete, yet were assumed to be complete.
    Anamon · 1791023660 · focus · HN ↗
    We're at the point of one such being mainstream-popular again.
    "I get it, the brain is just an LLM!"
aronaxe · 1790800244 · focus · HN ↗
Brain waves are to biological neural populations what large-scale, low-dimensional activation modes in the transformer’s residual stream are to an LLM.
1. tete · 1790856021 · focus · HN ↗
  No they are not. Stop comparing LLMs with brains. Even way before LLMs and the AI craze people realized that ANN (Artificial Neural Networks) are a bad bane and bad abstraction. At this point they are at best "inspired by", but partly also based on misunderstandings.
  Basically every new learning about how neurons and the brain works is increasing the distance between how neurons and "artificial neurons" work. There are so many ways in which they are different that I have to stop myself from giving examples, so basically google for it (or use an LLM if you must). The whole memory and computation part, the fact that there are many different types of neurons doing different things, the fact that so much stuff isn't still understood.
  And it's not like ANNs are per se changed or adapted to come any closer. A brain or neuron simulation is something very distinct from an artificial neuron.
  Yes, it's good enough to emulate something learning, it's probably even an excellent choice to build an AGI and despite LLMs being far from it I think that ANNs will be the right choice, simply because they are a simple basic piece, but they are still not what a biological neuron is. It's simply a different thing.
  Also just to be clear: That doesn't mean to say that an artificial biological neuron cannot be made or that we will not be using that or anything like that or that neurons are somehow magical and cannot possibly be replicated or anything like that.
  It's just LLMs, ANNs and biological neurons, brains etc. are widely different. Just like a stick figure, a doll or a (current day) robot, an NPC, a chatbot, etc. might be a usable "abstraction" of a human, but is very dissimilar nevertheless. Making artificial and biological neurons equivalent is like pretending your phone has feelings and a bad day, maybe needs to rest, because some app malfunctions. Maybe letting it sit for a while will make things work again, but it's not because it overcame its bad day.
  1. aronaxe · 1791056861 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
altairprime · 1790802537 · focus · HN ↗
[delayed]
randomImmigrant · 1790804308 · focus · HN ↗
For context, the debate in the field has been whether these are epiphenomena of the actual neuronal activity, or a meaningful driver of further activity.
I don’t think these studies quite rest the case. As Buzsaki comments in the article, the action is in the cells to create these waves. Do the waves themselves get measured and impact what happens next? The issue at hand is: synaptic currents are stronger and we know neurons respond to them. The wave behavior is in the extracellular fluid as well, and that part we have evidence neurons don’t respond much to.
That said, thing the article doesn’t talk about is astrocytes. Especially in the cortex, most synapses are tripartite. There’s an astrocytic end foot that sheathes the synapse and regulates how much of the bulk extracellular space has access to the synapse. And one astrocyte can touch thousands of synapses and in humans, hundreds of thousands. They also form a syncitium, through gap junctions/electrical synapses.
Do astrocytes respond to the extracellular wave behavior, which potentially changes the extent and behavior of the syncitium, and thus impact the neurons they touch?
That’s still an open question but that’s what I’d be interested to find out more about.
1. monideas · 1790834913 · focus · HN ↗
  Reminds me of when non-coding DNA was thought to be useless, calling it “Junk DNA”, and then it was realized it played a role in regulating gene expression.
  1. madaxe_again · 1790838243 · focus · HN ↗
    Reminds me of when we thought proteins were the be all and end all and this goopy stuff bundled up in chromosones was just some useless goop.
    There's a pattern which we see again and again in nature, where incredibly complex structures and behaviours emerge from interference and feedback patterns between waves - from deciding whether your toenails grow on your face or your feet to the formation of planets, from ant colony foraging and spacing to whether it will rain on Tuesday.
    I suspect elements of cognition are similar.
  2. bcjdjsndon · 1790844350 · focus · HN ↗
    Does make me worry about the competence of scientists that they make that mistake.
    coldtea · 1790845460 · focus · HN ↗
    Given that this was the scientific consensus, "the competence of scientists that they make that mistake" compared to whom? Laymen? I'd still bet on the scientists.
    If there's a real concern is not about "the competence of scientists that they make that mistake", but about the certainty of our grasp of the scientific facts in general.
    It's not that those scientists were incompetent.
    It's more like "science in general doesn't know as much as solidly as we'd like to think" about the matter.
    eviks · 1790847873 · focus · HN ↗
    Compared to competent scientists
    jibalt · 1790850037 · focus · HN ↗
    "the competence of scientists compared to competent scientists" is incoherent and, well, incompetent at multiple levels in this context.
    eviks · 1790851684 · focus · HN ↗
    Indeed, reading comprehension at some level is required for the competence to emerge! The competence of one group of scientists is compared to that of the another group of scientists. Feel free to point at your next stumbling block
    jibalt · 1790883451 · focus · HN ↗
    Yet more incompetence (and quite a case of projection) in the response ... as the GP made clear, and as was clearly my point, the context isn't about a comparison between different groups of scientists.
    I won't comment further on this foolishness.
    yourapostasy · 1790853874 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    HarHarVeryFunny · 1790857867 · focus · HN ↗
    Calling it a "mistake" vs just a lack of knowledge is a weird way of framing it. There was discussion of "junk DNA" (no referred to as non-coding DNA) for years - everyone realized it was an anomaly to be explained, but no-one knew the explanation. This comprises the vast majority (98%) of DNA - so clearly it was there for some reason.
  3. Kim_Bruning · 1790849348 · focus · HN ↗
    This is like calling the python in a flask app "junk html" ;-)
  4. randomImmigrant · 1790867046 · focus · HN ↗
    That was at least a relatively short lived belief. That glia, the other half of brain cells, got ignored and relegated to “support” for so long is, to my mind, the worse mistake: <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/these-cells-spark-electricity-in-the-brain-theyre-not-neurons-20231018/" rel="nofollow">https://www.quantamagazine.org/these-cells-spark-electricity...
    That said, science wouldn’t need to be self-correcting if it was always right.
    Science is like a group of people with lights of varying strength exploring a dense forest at night. We often mix up shadows and caves and rocks and animals and people… there’s a lot of room for misinterpretation. To demand otherwise, to demand some kind of mistake free march in good order as if we’re on a brightly lit field, is to ignore that we are… ingnorant.
2. HarHarVeryFunny · 1790858609 · focus · HN ↗
  Regardless of how these large scale coordinated dynamics arose, initially functional and selected for, or just epiphenomena (coupled oscillators?), it seems that they HAVE to have become functional (presumably longer range inter-region communication and sequencing) since timing does matter.
  If we assume that brain waves do have (have to have) some effect, then it seems most likely that the effect is either beneficial or detrimental compared to the alternative of uncorrelated brain activity, and therefore is being selected for or against, and as the production of millions of years of evolution, it seems the logical conclusion is that there is some functional benefit to it. The alternative is that the functional effect is merely benign, neither beneficial or detrimental, but this intuitively seems less likely.
  1. randomImmigrant · 1790866756 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m with you on finding it hard to think they’re just epiphenomena of coupled oscillators. And from the timing perspective and their spatial spread, I think it’s a solid hypothesis they actually contribute to the coupling.
    That actually happens in the narrow spatial scale of ephaptic coupling already, where neighboring neurons can sense one another firing and get primed to fire, which helps with synchronization.
    Where there’s still debate is in these larger waves, which sweep through very diverse architectures.
    And again, part of the answer may be to look at astrocytes, since they can actually tune their syncitium, and some at least can give out glutamate as a signal, and are electrically active: <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/these-cells-spark-electricity-in-the-brain-theyre-not-neurons-20231018/" rel="nofollow">https://www.quantamagazine.org/these-cells-spark-electricity...
brcmthrowaway · 1790806526 · focus · HN ↗
Is there any evidence the brain is a quantum device?
1. lolakutty · 1790823572 · focus · HN ↗
  It could be and more. Nature is not constrained by what human beings know at any point in time.
2. dvt · 1790834833 · focus · HN ↗
  Penrose and Hameroff have been arguing this for decades (see Orch OR[1]). Their arguments are interesting, but certainly not open and shut.
  [1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...
  1. jibalt · 1790851106 · focus · HN ↗
    They are widely considered by neuroscientists to be shut. P&H keep showing up at the [Towards a] Science of Consciousness conferences which long ago devolved into a gathering of crackpots, but no one else takes them seriously.
3. jibalt · 1790851142 · focus · HN ↗
  No, all the evidence is to the contrary.
4. mrguyorama · 1790885651 · focus · HN ↗
  What does that even mean to you?
  The brain is a quantum device in that it's full of stuff and all stuff is somewhat "quantum".
  Are you asking whether quantum mechanics is required for the human brain? We don't really have any way to know right now. We just don't understand the brain well enough to make any sort of conclusion about that.
  My bet is that consciousness will be computable, mostly because I expect it will be radically less "magical" than everyone wanted it to be: I believe that we are mostly a story we tell ourselves and most of your lived experience is basically a "Simulate other hairless apes" network that got too big for its britches. I think we will quantify the portion of the brain that does the actual work of "Consciousness" and it will be a sadly small portion.
  I think that means consciousness could be classical, but that doesn't preclude a consciousness that is dependent on some quantum phenomenon from also existing.
breckinloggins · 1790806727 · focus · HN ↗
My hypothesis:
Sentience / consciousness is “hosted by” or “seated in” structured EM fields. Neurons are just the mechanism.
I’ve not yet thought of a way to falsify this hypothesis, but I continue to think there’s something to this framing.
One reason I like it is that it doesn’t completely succumb to total dualism. Also it doesn’t say WHY this would be the case, or HOW. It just says “that thing you call experience? That’s a special kind of structured EM field configuration.”
1. uniqueusername7 · 1790807233 · focus · HN ↗
  What would you expect to happen of a brain were "unfolded" in some complicated way? Surely that would significantly change any structure in the em field. This hypothesis doesn't sound immediately wrong to me like many other non-materialist/non-physicalist ideas, but it does sound like a suspiciously convenient way of excluding non-biological entities from ever possibly having a human like experience.
  1. breckinloggins · 1790807496 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t think it would exclude non biological entities. If neurons are simply the way for such a structured field to be generated, sustained, and modulated, then presumably any biological physical apparatus that produced “that type of field” would produce experience.
    Or a hybrid. We already know there’s a long range binding problem in neuroscience: how do physically separated neuron assemblies construct what we report as a gestalt experience.
    This is a non spooky answer that also points to possible applications like cybernetic EM field modulators.
    All of this is complete fantasy, of course, but the hypothesis at least has the virtue of not getting too far over its skis.
  2. fooker · 1790808857 · focus · HN ↗
    An unfolded brain works fine.
    Joel_Mckay · 1790825684 · focus · HN ↗
    There are complex proximity interactions, the Robert Sapolsky biology course introduces the subject well (guest lecture by Nathan Woodling.) Best of luck =3
    <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqeYp3nxIYpF7dW7qK8OvLsVomHrnYNjD" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqeYp3nxIYpF7dW7qK8Ov...
    fooker · 1790825979 · focus · HN ↗
    Neat, thanks!
    fouc · 1790867491 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    fooker · 1790871077 · focus · HN ↗
    Brains are surprisingly resilient. There are documented cases of people losing half their brain and living seemingly normal lives afterwards.
    fouc · 1790880677 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
  3. nullbio · 1790849619 · focus · HN ↗
    Presumably the network would learn to reconfigure itself to compensate.
2. fooker · 1790808043 · focus · HN ↗
  One of the requirements for a random thought to be an hypothesis is that it has to be falsifiable with some kind of an experiment.
  What would falsify this?
  You can seamlessly replace EM in your paragraph with something quantum and it'd still be sort of a reasonable thought.
  1. TeMPOraL · 1790808686 · focus · HN ↗
    Well, GP would have to define "EM fields" a little more precisely, in which case for a subset of such definitions, there would be some experiments possible - strong enough EM fields, or EM fields calibrated to specific frequencies, would then wipe out consciousness (possibly unrecoverably) without seemingly damaging the physical substrate of the brain.
    fooker · 1790808963 · focus · HN ↗
    This would finally validate the tinfoil hats! :)
    To be fair, I have a room that is a bit of a faraday cage (almost no 5g and really atrocious wifi) and I get much better sleep there than other rooms.
    nullbio · 1790849762 · focus · HN ↗
    It'd need to be calibrated to a specific frequency, likely some sort of resonant frequency of the cells or their machinery. Someone should run an experiment over the entire frequency band to see what happens.
3. evilduck · 1790808051 · focus · HN ↗
  There are things like magnetic stimulation of the brain, but there's no EM-field equivalent to Propofol.
4. jibalt · 1790850521 · focus · HN ↗
  Such a completely baseless speculation doesn't even warrant being called a hypothesis.
shevy-java · 1790809578 · focus · HN ↗
Now do Beavis and Butthead.
cfloyd · 1790810918 · focus · HN ↗
Stopped reading here when I recognized the slop “The work coming out is moving this from ‘Are they relevant?’ to ‘This is a major motif of how the cortex processes information,’”
2001zhaozhao · 1790811564 · focus · HN ↗
I think there will be a lot to be learned mapping exactly how brainwaves travel when performing specific tasks.
Maybe they should recruit experienced meditators who can corroborate the measurements with self-reports, then we would start to have a relatively confident map between brain physiology and psychology.
tholman · 1790814548 · focus · HN ↗
I know it's anecdotal and irrelevant to the real science, but whenever neuroscience comes up, I think about the Exhalation short story Ted Chian, about a civilization with brains that rely on air pressure, and a deep explanation of these alien brains and at the same time made me appreciate that we also still know so little about our own, they may as well be the same.
ghm2180 · 1790832784 · focus · HN ↗
> If you’re paying attention to what you are looking at, signals are traveling backward from receptors in your eyes to the visual cortex, and then forward into the rest of the brain via the wave to form a memory.
has someone used muse2 to measure there brain waves are indeed some how different on days/hours when tehy are focused?
Let me explain. I have ADHD, I am on medication. I read an alternate hypothesis to stimulant based treatment of how attention networks don't necessarily change with intake of traditional stimulants[1]; this is also something i have experienced.
Personally, medication helps me keep certain negative thoughts and resistance to doing things, but it does not help with longer arc change in executive functioning like planning or strategy. It just removes some barriers to focus on _a_ task, whatever is in front of me and I can do it. The only thing that really worked for executive function improvemement is meditation for 45 mins a day. I believe that also puts the brain waves in a different state. Which is why I've been interested in brain activity tracking and why this article is interesting too.
[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/science/adhd-attention-motivation.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/science/adhd-attention-mo...
1. davzie · 1790842559 · focus · HN ↗
  Do you do 45 minutes in one sitting? I am doing 25 minutes a day in one sitting right now.
  1. ghm2180 · 1790861383 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes its because it takes me a long time to sustain attention. It was never easy, but then I learned how to in a 10 day vipassana camp to sustain for that long to be able to get to a state where i could focus on my breath and do the meditation.
2. bcjdjsndon · 1790844798 · focus · HN ↗
  > Personally, medication helps me keep certain negative thoughts and resistance to doing things, but it does not help with longer arc change in executive functioning like planning or strategy. It just removes some barriers to focus on _a_ task, whatever is in front of me and I can do it. The only thing that really worked for executive function improvemement is meditation for 45 mins a day. I believe that also puts the brain waves in a different state. Which is why I've been interested in brain activity tracking and why this article is interesting too.
  What are your actual disabilities from ADHD? You mentioned focus, but I was confused by the executive function part
  1. ghm2180 · 1790862589 · focus · HN ↗
    Executive functioning has to do with making decisions that requires planning on long range tasks and sticking to the plan and then carrying the tasks of it out.
    There are certain things with ADHD that mess with executive functioning for me e.g. focusing on short term rewards rather than longer term outcomes, more active DMN(default mode network) i.e. the part that makes you worry about past or the future, memory encoding problems(i.e. how things go from short term memory to long term memory) etc.
    Technically speaking, executive functions are roughly divide as: - nonverbal working memory. - internalization of speech (verbal working memory). - self-regulation of affect/motivation/arousal. - reconstitution (planning and generativity).
3. _ink_ · 1790854111 · focus · HN ↗
  If you feel comfortable with sharing, I'd be interested in what medis you are on / work for you best.
  1. ghm2180 · 1790861264 · focus · HN ↗
    No problem in sharing, its vipassana meditation
MoraliaApp · 1790847196 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
pbodyvstheworld · 1790854063 · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
doodlebugging · 1790859888 · focus · HN ↗
OT - This is pretty interesting research in understanding the flow of information through the brain. The correlation with similar research using mice appears to confirm these flow modes.
My thoughts on reading this article were not about how the information or electricity flows while the brain is engaged but more about whether this may help understand the origin of and the sensations associated with migraine or cluster migraine type headaches. I have relatives who suffer from migraines and they are debilitating, very painful experiences. As a geophysicist I understand waves, frequencies, sample rates, array design, and lots of other things.
The research here took advantage of more dense arrays implanted in the brains of epileptics and allowed reconstruction of wavefields detected much as one would use a stationary seismic array in earthquake detection and signal propagation studies.
I am left wondering whether a migraine trigger could occur when brain wave amplitudes interfere constructively at specific synapses (?) causing the signal amplitudes which are normally well-handled to swamp the region where the migraine is triggered. In many cases, light is a trigger and sufferers need to get to a dark place and cover up while the headache reverberates. I guess I would love to understand how to help dampen the severity of the headaches so that they can return to normal function as quickly as possible.
In summary - are migraine headaches related to wavefield interference such that impinging waves from the sensory organs (eyes, ears, etc) form a high amplitude standing wave focused on the region where these waves would normally arrive out of phase with little or no interference and the standing wave generates a physical sensation of deep pain in the skull sometimes with visual auras preceding the migraine event.
Y'all are some pretty smart guys. Ignore this OT post. I was just thinking.
ghm2180 · 1790863374 · focus · HN ↗
Has anyone worked with <a href="https://shop.openbci.com/products/ultracortex-mark-iv?variant=23280741955" rel="nofollow">https://shop.openbci.com/products/ultracortex-mark-iv?varian...? If so could they share how easy/ergonomic it was to have this set up to move around the home and work with and record data?
markhahn · 1790869111 · focus · HN ↗
the problem is: do these waves affect a neuron's behavior?
eeg waveology faces the same problem as, for instance, Penrose and the quantum brain gang. there can be epiphenomena - they're not causal, but inconsequential side-effect.

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.