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“What happened is that we began putting people in scanners that can measure their brain activity,” Buckner recalls now, “and Mother Nature shouted back at us.” When people were told to sit and do nothing, the PET scans showed a distinct surge of mental energy in some regions. The resting state turned out to be more active than the active state.
The odd blast of activity during the resting state would be observed in dozens of other studies using a similar control structure during this period. To this first generation of scientists using PET scans, the active rest state was viewed, in Buckner’s words, as “a confound, as troublesome.” A confound is an errant variable that prevents a scientist from doing a proper control study. It’s noise, mere interference getting in the way of the signal that science is looking for. Buckner and his colleagues noted the strange activity in a paper submitted in 1993, but almost as an afterthought, or an apology.
Past experiences shape what we see more than what we are looking at now -- ScienceDaily
Most past vision research, however, has been based on experiments wherein clear images were shown to subjects in perfect lighting, says He. The current study instead analyzed visual perception as subjects looked at black-and-white images degraded until they were difficult to recognize. Nineteen subjects were shown 33 such obscured "Mooney images" -- 17 of animals and 16 humanmade objects -- in a particular order. They viewed each obscured image six times, then a corresponding clear version once to achieve recognition, and then blurred images again six times after. Following the presentation of each blurred image, subjects were asked if they could name the object shown.
As the subjects sought to recognize images, the researchers "took pictures" of their brains every two seconds using functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI). The technology lights up with increased blood flow, which is known to happen as brain cells are turned on during a specific task. The team's 7 Tesla scanner offered a more than three-fold improvement in resolution over past studies using standard 3 Tesla scanners, for extremely precise fMRI-based measurement of vision-related nerve circuit activity patterns.
After seeing the clear version of each image, the study subjects were more than twice as likely to recognize what they were looking at when again shown the obscured version as they were of recognizing it before seeing the clear version. They had been "forced" to use a stored representation of clear images, called priors, to better recognize related, blurred versions, says He.
Newfound 'organ' had been missed by standard method for visualizing anatomy -- ScienceDaily
The researchers say that no one saw these spaces before because of the medical field's dependence on the examination of fixed tissue on microscope slides, believed to offer the most accurate view of biological reality. Scientists prepare tissue this examination by treating it with chemicals, slicing it thinly, and dying it to highlight key features. The "fixing" process makes vivid details of cells and structures, but drains away any fluid. The current research team found that the removal of fluid as slides are made causes the connective protein meshwork surrounding once fluid-filled compartments to pancake, like the floors of a collapsed building.
Self-generated vision inputs suppressed
That's because the brain can tell if visual motion is self-generated, canceling out information that would otherwise make us feel -- and act -- as if the world was whirling around us. It's an astonishing bit of neural computation -- one that Maimon and his team are attempting to decode in fruit flies. And the results of their most recent investigations, published in Cell on January 5, provide fresh insights into how the brain processes visual information to control behavior.
Each time you shift your gaze (and you do so several times a second), the brain sends a command to the eyes to move. But a copy of that command is issued internally to the brain's own visual system, as well.
This allows the brain to predict that it is about to receive a flood of visual information resulting from the body's own movement -- and to compensate for it by suppressing or enhancing the activity of particular neurons.
Twitter is polluted and getting worse
Even though I follow people I like and respect, there’s no way around seeing some of the crap that happens on Twitter. Even if you don’t use Twitter at all, you will have seen articles about people being harrassed and threatened. You will have noticed the pure toxic sludge that pours through the service. (A hypothetical “Dawn of the Idiocracy” prequel would feature Twitter prominently.)
And it’s worse than any blog comments system, because if you use it, anybody can put something in front of your face whether you want it or not.
Twitter is also wonderful, and I get so much value out of it. But it’s like 51% good and 49% bad.
I don’t see it getting any better. Hopefully it can hold the line at just-barely-worth-it. (But the recent changes to the timeline make that a little less likely.)
Even smart people start shouting amid Twitter's noise.
My feed (full of people I admire) is mostly just a loud, stupid, sad place. Basically: a mirror to the world we made that I don’t want to look into. The common way to refute my complaint is to say that I’m following the wrong people. I think I’m following the right people, I’m just seeing the worst side of them while they’re stuck in an inhospitable environment. It’s exasperating to be stuck in a stream.
Twitter too noisy
But what I’ve come to call Big Twitter is simply not a place for conversation any more.
I don’t like this change. I made friends — real friends — on Twitter when it was a place for conversation. I reconnected with people I had lost touch with. Whole new realms of knowledge were opened to me. I don’t want to foreclose on the possibility of further discovery, but the signal-to-noise ration is so bad now that I don’t think I could pick out the constructive and interesting voices from all the mean-spiritedness and incomprehension; and so few smart people now dare to use Twitter in the old open way.
Big Twitter was great — for a while. But now it’s over, and it’s time to move on. I’m just hoping that some smart people out there are learning from what went wrong and developing social networks that can strengthen the signal and silence the noise.
