Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize

http://discovermagazine.com/2011/sep/18-your-brain-knows-lot-more-than-you-realize

by jamesbritt • 15 years ago

146 37 15 years ago

phunction• 15 years ago

Reading this article reminded me of an acid trip I had (thanks Steve Jobs), where I was completely surprised by how much was going on when the "filter" was removed and I felt as though I was able to look at what my subconscious was doing. I wrote a really long essay about it (unreleased), but I didn't feel all of it was relevant so I'll just summarize my thoughts here: I was pretty surprised at the depth of thoughts I could access when I tried LSD.

I was surprised at the speed of the processing: simple thoughts like "bike" would trigger an enormously long chain of associations and thoughts that would go all the way back to my childhood, and I would vividly recall pictures of my first bike, but even now when I try to think of it I have trouble recalling such vivid memories.

I'm not quite sure whether the LSD caused me to think more about things, or whether it simply removed a filter that otherwise would exist without the drug. Either way, I walked away from that trip thinking, "there's so much more going on up there than I realize."

rohit892• 15 years ago

Sounds like your essay is an interesting read. It would be nice if you released it.

cturner• 15 years ago

    even now when I try to think of it I have trouble
    recalling such vivid memories.

Are the youth memories part of what you captured to paper, and are you able to find an external way of verifying that they're authentic?

I have zero experience in this field and no education in related disciplines (other than CS :) ).

A theory about experiences such as from dreams - that it might feel like memory recall but actually be caused by stuff being written directly to the recall system at the time of recall.

By way of analogy, you used to be able to buy devices that plugged into floppy drives, and wrote magnetic signal directly to the reader head, without there being any actual movement or a real disk in there.

Continuing this (still entirely speculative) theory, after we wake up, a whole lot of internal correction rebuilds our knowledge map. This could explain why our memory of dreams fades as we wake up - that stuff we experienced wasn't a genuine experience and our brain has ways of knowing and chucking the junk.

felipemnoa2• 15 years ago

>>I'm not quite sure whether the LSD caused me to think more about things, or whether it simply removed a filter that otherwise would exist without the drug.

Alcohol puts some parts of your brain to sleep. Too much alcohol eventually starts killing brain neurons. LSD obviously causes some temporary changes in your brain.

coryl• 15 years ago

Well, almost exactly. The Japanese invented a method of sexing chicks known as vent sexing, by which experts could rapidly ascertain the sex of one-day-old hatchlings. Beginning in the 1930s, poultry breeders from around the world traveled to the Zen-Nippon Chick Sexing School in Japan to learn the technique.

The mystery was that no one could explain exactly how it was done. It was somehow based on very subtle visual cues, but the professional sexers could not say what those cues were. They would look at the chick’s rear (where the vent is) and simply seem to know the correct bin to throw it in.

And this is how the professionals taught the student sexers. The master would stand over the apprentice and watch. The student would pick up a chick, examine its rear, and toss it into one bin or the other. The master would give feedback: yes or no. After weeks on end of this activity, the student’s brain was trained to a masterful—albeit unconscious—level.

Huh? "Subtle visual cues" that seemingly cannot be described, but can somehow be taught and passed on? I call bs.

Just googled it, here's the technique:

Vent sexing, also known simply as venting, involves literally squeezing the feces out of the chick, which opens up the chick's anal vent (called a cloaca) slightly, allowing the chicken sexer to see if the chick has a small "bump", which would indicate that the chick is a male. Some females have very small bumps, but rarely do they have the large bumps male chicks possess.

lucasjung• 15 years ago

You're clearly correct about vent sexing, but the story about the planes rings more true. It reminded me of a study that shows that car enthusiasts and bird watchers access the area of the brain normally used for facial recognition when identifying cars and birds, respectively[1]. I would expect that plane enthusiasts learn to identify planes much in the same way that car or bird enthusiasts do.

I think another factor is almost certainly sound. The study I just cited dealt with photographs, but the plane watchers in the story would also have been able to hear the sounds of the planes. There are certain models of aircraft I can identify by the sounds of their engines alone because I have been around (or in) them so much. However, to most people they just sound like "jet noise" or "prop noise." Even though I can tell the difference, I would have a hard time explaining it because the vocabulary we have for describing sounds is not nearly as complete as the vocabulary we have for describing images (or at least my vocabulary is that way).

1: http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/courses/concepts/...

bane• 15 years ago

"Huh? "Subtle visual cues" that seemingly cannot be described, but can somehow be taught and passed on? I call bs."

I'm still on the fence. Years ago I rented a room in my house to an immigrant from South Korea who got his work visa (and later his green card) because he could sex chickens and the local farmers couldn't get anybody local who knew how to do it. He got great pay, and relatively easy work hours since as the taskers became tired, their error rate went up. He worked with several other sexers who were all either from South Korea or Japan.

He could never quite explain how he did it, but he did teach a few Americans at the poultry plant how to do it via the technique described in the article before moving on to some different trades.

hrktb• 15 years ago

I saw a documentary on this a few years ago. The visual cues can be very subtle, and they do the sorting at insane speeds. The chick is litteraly flighing to one bin or the other, and just stops a fragment of a second in front of the guy. This, with an error rate ridiculously low (like one in a few thousands or something like that).

I believe the operator really doesn't know how he parses the information, and at these speed and error rates it must be something more than seeing bumps or not.

kahawe2• 15 years ago

I would say it is just a different way of teaching and probably also a way of creating an opportune niche, at least for some time. Every student would eventually figure it out and be able to differentiate between the two and I am sure they would have been able to describe the difference if they actually tried, just were not willing to and the more polite and unproblematic way of saying "no" would be to say "you cannot describe it, you can only learn it at that one place in Japan".

felipemnoa2• 15 years ago

>>involves literally squeezing the feces out of the chick

Could it be that this method would not be efficient, economical?

I remember an anecdotal story of how, in the old days, the great players of chess could tell you if the move just made was good or not but could not explain why. They somehow just knew.

colonelxc2• 15 years ago

The story about the chickens and planes was fascinating. In those cases, there obviously is something that the brain can detect that differentiates the different sets, yet is something so subtle that the conscious mind cannot readily identify it.

I'd be interested to hear if "muscle memory" like this is used in machine learning/AI type situations for things such as evaluating and tuning randomly created classifiers to identify objects, or respond to stimuli. If so, we could extract those "memories" from the computer to identify exactly what it ends up using to classify different objects, to show us the subtle differences.

extension• 15 years ago

I'm awfully skeptical that there is some part of the mind called "consciousness" that is distinct from all these other "unconscious" things. I suspect that what we think of as conscious thought is just a frankenstein of these same little faculties, that just happen to have control of your mouth. The sensation of unity and free will is just that: a sensation, nothing more. I'm not even sure we would claim to have the sensation if we didn't learn about it from our culture.

The story about the judge is great evidence of this. He knows what an injury is, and all his senses tell him he is injured, but somehow he still can't know that he is injured. Or at least, he behaves like he can't know it. The conscious/unconscious model of the mind just can't reconcile this.

maeon3• 15 years ago

The words "Conscious" and "unconscious" to describe thought states is like trying to cram an array of ints into a boolean. I always saw my mind as a collection of states ranging from "Front and center, obvious when I'm wide awake" to "mysterious process I cannot control". Like night time brain optimization strategies, night time breathing, squeeze-loosening process to get the small intestine to flow, etc.

We need a better resolution picture of "Conscious" and "Unconscious".

tqgupta• 15 years ago

http://www.quora.com/What-is-consciousness

irrationalfab• 15 years ago

I (try to) use this process to learn efficiently.

When I want to understand a complex topic (e.g. back end development), I simply read every now and then articles and posts beyond my comprehension. And I do it quickly. When I commit to learn the topic, I usually find that 90% of the work is already done. Is really like somebody else was processing all the information.

I think that this is a very powerful process to boost knowledge. But it also has significative drawbacks. It tend to be a far less social person when I saturate my subconscious. I also noticed, that my brain tends to discard little details. For example sometimes I can't remember what I eat at lunch.

AS a side note, I also noticed that I can bump myself out this learning mode if I don't touch a computer for the whole day. I do it on saturdays and sundays and start the next week feeling more productive. On the other hand if I don't do it for a couple of weeks I tend to feel exhausted.

Anybody else has similar experiences? Tips to share?

colonelxc2• 15 years ago

Hmmm, I hadn't thought about the social aspect before. Now that I think of it, I do sometimes have a hard time being social after being deep into some complicated problem.

ajuc• 15 years ago

I'm reading books different way than people I know. I'm skipping many fragments, I think I read maybe 10% of the whole text. This applies to fiction and technical books as well.

I'm doing this automatically, without thinking about it, some time ago I've discovered this, when at 2nd reading of the book I've stumbled at a fragment that made my understanding of the whole story "reevaluate" :) Somehow I've missed the fragment before, and the whole book made less sense.

I've tried to understand how my brain decides what to skip, and the heuristic is sth like this - read all things that starts with "-" (dialogs are the most important), beginning of the paragraphs, and the places that have many whitespaces, skip most of the other text, if you don't know what you are reading about - think for a while to deduce what's going on, if you don't know - go back and read more. That's not the whole heuristic, but that's what I can easily notice.

Especially the skill to "wait for a few pages to see if something you don't know yet will explain by itself, or can be deduced from what you know" is usefull. That way I read faster than most people I know, and I'm good at quickly learning material for exams (but without using the information I quickly forget what I've read. I even don't remember sometimes if I've read this book at all - mostly happens with fantasy books - they are all similiar :) ).

I'm also very bad at remembering names of real people and book heroes. I remember them "functionaly" - the one that is the uncle of the bad guy, etc.

orp2• 15 years ago

Interesting. I read about the same way, and I find that I'm using something very similar to your heuristic (looking for dialog signs, skip-reading long descriptions, etc.)

I call this 'reading for the plot'.

I also suffer from the same issue with remembering names. I wonder if the two phenomena are related.

csomar• 15 years ago

I'm using exactly the same technique but I have a completely different explanation. It's not someone else processing the data, it's you getting around the topic ins and outs.

Here is a long story if you want to know how I discovered this method.

When I was young (12 year old), I usually go to school to learn things. The process is simple. You start from the basics and you build upon this knowledge. In the end of the trimester, you accumulate knowledge which is pretty much limited to what teachers taught you. This is because you (I) don't go and read books or articles.

This knowledge quickly evaporates. I usually find myself learning and learning the same stuff again and reviewing it every-time I have an exam. It went like that and I succeeded every year.

When I was 17, I noticed an interesting fact: I'm quite good at programming. I have been doing it since 10 and reading anything that just comes in my way. Article about programming? Just read and think about it, discuss it on communities, read comments and contribute to coding forums.

Why I'm better/different than the other guys? Simply: I have a wider and deeper knowledge. When I read a programming book about Ruby On Rails, it doesn't take 30 days to write my first program. I can do it from the first hour. This is because I already know how to install a program, what a server is, what a HTTP request is, and have a good coding knowledge.

What you are doing is exactly this: You are broadening your spectrum of knowledge about that particular topic so when you read the said book, you get the gist out of it quickly and easily. No one/thing is doing the work for you, you are just using a different method.

For me, and the reason why I use this is because the book/resources are quite boring to read. They don't also cover lot of topics that I don't know about and reading them will make the topic feel like quite difficult to master and understand.

thret• 15 years ago

"Amazingly, this entire sequence is possible in less than four-tenths of a second; otherwise no one would ever hit a fastball. But even more surprising is that conscious awareness takes longer than that: about half a second. So the ball travels too rapidly for batters to be consciously aware of it."

I believe I've had this experience with some computer games - like tetris - where at some point it is too fast to really see what is going on despite the fact that you are still playing correctly.

hexagonc• 15 years ago

I remember this too. The result was usually that I'd start panicking once I realized that I couldn't consciously see where the blocks were going. This resulted in making mistakes and the blocks piling up quickly.

Too• 15 years ago

This is why gamers go berserk when they don't get a monitor with 100Hz refresh rate and a computer that can deliver 100fps. You can really tell the difference, even though studies show that your brain can only react in 20ms and your eyes can't see more than 25fps and blabla. Though i think it's quite well known that the 25fps myth has been busted long ago.

In the near future I guess we will have to live with 60fps, which still is quite good, since that's becoming the defacto standard refresh rate of tvs and monitors. But it's quite sad to see newer games trying to lower the frame rate just for more visual effects, Battlefield 3 for example only runs in 30FPS on consoles T_T

makmanalp• 15 years ago

Regarding consoles, it's pointless to have any more than 30fps because the controllers are stupid enough that reaction times are not the bottleneck.

sp332• 15 years ago

Actually 24 fps was chosen for film (way back when film was first standardized) because it was the lowest frame rate at which your eyes interpret the separate frames as smooth motion. 60 fps makes a huge difference over 30 fps in a movie.

jQueryIsAwesome• 15 years ago

I think it also happens with music, i play guitar and there is some riffs/solos that i can not remember with my brain, just with my fingers when the guitar is on my hands (so to speak).

jaylevitt• 15 years ago

In music there's also the interesting phenomenon that you and the other musicians are converging on an agreement about when the beat is - but sound travels only a foot per millisecond, so you can't possibly be hearing each other at the same time.

JoeAltmaier2• 15 years ago

To debug code, I read it. All of it. Without trying to process it. Sometimes the bugs jump out at me. Not the only way I debug but it has its place.

One consulting project involved 900 modules in 200 directories. I opened modules and skimmed through, and the bugs were just everywhere. (No, not false-positives. Once flagged, you can read carefully and prove the bug). I abandoned that source base as unredeemable and wrote a simple 10-module driver to replace it. (The customer rejected it, couldn't believe I could be right. They hired somebody else, the product was cancelled and recalled 9 months later).

kahawe2• 15 years ago

Not having a clear-structured and measured method doesn't equal to not having any method any relying purely on your subconscious. Sounds more like you were parsing through the code and lots of typical hints such cesspools usually have made it pretty clear very quickly.

JoeAltmaier2• 15 years ago

Perhaps. But I page through the code faster than I can register the details. Just the 'shape of it' gets through. Not really time for parsing. So some subconscious element must be in play.

ap22213• 15 years ago

This makes sense to me - and, I do this all the time, especially with games.

Recently, I took a three-day trip and wanted to zone out on a game, so I started playing a card game called 'spider solitaire', based on a friend's suggestion.

I had never played it before, and I found it to be very challenging with all the difficulty settings set to the maximum. And, at that difficulty level, I would quickly lose every attempt, and it was very frustrating.

But, by the third day, I found that I suddenly winning 15-20% of my attempts. Not statistical evidence by any means, but I was playing enough to definitely see a drastic change in success.

The funny thing was that I had no idea why I was suddenly winning. I didn't consciously change my playing methods. In fact, I 'felt' like I was just moving the cards around the same as I was before.

meric• 15 years ago

"With a little ingenuity, the British finally figured out how to successfully train new spotters: by trial-and-error feedback. A novice would hazard a guess and an expert would say yes or no. Eventually the novices became, like their mentors, vessels of the mysterious, ineffable expertise."

I think a lot of programmers here learned programming the same way too. Sitting in front of a compiler/interpreter, edit the code, try to compile and run the program. We will get a "yes or no", and if no, we repeat the procedure. Today, we can program without thinking consciously "will this code compile"; We just write it and a lot of the time, it compiles just fine. If we were to teach someone having trouble with programming however, the most useful advice we have is usually "You just need to spend more time with it".

billswift• 15 years ago

This is the reason government regulation never works as well as the regulators expect. It is the distinction between "tacit" knowledge and "explicit" knowledge. Most tacit knowledge is both local and non-verbal, some can be explained after the fact, like the chick sexing technique, but the verbal description itself isn't the useful part. And it is contained in the heads of the people actually doing the work so it is rarely, if ever, taken into proper account when formulating regulations.

For a really good explanation of the differences and the problems caused, read Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions. Hayek's Use of Knowledge in Society also discusses this, as do other books and essays, but Sowell's is more readable and his examples are closer to contemporary (it was written in the late 1970s and published in 1981).

syncopatience• 15 years ago

"To the extent that consciousness is useful, it is useful in small quantities, and for very particular kinds of tasks."

I wonder where programming falls on this?

nagel1234• 15 years ago

Problem solving can fall under both categories I think. If you have a lot of experience, eventually you begin to instinctively know what approach to take.

rohit892• 15 years ago

A few years back, one skill I realized that I have is that I can recognize people at a distance. I recognize them by the way they walk, the way they dress, their height and a couple of other cues that I can't really explain. As long as I have met the person a few times, I can pick them out even when they are in a crowd and it takes only a second or so for me to realize that I know the person. I may not remember the person immediately or place him, but I will be sure that I know him. I've had a few false positives here and there but never a false negative. This is in complete constrast to noticing things around me. I could walk past a shop multiple times and not see it, not realize that a picture has been moved, not realize that my friend got a new phone etc. All these things come as suprise for me, but never with people. I don't consciously observe or study how people walk, dress etc but apparently my brain processes it all. I can't explain it, I just know.

I read about a year back that a person's gait can be used for biometric identification (something which I wondered about because its seems to be the primary way I recognize people). The article linked to a pdf that showed an attempt at designing a system that recognized people from their gait. It was incredibly difficult and complicated because you needed a lot of sensors to measure, bunch of high level math to process and prone to failure because the gait would change if you were carrying a heavy bag, walking on a slippery floor etc. Yet, the brain is capable of doing all this and adjust to situations all in a fraction of a second. It was the first time that I was seriously blown away by how incredible the brain is.

Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize

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