[math] {bf Why~is~the~human~eye~so fucking~cool?[/math]

[math] {\bf Why~is~the~human~eye~so fucking~cool?[/math]

Direct detection of a single photon by humans
>nature.com/ncomms/2016/160719/ncomms12172/full/ncomms12172.html

Also, neuroscience general thread.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychophysics
nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

I read the paper, that's actually pretty neat.

photons don't really exist, they are just an abstract concept to represent action at the distance with particles

>I read the paper
that was quick, it's been out for less than half an our.

Received
15 January 2016

That is when the paper was submitted, not when it was actually published. Are you implying you reviewed the paper?

;)

I don't believe you.

Can somone explain the diagram?

Nerd are shooting lasers into undergad's eyes for science!

> This was achieved by implementing a combination of a psychophysics procedure with a quantum light source

> Psychophysics

It's the quantitative analysis of behavior.

> Psychophysics

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychophysics

>Psychophysics

>summer

>Psychophysics

its a shit name desu, should be names sensory psychology or something like that .

>neuroscience
>science

neuro-"scientists" are just failed EEs and ChEs who think they contribute something to the field
also a fucking pulse can have at least 5 different properties if you look closely enough


i'm getting sick of this scam called neuroscience

*tips autism*

Tell that to the doctor the next time you get a stroke or a brain tumor bro.

>neuroscience
Is that the field that showed that dead salmon has brainwaves and can't reproduce 90% of its studies?

How is that cold fusion working out for you?

This is hilarious, you're either trolling or seriously misinformed.

This study "measured" subjective experience, therefore it is unreliable.

Also, N=3. So reliable.

That is some shit tier criticism, guy. There are plenty of interesting points you can make to question the validity of the conclusions, but you decided to go with undergrad level comments that display a profound lack of understanding. I fucking hate this board sometimes.

It actually isn't.

Please enlighten me on how asking "How confident are you?" from three persons is valid science.

Because if you ask it over many hundreds of trials, you can use this information in combination with other metrics to fit psychometric and chronometric functions to the data, and thereby obtain a detection threshold for each participant.

bump

Underwear fetishism induced by bilaterally decreased cerebral blood flow in the temporo-occipital lobe.

Here's the abstract for the lazy.
>Despite investigations for over 70 years, the absolute limits of human vision have remained unclear. Rod cells respond to individual photons, yet whether a single-photon incident on the eye can be perceived by a human subject has remained a fundamental open question. Here we report that humans can detect a single-photon incident on the cornea with a probability significantly above chance. This was achieved by implementing a combination of a psychophysics procedure with a quantum light source that can generate single-photon states of light. We further discover that the probability of reporting a single photon is modulated by the presence of an earlier photon, suggesting a priming process that temporarily enhances the effective gain of the visual system on the timescale of seconds.

Sounds interesting.


On a sidenote, I was under the (probably incorrect) impression that the eye was actually somewhat crappy and we only had good vision because our brain filled in everything with all sorts of metadata about the real world.

>many hundreds of trials
>3

So apparently you don't even know what trials are. And you think you can criticise the method?

What was the illuminance (lx) of the dark chamber? Was it just a dimmed room with some photons coming from outside, or really a chamber of complete darkness?

Should rename the study:
"Subjective experiences of three white male students picked from the cafe"

... and not a single fuck was given.

There was a dim fixation light to ensure a constant eye position so that the photon could be placed on the part of the retina with maximal cone density. Meaning, the room was not completely free of other photons, but that simply adds noise to the data that is constant across the two experimental conditions.

So what were your main points?

I know that at least one of the reviewers was Christof Koch.

Front page

Sample sizes are a social construct

The dead salmon study basically said "if you don't make these corrections to your analyses, you can find statistically significant brain activity even in a dead salmon". A lot of neuroscientists didn't do those corrections at the time. And now neuroscience is plagued by the fMRI false positive rate scandal.

The problem with neuroscience is that neuroscientists don't really care about the data, numbers and analysis, they are more interested in the biological and psychological phenomena and fancy images that the MRI and fMRI generate. They enjoy doing their methods and forming new hypotheses, but they don't really know how to analyze the data. They do the same familiar analyzes all the time without questioning their reliability to get their results published fast.

...

You started off well, but then your post turned to shit.

I can understand the hate towards mass-produced psychological research and dubious fMRI interpretations, but I don't really understand hostility towards neuroscience in general, especially if done from physiological perspective. It's basically physical research conducted on really difficult systems, and the end goal is to model these systems mathematically. What makes this goal less scientific and noble?

Neuroscientific research needs a lot of time because the research subjects are hard to measure, and there are many factors adding noise to the real data. But we try our best to eliminate the noise and solve the true mechanisms behind it all. The best example is the squid neuron studied by Hodgkin and Huxley - they made measurements and created a valid mathematical model of action potentials, that is accurate even after 70 years. It has also sparked many other mathematical models of excitable cell membranes, including cardiac muscle cell membrane models.

University politics and funding systems force researchers to publish small and half-assed research. Neuroscientists also trust the analysis software, which are made by engineers and computer scientists. But apparently their software fail, and neuroscientists get all the blame.

Good post. One small remark:
>But apparently their software fail
I'd just like to point out that this problem isn't nearly as bad as people seem to think it is. For one, it only concerns *parametric* statistics for *cluster correction* in *some* of the software that is out there. Most people use non-parametric permutation testing nowadays, simply because of the lack of assumptions about the data that are needed. This whole thing is completely overdrawn.

Bump

You're confusing neuroscience with applied psychology. >nature.com/news/over-half-of-psychology-studies-fail-reproducibility-test-1.18248

Electrophysiological measurements can be replicated by anyone with the proper training. Measurements from animal models and isolated sensory cells / neurons are in my opinion easily replicated.

Behavioral research results always have huge standard deviations, unless the studied behavior is a reflex. With large enough sample sizes and trials, patterns can be still found.

I can't comment on human brain imaging, I haven't done it myself. I study insect vision and brain function through electrophysiology and quantifying reflexive behavior.