Ask a cognitive neuroscientist anything...

>cognitive neuroscientist
Are you a girl? Because it's always girls who are attracted to this field.

Post feet. :3

>is the standard nowadays
that's not what I asked about, 'today's standard'

>specifically its implementation of a particular parametric statistical test. Perumutation testing (which is non-parametric
pls elaborate

>overdrawn in the media.
an unfamiliar turn of phrase, (I am not familiar with the world over)

These drugs act on receptors that are particularly strongly expressed in the visual cortex. They amplify naturally occurring patterns of activity* that spread in accordance with the anatomical organization of the visual system. We see gemetric shapes because our brain is predisposed to see geometric shapes. The drugs only amplify this property.

*cell.com/abstract/S0896-6273(08)00767-8

Sorry to disappoint, I'm a guy. Besides, there are no girls on the internet.

>pls elaborate
AFNI underestimates the familiwise error rate in its parametric tests (e.g. ANOVA's). What else do you want to know?

>an unfamiliar turn of phrase,
Blown out of proportion. Exaggerated. That's what I meant to say.

It's probably true that some findings may have been below the threshold of significance with proper FWE estimation, but that doesn't 'invalidate thousands of fMRI' studies.

>AFNI underestimates the familiwise error rate in its parametric tests (e.g. ANOVA's). What else do you want to know?
lel, that's incomprehensible to me, evidently I want to know a lot more about statistics than can reasonably be conveyed in this medium

>Blown out of proportion. Exaggerated. That's what I meant to say.
"overblown"

>lel, that's incomprehensible to me, evidently I want to know a lot more about statistics than can reasonably be conveyed in this medium
My bad, I thought you wanted to know the details, not a simpler explanation. I'll try again.

A statistical test gives you the probability that data occurred by chance. Typically, people then set a threshold for this probability (conventionally at 0.05), below which an effect is considered significant, and the null hypothesis can be rejected. In fMRI, you often don't just run one test in isolation, but you run one test for every single voxel (the 3D equivalent of a pixel) in the entire brain. So the joint probability that some of the tests come out as significant, even in the absence of an actual effect, needs to be estimated accurately and corrected for. This joint probability called the family wise error (FWE). One particular software package to do fMRI analyses (AFNI) was shown to underestimate the FWE, and thus was more likely to yield significant results when no effects were actually present. Does that make sense?

>"overblown"
Thanks, that's what I meant.

what do you think of the findings of paper "At natural history of ashkenazi intelligence" by Cochrane et al.

web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jbiosocsci.pdf

which among other things:
-identifies several neurological genetic disorders far more common in ashkenazi jews than other populations like Tay-sachs disease
-identifies that these neurological diseases are all involved in the same metabolic pathway concerning the construction and maintenance of the fatty myelin sheath of nerve cells in the brain
-shows that being hetereozygous in the genes which cause these disorders has been found to be associated with higher IQ

Why is there such limited research into the genes involved in neurons and whether there are any alleles associated with high IQ?

i just got accepted for a cognitive science bachelor degree program. what am i in for? will i be able to get my degree despite being mediocre at mathematics?

also, what are consciousness and intelligence?

will we ever be able to simulate it?

why is the field of artificial intelligence trying to make hardware and software to do labor rather than trying to simulate consciousness? when can we expect to see machines that are capable of creativity?

what are your thoughts about the human-brain-project in europe?

how much do you earn per month?

Sounds interesting. I'd have to actually read it before I give an opinion on it.

>such limited research into the genes involved in neurons
There's actually a humongous amount of research on the genetics of neurons.

>and whether there are any alleles associated with high IQ
Because intelligence is a polygenic phenomenon, and arguably one of the most complex traits there are, if we can even consider it as one trait. It's also shaped heavily by environmental factors.

What's the science behind depression?

>what am i in for? will i be able to get my degree despite being mediocre at mathematics?
Depends on the curriculum of the particular program. There's probably some math involved, but most cognitive science programs don't heavily rely on it at the Bachelor level.

>what are your thoughts about the human-brain-project in europe?
I like that the flagship grant went to neuroscience, but I also feel that the money could have been spent better. There's not enough thought being put into algorithmic detail, and such a focus on anatomy that it approaches fetishism.

>how much do you earn per month?
2600 Euro's a month, after tax.

The other questions would require me to write several books on the hypotheses and conjectures that we're working with now, so I'll skip them.

why do we need to worry about holistic intelligence?

g factor is what matters. The fundamental skill needed for spotting and understanding relationships in our environment and hence modelling our environment and so manipulating our environment to our advantage is patern recognition, and that is what g factor tests.

deciding not to use g factor because of concerns like "what about musical or artistic talent" seems like quite a lazy shirking of responsibility.

generating einsteins and von-neumanns more frequently would be in humanity's best interests.

You're asking me to summarize an entire field. There's no way I can do that accurately within a reasonable amount of time.

>holistic intelligence
I've never even heard that term before.

>generating einsteins and von-neumanns more frequently would be in humanity's best interests.
>generating
That'd be eugenics.

thank you for your answers!

What's so bad about eugenics?

you can read a good youtube talk summarising the findings and methods and different parts of teh hypothesis and conclusions here given by steven pinker

youtube.com/watch?v=1GexZF5VIMU

That makes me think of another question.

How much politics is there on the scene in terms of evolutionary psychology being unpopular?

It's incredibly obvious and undeniable that genes influence behaviour , e.g. testosterone production and aggression, and so behaviour would be affected by selection pressures.

yet Steve jones has slammed evolutionary biology.

making parents aware that they're carriers for genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis is also eugenics

What nootropics do you recommend? Do you personally take any?

>How much politics is there on the scene in terms of evolutionary psychology being unpopular?
If you're talking about academia specifically, than not all that much, at least not in my immediate surroundings. Some evolutionary psychological research has been criticized for questionable methodology, but as a whole the approach of retrospective and cross-species prediction seems to work fine. I'm not particularly close to this field though, so I'm not very up to date on the literature.

Caffeine. I also use nicotine on a habitual basis, but I wouldn't recommend it.

>cognitive neuroscientist
what did you study in uni?

Bachelor in biology with a minor in neuroscience, a master in cognitive neuroscience, and a PhD in the cognitive neuroscience.

What do you think about visual snow? Both in a low level mechanical sense, and a more broad one.

I'm very curious about the notion of a dysfunction in multiple steps of a series of very simple fixed functioning filtering and mixing steps.

To be honest, I don't really know anything about it beyond what you can probably find in Wikipedia. It's a pretty understudied phenomenon.

cool bananas

I study molecular biology, still deciding what to pursue in the future, but your field sounds interesting as hell

What was your dissertation on and what are you currently interested in or researching?

I'd prefer not to give out the topic of my dissertation because it's available online.

I'm currently working on the neural mechanisms of transient attractor dynamics in cortex and its relation with bistable perception and decision making.

It is. The only information on it is the observation of hypermetabolism in the left lingual gyrus and right anterior cerebellum. The rest is inferred by a top down approach and deductive logic. Subject to great error.

I'll provide a few subjective aspects and maybe you'll have thoughts:
-Noise in the visual fields, obviously. It's not as though it's in your eye or an overlay though, it's often very much like a blanket or coating on the object you're seeing. Or a layer in the air. But never inside the eye. In my case light objects receive dark noise, dark objects receive lighter or colored noise.
-The grain isn't random. It's context based.
-I'll sometimes see either a flash of a single red dot, or splotches of blue on an object.
-Regular patterns, especially those that are grid-like, are nauseating and disorienting.
-Positive and negative afterimages are exaggerated.
-Under certain lighting (a specific type of fluorescent, or high pressure sodium lights) I'll see trails off of objects regardless of their color, or yellow afterimages trailing off everything.
-On bright, monochromatic surfaces, or if I focus on it, I'll see a spinning vortex-like pattern. The sky will reliably make this visible, it's only in the fovea part of the visual processing chain. It's not actually rotating, but the structure has spiral arms that are morphing about such that it gives the appearance of rotation. It's very similar to this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_constant#/media/File:Form_constant.jpg
-The granularity of the grain can either by fine or coarse, depending on mental state.
-I'll see heat-wave like distortion patterns, that aren't caused by floaters.
-Occasionally straight lines will appear curved (no eye problems), and perception of relative size and shape will become skewed. I was surprised to see a paper relating Alice in Wonderland Syndrome in childhood to visual snow the other day, because I had thought they might relate.

hey accomplished Veeky Forumsentist, please reply to this schizo

[cont]
-Certain compounds will change its presentation, and accentuate or inhibit certain elements, but it never outright polarizes or goes away. eg amphetamine causes the grain to become colored, and I'll see grainy rainbow waves cascading down the surface of flat monochromatic surfaces (eg white walls). Patterned carpet becomes a haze of static. Phenylethylamine and theobromine in higher doses causes waves of complex patterns along gradients, like people's faces.

Etc. It's all very curious. I'll be interested to see how or if research pans out. I have a feeling it'll pick up when it becomes apparent this could be an effective means of unraveling more about visual and spatial processing.

>eg amphetamine
(dextroamphetamine, that is. I didn't notice that levoamphetamine had any clear impact.)

>left lingual gyrus and right anterior cerebellum
>right anterior cerebellum
Right off the bat that sounds like mislabeling due to low scanning resolution. The symptoms that you're describing though sound similar to visual aura's that accompany migraines, and that in turn suggests that this may have a vascular origin. That could also explain overlap with the cerebellum, because visual cortex and cerebellum are quite far apart in terms of neural connections, but there are veins that cross both.
This is also tentative evidence for vascular abnormalities as amphetamines don't do much to the visual system but they do cause capillary expansion.

I'm speculating wildly here, don't take any of this as absolute truth.

I'm off to eat now, I'll be back in an hour or so.

Don't know. I'm fairly certain there's a strong vascular basis as well, but am uncertain how this fits in with the greater whole. Very seldom, at random, I'll have hundreds of bright firefly-like dots with trails behind them appear suddenly in my complete visual fields, and zig-zag around. Like termites burrowing around my vision. Then they fade. At one point, upon sprint-induced exhaustion, when I stopped and leaned over to rest I had their familiar appearance in my vision. I stood up, and put my head back and looked at the sky. The points grew and threatened to eclipse my vision entirely, then receded. There are other aspects related to blood pressure and metabolic demand that tie in, I don't feel like elaborating.

If I'm very tired, occasionally, my perception of the grain changes greatly. I think it reveals a bit about their underlying nature and how their appearance maps with the underlying neurological machinery. eg if I watch an area of high contrast, off of the hard edges I can see small chunks of grain tracing the edges, but also almost bounding along them. Merging in, reappearing, etc. And if I focus very hard on these regions I can see that a "black" dot is actually composed of billions of tiny swarming blue, pink, and yellow dots on a white background. Analyzing how they cluster, and how given clusters behave relative to the content of the visual fields, obviously shows repeating patterns. Pyramidal cell networks, geometry information extraction, and complex object recognition, seemingly are not affected. So most of it occurs well after visual pre-processing.

Anyway, it's interesting. I don't have any real trouble beyond trying to navigate around bathrooms with patterned or very fine tiles, and work with photoshop on pixel art or whatever. I'd like to see this and Alice in Wonderland syndrome (and the mechanics that make it possible) unraveled further, though it's very unlikely I'll ever be involved in research myself.

And this is how you BTFO all the drug addicts saying their hallucinations mean anything deep and mysterious, le third eye le consciousness

oh my god

oh my god

oh my god

i'm too excited that you're actually literally posting here to ask anything coherent

Are you CNS? What happened to CNS?

Calm down, who cares. The only one who seems ass-ravaged and BTFO'd is you.

hahah projecting this much druggie? lmao

I've never done psychedelics. I'm just not a degenerate so bored and upset with life that I've worked my way to a point of such myopia and misery, that I see it worthwhile to wander into a neuroscience thread to whine about differences in personal philosophy.

You're broken, and you're a joke. Get better, or finish fizzling out like the gutter trash you are.

>I'm fairly certain there's a strong vascular basis as well, but am uncertain how this fits in with the greater whole.
It's the currently dominant view that migraines a neurovascular in origin. The symptoms that you describe overlap with visual aura, so that suggests that something similar might be going on here too.

>Pyramidal cell networks, geometry information extraction, and complex object recognition, seemingly are not affected. So most of it occurs well after visual pre-processing.
Object recognition is a higher order visual function. The perceptual distortions that you describe are more consistent with some pathological process *early on* in visual processing, so lower level cortical areas like V1-V3, possibly up to MT. If this was something in higher levels of visual processing, then you'd likely experience more complex cognitive problems like memory deficits.

And I am the mad one ... wewlad

>Are you CNS?
Yup.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_field_entoptic_phenomenon

It's not. Possibly the brain has passive filtering stages that aren't correctly removing certain types of noise.

Regardless, I'm seeing it in the absence of bright blue, over a normal visual scene.

Probably. I don't have any issues with cognition or memory, beyond shitty working memory from chronic pain, and occasional difficulty recognizing people out of context. I readily recognize faces, but easily can't picture them or visually recall. My visual memory otherwise is pretty decent.

Than ks for the feedback.

Nice to see that some of the good posters are still around.

How do you conduct research? Are there models of the brain that you work with or do you work on a deeper level? How much do we even know about how the brain works?

t. brainlet

>How do you conduct research? Are there models of the brain that you work with
I use various methods, most commonly MEG and fMRI. I also use computational models to make predictions about what certain manipulations should do to the data, or how certain mechanisms should be manifested in the data. The model that's used often depends on the specific phenomenon under study though. In my case, they're biologically plausible dynamical systems models, that consist of a sets of differential equations.

Some examples (not my actual work):
nature.com/ncomms/2015/150204/ncomms7177/full/ncomms7177.html
nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n3/abs/nn.3645.html

>How much do we even know about how the brain works?
We know a lot, but there's a lot more that we don't know.

What do you think about transcranial magnetic stimulation?

What you do you think about the part of the brain that, if blocked from achieving an action potential, results in immediate complete loss of consciousness? That the CIA curiously also discovered during their trials for how to use intense ultra/subsonic frequencies to render people unconscious / braindead.

My god OP I really need an answer from you. I recently purchased a favorite game if mine for the Nintendo 64, wave race. I have all the n64 accecories and I sometimes take it out of storage and binge play for a week or so. About 2 months ago I brought it out to play wave race but was dissapointed to find that I was missing a cord to my two piece power cable. I had assumed I simply lost it and began searching for it becoming more and more dissapointed and confused on how I lost such a treasured item when I so I frequently separate my accecories. I stopped searching and lost interest in playing the game. I was planning all the while to make a trip to buy another cord, which I did today after finding the power cord I asked the clerk of they had the other cord that it connects to. He replied that it was a single cord unit. I said again that I was certain it was two cords. Excited to play my game I returned home and opened the power cord box and was upset, legitimately upset to see that it was in fact just one cord. I inspected my n64 and original power cord and plugged it in to find that it was in fact the only cord I needed. I'm 26 years old male, and I've been playing games since I was 3. I got my n64 when I was 7. I am very familliar with it.

How did this lapse of judgement and memory happen? Should I see a psychiatrist? I never physically tried to plug in the cable until today. Perhaps all this could have been avoided had I just plugged it in the first time I questioned if there was more than one cord. But I didn't. If you want me to reiterate my question just tell me what parts to clarify.

>What do you think about transcranial magnetic stimulation?
It's a useful tool. Not sure what else to say.

>What you do you think about the part of the brain that, if blocked from achieving an action potential, results in immediate complete loss of consciousness?
I'm pretty sure that doesn't actually exist. At least to my knowledge it doesn't.

I can't remember its exact name anatomically. It's located on either side of the corpus callosum.

To my knowledge it exists.

I know alcohol consumption messes with cognitive function, so exactly what happens to the synapses occurring in your brain, do they become more infrequent or maybe more sporadic? Is the concentration of neurotransmitters effected?

I was chuckling while reading that, until I realized that you were serious. You know I'm not a medical doctor, right?

The corpus callosum spans almost the entire brain.

>To my knowledge it exists.
There's not much point to this conversation unless we have literature to go by.

Ah. Claustrum.

What do you think about the claustrum?

How are you studying this? Who is funding you?

Well you said you're a cognitive neuroscientist so I figured you studied the science of cognition and synapses and junk. I had a cognitive malfunction, I thought you might have some knowledge about it.

>Claustrum.
Falls in the same category as posterior cingulate and cuneus: highly associative area with a plethora of functions that can't really be described at the level of behavior.

I'm not sure where that rumor came from that it supposedly causes immediate loss of consciousness when inhibited, but that's most definitely not the case.

I can tell you more about the neural basis of lapses of attention if you'd like, but there's no way for me to tell if that will generalize to your case as well.

I applied for a grant with the Dutch government to study this topic. I do my research at a university.

Please do. Maybe I don't need to see a doctor if this sort of thing is common.

Hm. If only the majority of MKUltra documents weren't burned or "lost". Once people involved finish dying off, that's it. The work would have to be duplicated or reconstructed indirectly.

What did you studied in university, biology, medicine or something else?
Also, what do you think about Penrose's quantum consciousness theory? Being an AI enthusiast, I'd rather not live in a world where it is true, but it''s scientific objectivity and everything…

What role does pharmacology tend to play in neuroscience research?

Thanks for taking the time with us. With regards to computational neural networks, how plausible do you believe the popular "neural-mesh" cortical interface will be?

When performing a demanding cognitive task that requires you to focus your attention, a set of right-lateralized brain regions is activated. It subtends a rather large portion of the brain, so its metabolically expensive to have it be active in sustained fashion. In contrast, when you're not doing anything (but not sleeping either), your brain shows a pattern of activity that encompasses a network of brain regions know as the default mode network. To orchestrate sustained attention efficiently, in everyday life the patterns of brain activity periodically alternate between default mode and attention-related network dominance. When we get tired, the default mode is dominant more often. Similarly, slips of the mind such as the one you're describing, are usually the cause of inappropriate default mode activation.

>Maybe I don't need to see a doctor
You're fine. But that's just common sense, not my professional opinion.

There's no conspiracy surrounding the claustrum. This is really quite comical to me. Imagine being a plumber and people telling you the CIA is hiding secret information about sink drainage.

see:
Quite a big role. Pharmacological manipulation is becoming an increasingly popular way to study particular systems in (relative) isolation.

It's possible in principle, but we need to learn WAY more about neural population coding to be able to create something like that.

>There's no conspiracy surrounding the claustrum.
I never mentioned nor implied conspiracy. You mentioned working at a Dutch university, so I'll otherwise just ignore your asinine chain of assumptions.

Start here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKUltra
It yielded many interesting fruits. It's difficult to say how much was lost, and what degree it later filtered into the public and academic sphere.

>You mentioned working at a Dutch university
I mentioned receiving money from the Dutch government, but I don't work for a Dutch university.

>I never mentioned nor implied conspiracy.
My mistake. It's an easy assumption to make when people start talking about mind control programs run by the CIA.

Neural-mesh follow up: Would you have any recommendations with regards to independently studying nerve growth factors? I'm currently grinding through general pharmacological prerequisites and have yet to be directed toward this area of study.

OP here, I gotta go. Thanks for all the interesting questions.

Thanks again m8

good luck with everything dude

You have to look at the era as a whole and take it within its broader context. The advent of formalized crowd psychology had already spawned the PR and marketing sector, along with widespread and highly effective propaganda campaigns. The labor parties in the US (the source of the phrase "wage slavery") had finally been disassembled and their leaders either imprisoned or deported. The Red Scare tactic was beginning to be take form.

And then you have the CIA trying to unravel the means by which you can interface with the machinery of the human mind. Creation of sleeper agents, memory wiping, induced creation of false memories (something humans do all the time, but in a directed sense), sleeper agents, etc. In the case of what I was talking about they wanted to develop a way to render people unconscious, or dead, from a distance, and without leaving any marks. They investigated ultra and subsonic sound to jostle the brain around, and supposedly, may have found something that worked but likely wasn't viable. They were also investigating manipulation of ion channels via magnetic fields.

Anyway. Don't just shrug off MKUltra. This is one of the few cases when people can't pull the classic "'tinfoil hat" horseshit, it happened, and it's well documented. The entire notion of a conspiracy theorist was seeded by the CIA following the Kennedy assassination, for fuck's sake. And it works. To control people and muddy the collective dialogue you need only mention the phrase, divide and conquer.

As a neuroscientist, I would sincerely hope you'd have a decent interest in the findings of the projects during that era.

MKUltra is interesting, but out of date.
It was canned 40+ years ago, and we've moved on.

What is your opinion on cosmetic neurology?

do you think that there is some credibility to the theory that schizophrenia is actually an atavism pointing to an earlier form of consciousness in which we were hallucinating voices on a regular basis ?

im refering to the theory of consciousness evolution of julian jaynes

What experiments would you conduct if you had the opportunity to do whatever you want with human test subjects?

That sounds like the Bicameral Brain

You should check out Psychedelic Information Theory

>The entire notion of a conspiracy theorist was seeded by the CIA following the Kennedy assassination

Proof?

If you study language at all you'd realize that this is retarded.

Okay, this isn't the same user as but I can confirm that I have Visual Snow for as long as I can remember. I have tinnitus, random static vision, floaters, fatigue, afterimages, photophobia, and very common brain fog. I am also very forgetful, which leads me to believe I have some memory deficits.

I really do not care for most of my symptoms besides the cognitive ones, specifically brainfog. On top of that, I believe I have RLS which gives me a lot of ADHD symptoms too. I cannot pay attention very often and I experience brain fog frequently, and I cannot think critically at all when this happens.
I was wondering if something like amphetamines would help, especially with the brain fog and ADHD symptoms induced by RLS.

No problem senpai.
Anyway, I have a question;
do you have any recommended reading? Specifically textbooks? but a list of papers would be good too.

Why aren't you doing something ground breaking in neuroscience

To what extent can we consider the brain to be a biological computer?

100 - 0%, depending on your arbitrary definitions and lil' feelsies weelsies.

I've seen research where people are able to make fuzzy images of what people are imagining/seeing in their sleep.

Are you familiar with this research or how far along it is?

>Imagine being a plumber and people telling you the CIA is hiding secret information about sink drainage.
Kek

I've woken up fucking this girl that stayed the night in my house in my sleep. Like i woke up and was fucking her and fell back asleep mid hump. Thought it was a dream until she said "that fucked me up last night"
I talk nonstop in my sleep sometimes, I've had full-on conversations with people that are "logical"(the premise isnt but if you based my words on the premise it is logical- like i might say "Friendsname is going to kill anotherfriendsname" but then have a reason why that would make sense if it were true like "he stole from him" I have crazy dreams(all of them 'nightmares'- not monsters but nefarious situations like me going to jail or getting murdered). My sleep habits are weird, but consistent regarding the hours that i sleep for.(8pm - 6am, 11pm to 9pm, etc) I usually sleep uninterrupted. The fuck is wrong with me?