Scientists reconstruct Pink Floyd song by listening to people’s brainwaves

dan1101@lemm.ee to Technology@lemmy.world – 274 points –
Scientists reconstruct Pink Floyd song by listening to people’s brainwaves
theguardian.com

Sound clip is pretty creepy.

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I guess you could say that but brains are orders of magnitude more complex than any computer. Saying that they're "simply" organic computers is a huge understatement.

A TI-82, an Apple II, and a 48 core Xeon rack Server are all simply computers. It isn't insulting the rack server to declare that it and an Apple II are both simply computers, despite their orders of magnitude difference in processing power, capacity, utility, etc.

No. The human brain is not 1 and O. It is "analog" meaning the state can be any number between 1 and 0 because neurons are fired biochemically and linked to each other in multiple connections. This means the human brain or any animal brain can carry, process and store more info than any computer yet invented for the given size and mass. Non-biologists don't know how complex biological sytems are. Go and google about the rotor-stator system of bacterial flagellum. That's right, some bacteria have an electrical motor to propel themselves, long before humans invented the electric motor.

Neurons are very much binary. They receive enough simulation to fire or they don't. They don't fire with variable strengths.

Brains are literally just biologically grown electrochemical computers.

They fire at different rates are though.

Any logic gate will fire a different rates depending on how frequently it's fire conditions are met.

Still binary.

That's just plainly wrong. If neurons are "activated" (the binary analogy) it starts firing, but at varying rates depending on how far above it's threshold the activation happened. A bit like an activation level to frequency converter, but non-linear.

I think we just have different interpretations of the same behavior. I feel like we're describing the exact same thing, just with different definitions.

It's common for binary systems to pulse at different frequencies. That's how binary data transmission works.

Yes, but a binary gate reacts to a change in inputs exactly once by adjusting its own state. If the inputs change faster the frequency will change of course, but that's not the point. Neurons will fire pulse trains with different rates for two different inputs that a binary system would both interpret as "on". It's a much more analog and continuous system in that regard.

Again we agree completely, and are just calling the same thing two different things.

True but they are rates of events, which could be said to be 0 for nothing and 1 for a spike.

That being said there are definitely some things in the way neurons behave that are not very binary, from the potentials driving ion flow to the way certain proteins act. Complex on amazing levels but I'd say it's stil just a gloopy predicting computer.

Anybody who believes that out brains are simple organic computers seriously needs to try acid.

Complex but still organic computers. What else would they be? Soul vessels?

Devil's advocate: Maybe acid just disables the "noise filtering" part of you organic computer.