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10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain

discovermagazine.com — What we know—and don’t know—about how we think.

Who dugg this? Made popular Aug 9, 2007

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  • veeshy, on 10/10/2007, -3/+53dugg for putting the list page 3 first.
  • tblasko, on 10/10/2007, -0/+34Anyone else sit and think about these sometimes and have a total mind ***** experience

    Headings FTA

    1. How is information coded in neural activity?
    2. How are memories stored and retrieved?
    3. What does the baseline activity in the brain represent?
    4. How do brains simulate the future?
    5. What are emotions?
    6. What is intelligence?
    7. How is time represented in the brain?
    8. Why do brains sleep and dream?
    9. How do the specialized systems of the brain integrate with one another?
    10. What is consciousness?
  • omnirusa, on 10/10/2007, -2/+16Normal people submit the first page.
  • TeMerc, on 10/10/2007, -0/+10Having a wife with brain damage from axonal brain shear due to a car wreck, this article is great info me.

    With the recent brain implants mentioned in the article, it gives me some hope that some day she may be fully back to normal.
  • BigManOnCampus, on 10/10/2007, -2/+12That's not entirely correct. Our brains perceive light just as fast as sound... our brains do not perceive IMAGES as fast as sound. Images are much harder to process than sound as anyone who programs multimedia programs will tell you.

    If you were an insect who's only sight was light-or-dark, you would perceive that just as fast as you perceived sound.

    Also take note, that while you may perceive sound fast, it typically will take you a moment or two to recognize even your favorite song.
  • psygnisfive, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8Suggested reading:

    Phantoms in the Brain by V. S. Ramachandran
    Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett
    On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

    These people, I think, are on the right path of inquiry. Their ideas actually provide a very good place to start when it comes to answering many of those questions.
  • NeonNinja, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7Great article. Being an avid reader in the topic of learning & memory, I found it nicely packed with information for the size. And, indeed, quite trippy to think about. Amazing how perhaps the biggest question left on this planet, IMHO, is inside our own skulls.
  • sixthplanet, on 10/10/2007, -3/+10Nice find. Really interesting article. It's weird how light travels faster than sound, yet our brains perceive sound faster than light.
  • samchance, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5Have you seen the webpage of Dr. David Eagleman, the author of the article? Incredibly interesting research going on in his lab, including whether time really goes into slow motion when people are in a life-threatening situation... http://neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman
  • esbern1, on 10/10/2007, -2/+7digg for this article having nothing to do with videogames, movies, music or celebrities.
  • skjalff, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5saccadic motion of human eye can be as fast as a few thousand degrees a second. thats way past what you can visually perceive. No wonder you don't see your eyes moving while looking in the mirror. Incidentally, the only way to make your eyes move smoothly instead of "jumping" is to give them something to follow. The really brilliant faculty of the brain is being able to take all the visual snapshots that we take and feed them to the consciousness as a coherent whole. Good article btw.
  • archer104, on 10/10/2007, -0/+411. Does your consciousness lie in the exact sperm and egg that made you? If yes, would you not exist if that sperm had been a second too late and another took its place? If yes, do you realize the astronomical odds that you can come into being given the amount of sperm that is made in a human male, the number of eggs in a female, and the number of humans alive at a given time? Talk about lucky to be alive.
  • ericthesalmon, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Once we unlock the Secrets of the Human Brain, we can get Centauri Ecology or Ethical Calculus for free.
  • AAEXP, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4As if the typical digger is even close to normal! This is probably what happens when a normal person submits to digg!
  • drummer1189, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Good luck, bro.
  • mtrip, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3You can tell after a brief pause in which your brain receives, and then interprets the noise as music, and then provides the context (which song). We don't perceive reality in real time.
  • Evacide, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5@eohano
    You fail. He's right.
  • thealliedhacker, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3On Intelligence is a great book.
  • MasterThief117, on 10/10/2007, -2/+5Actually, I can tell what song it is by hearing the first chord.
  • hotsake, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3This made me think about a recent figure I saw regarding the bandwidth of the human eye. Some scientists at the University of Pennsylvania estimate it's about 10 Mbps. See here: http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news/News_Releases/jul06/retinput.htm Maybe with some nice retinal implants and optic nerve tweaks we can someday achieve gigabit eyes. :D
  • tejohnst, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3What about MIND BULLETS! THATS TELEKINESIS, KYLE!
  • badmephisto, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Excellent article. We need more articles like this, and less articles about Paris. I wish I could digg this twice.
  • pyroh, on 10/10/2007, -0/+210 unsolved mysteries of why people keep posting lists
  • HairyFotr, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Here's an interesting 20 minute talk from Jeff Hawkins at the 2003 TED conference:
    http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/125
    He's not going into any detail, but does give some general ideas behind neuroscience.
  • HairyFotr, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Why are you the third person that points this out. Also, what about it is such a big deal you really needed to say *****?
  • JQP123, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3"We don’t have a theory yet of how to do this; we don’t even know what the theory will look like."

    Basically, we have no clue how "intelligence" really works. So why do so many have "faith" that we're on the verge of creating real artificial intelligence? It's like a geek religion --- a widely held view with limited basis in reality.
  • HairyFotr, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Good luck finding that amount of data on something so elusive.
  • tnatharik, on 10/10/2007, -0/+211th Unsolved, The Page 3 Effect
  • rlee0001, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2The part of the brain that keeps track of what page you are on...
  • psygnisfive, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2@ allied and sake: They are indeed good books. You can get On Intelligence in audiobook format on Audible. If you're not a member, when you join, you can get it for free, and then cancel your membership, so you get a free book. I don't know if they have the other two tho.
  • realdcurtis, on 06/03/2009, -0/+2The human brain likes organizing things in lists.
  • bobthebruce123, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I remembered this:

    http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-19990501-000013.html

    Not the best article on the subject, but it's another piece of the equation which wasn't even touched on in this article.
  • jmontes, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1FTA: "For example, snap your fingers in front of you. Although your auditory system processes information about the snap about 30 milliseconds faster than your visual system, the sight of your fingers and the sound of the snap seem simultaneous. Your brain is employing fancy editing tricks to make simultaneous events in the world feel simultaneous to you, even when the different senses processing the information would individually swear otherwise."

    This is an example of why this article is lame. A human is supposed to be able to detect that events that happen 30ms apart? That's only 0.03 seconds. There's 33 such periods in a second.
  • HairyFotr, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1If that's the only mistake you see in his comment, the joke is on you.
    Perfect english spelling and grammar is not necessary on the internet - not everyone who uses it had a good english education, but that doesn't mean they can't contribute something to the debate.
    (I'm talking in general here, that comment in particular doesn't really add anything new to the debate.)
  • eviltandem, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I can tell when the audio on a movie I download is off by almost nothing (easily less than a second). It's really annoying to try and watch.

    What I thought was most interesting is that this doesn't seem to be tweak-able. One would think if my brain did all this work to sync things up, it would try to sync the audio on that video without it having to be perfect. But it doesn't.
  • noumuon, on 10/10/2007, -1/+2there's something about quite a few of those that seems as if the answer is already right in front of us.
  • inactive, on 10/10/2007, -1/+212. Is consciousness really in the brain?
    13. Since the brain is responsible for the perception of a brain as we know, how do we know what a brain really is and how it looks like and works? Analogy: the perception of the CPU by the RAM/program.
  • tallulahvulture, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I watched a video with a talk by Ramachandran talking about phantom limbs, it was truly fascinating.
  • superguysteve, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1How bout the power to kill a yak...from 200 yards away. That do anything for ya?
  • kelway, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Could be worth a try:

    "If I give you all the Tinkertoys in the world and tell you to hook them up so that they form a conscious machine, good luck. "
  • GregLoire, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I majored in psychology in college, hoping to learn the answers to these questions. But really, the major just teaches the questions themselves more than anything else. An article like this should've been required reading when I entered the major so I could've picked something else instead.

    (Well, maybe not... then I might've had to actually study and learn stuff to graduate.)
  • fmarkos, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Singularity is the geek religion. (Accelerando http://www.accelerando.org/)
  • allengeer, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I actually took Eagleman's class in college. Pretty interesting class, although I have to say he was pretty arrogant about his field and its place in regards to other sciences.
  • transcendz, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1That can explain some "regular" dreams, not all of them. Some dreams can be completely disconnected with what you've been doing during the past hours or days.
  • transcendz, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1That's related to point 6.
  • allengeer, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Its actually the name of Eagleman's book too.
  • DeadFly, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1After reading that... what do we know about the brain?
  • gmaskew, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1There was a story once about a guy who had a heart transplant and immediately found new tastes in things from the donor's interests (like music, food etc) that he hadn't had before. I think neurologists supported this by saying that the heart had it's own internal nervous system tightly linked with the brain and information wasn't just stored in the brain but possibly across the whole nervous system. I found an article about a woman with this experience. http://www.lostartsofthemind.com/2006/11/can-your-heart-think-and-feel.html
  • allengeer, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=david+eagleman&search=Search
    http://neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman/
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Eagleman

    (further reading on the author of the article, and a book by the same title)
  • cusoman, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Or religion.
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