Sand in the Brain: A Fundamental Theory To Model the Mind 105
An anonymous reader writes "In 1999, the Danish physicist Per Bak proclaimed to a group of neuroscientists that it had taken him only 10 minutes to determine where the field had gone wrong. Perhaps the brain was less complicated than they thought, he said. Perhaps, he said, the brain worked on the same fundamental principles as a simple sand pile, in which avalanches of various sizes help keep the entire system stable overall — a process he dubbed 'self-organized criticality.'"
Re:oblig xkcd (Score:5, Interesting)
But over time, in fits and starts, Bak’s radical argument has grown into a legitimate scientific discipline. Now, about 150 scientists worldwide investigate so-called “critical” phenomena in the brain, the topic of at least three focused workshops in 2013 alone.
Just goes to show that xkcd is not the answer to everything.
Re:Sand in our Brain (Score:3, Interesting)
The theory is an overarching idea of how the brain works and best makes sense when compared to other theories. One (not this theory) way to think of the brain is that it is like a computer, with specialized areas which each calculate for specific functions and having a whole mess of complicated parts that evaluate against each other and somehow all work together. This theory instead sees the areas not as having logically complicated interlocking parts, but as each part having a sort of pile where if enough stuff (hormones, electric potential, etc.) is piled onto it, it performs its action. Often this action will include piling more stuff onto other areas piles and then resetting to a baseline.
This theory better explains how the brain can operate in a logical, deterministic fashion while allowing for easy error correction. A computer-like brain would continue to use bad data and damaged instructions could cause whole parts of the brain to fail permanently. The "piles of sand" resetting to a baseline model would accept the bad data once, reset to base, and move on. Damaged instructions (mislinked neurons, brain damage, etc.) could continue to send to much or too little "stuff" to other nodes or wrong nodes, but a system which monitors what is considered "normal" and resets to such will eventually be able to re-normalize every node that isn't directly damaged.
Re:Sand in our Brain (Score:5, Interesting)
The pendulum regarding self-organized criticality is beginning to swing back in the other direction: many researchers now believe it's being over-applied, and the "power law" distributions that people see for natural phenomenon that are "evidence" of S.O.C. have been shown to not actually obey power laws (it's really easy to make these kinds of mistakes when you make your graphs on log-log scales). Sorry if that was a bit dense, but the long and short of it is that not everything that is being touted as an example of self-organized criticality likely is. For instance, the Bak–Tang–Wiesenfeld sandpile (Bak being the one from TFA)? Turns out it's a HORRIBLE model for how real sandpiles behave.
A lot of the above really needs citations, but I'm too tired and lazy, sorry. To "back this up," let me just say that I have a Ph.D in physics, specializing in nonlinear dynamics, and the above comes from a graduate-level course I took from a professor who knows her shit.
Re:As an observer (Score:5, Interesting)
Except we are seeing many cases where it is counterintuitive even to working scientists in their own fields, just which explanation is simpler.
For example, Guth's inflationary hypothesis in Cosmology has resulted in a prediction that certain constants must be random (because otherwise, there's the implication of something we might as well call God behind the non-random values). A hypothesis that invokes God is probably not the most simple - anything that might merit the name of God is likely to be more complex than the very universe it 'explains'. Fair enough, but random values seem to imply an infinity of parallel universes, which however will never be detected by real science, only in science fiction. An infinity of untestable phenomina as the outcome of a model hardly makes that the preferred model by Occam either. Last I looked, neither one of these interpretations of the inflationary hypothesis* has been mathematically shown to be the more simple of the two. If people who have had some real impact on the specific field (i.e. Hawking), can't really agree on what they mean by simple, Occam's Razor isn't working very well.
This has shown up in several other areas of science, for example recent math proofs by computer that are so complex there's a real chance the computer made errors during the months it was crunching numbers for the millions of steps required. Once a proof is too complex for humans to even check, how can we possibly tell whether it is more complex than another proof or not? (Counting lines of code is not a very good measure there). And while I'm hardly up on all the issues in the "universe as a giant computer" debate, I've seen arguments from some of the pros in that field that seem to show there's problem with determining which explanations are the most simple there too, and I've heard at least one working scientist in the field of sexual selection pressure complain about the same thing.
* The recent Antarctic discovery might argualbly elevate Cosmic Inflation from hypothisis to full fledged theory if it wasn't there yet. For those who think it was a theory already, these observations would seem to place it on even more solid ground, in much the same way as Crick and Watson's work helped strengthen the claim of Evolution to be a well tested and heavily supported theory. But, not being able to predict whether the initial universal constants were random or non-random is a real problem when it comes to proclaiming Cosmic Inflation has the status of a solidly tested theory, no matter how much other evidence scientists gather.
Re:As a physicist: (Score:5, Interesting)
"I have a simple theory" is the result of multidisciplinary collaboration, in which new connections get made by someone who understands the patterns and foundations of apparently, but not really, unrelated subjects.
"Your field is fundamentally wrong" could be idiotic and arrogant. Or it could be something so intrinsically obvious as two plus two does not equal four, or God exists (or doesn't). Democrats are evil, Republicans are evil, and the focus of neuroscience should be about how the system maintains criticality.
I hardly consider this arrogant. Arrogance is an inflated sense of superiority, and usually the arrogant person knows, on some level, that it is just a front. Just stating something gives them a feeling of superiority, triggering pleasure centers. Being proven right, in public, is quite possibly the best thing ever because it presents a factual basis for what is, at least occasionally, a fantasy.
People who know, or believe, something truly and completely, do not do this. Believers seem to rebel against any contrary information, actively rejecting it. Knowers present clarity of fact. They may be completely wrong, and may cross over into being believers, or they may disbelieve when proven wrong.
Because science is fundamentally about trying to prove others wrong (and either failing or succeeding), it is important to distinguish among a deep-rooted belief, transference of knowledge (even if it is mistaken), arrogance, idiocy, and the scientific method.
As far as physicists specifically, I would expect that biological and chemical functions would have some level of physics at their core. Whether it is a true correlation or just similar in appearance will have to be decided. But I would prefer to have an asshole physicist say everything is wrong and be right 1% of the time, and the rest just be brushed off like the guy from marketing at the Christmas party.
Nitpick the oversimplified psychobabble if you like, but the point is that words mean things. And attributing intent to people based on their ideas, and even their words especially if they are not a native speaker, is a great way to completely miss the point. Not debating that it's an issue - but it is far too easy to dismiss an interloper from another discipline as arrogant - all the easier if you believe in your field of study, as opposed to knowing it.