Spontaneous Brain Activity and Human Behavior 141
Dr. Eggman writes "Ars Technica is featuring an article summarizing an interesting and perhaps controversial paper which finds links between spontaneous brain activity and human behavior. Spontaneous, yet organized brain activity has been observed without stimulation and even in humans under anesthesia. This paper attempts to link this activity to the observed variability of human performance in even simple, repeated tasks, hoping to establish a new avenue of research into alternative brain processing theories. 'The subtraction provided a much cleaner connection between the button press and brain activity in the left SMC. Once spontaneous activity was accounted for, noise was down by 60 percent, and the signal to noise ratio in the experiments doubled. Putting this another way, spontaneous activity accounted for about 60 percent of the variation between tests. The authors say that these results show that spontaneous brain activity is more than simply a physiological artifact; it helps account for some of the variability in human behavior. In that sense, they argue for a greater acceptance of the view that our brain may have some intrinsic activity that's somewhat independent of sensory input.'"
Uh Yeah.. (Score:5, Funny)
This has been a postulate of mine for a while. It's the only rational explanation for me thinking about sex every 5 seconds - with our without sensory input.
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Mind (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mind (Score:4, Insightful)
I have never seen my brain (Score:4, Interesting)
My experience of my mind, however is immediate. I sense it directly. I didn't become aware of it by being told it was there, I became aware of it by feeling it.
So, in a very concrete sense, my mind is more real to me than my brain. I have experienced my mind directly, whereas I have only heard about my brain second-hand. What sense does it make for me to believe that something which I experience moment-by-moment isn't real because of its incompatibilities between some idea of how things work which I have only experienced, and can only ever experience, second-hand?
Scientists model our experience of reality. These models are not perfect; they have gaps. We shouldn't respond to these gaps by pretending that reality has them too. We should simply recognize them as gaps and continue to study what we can.
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http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/in [reference.com]
in: (...)
2. (used to indicate inclusion within something abstract or immaterial): in politics; in the autumn.
> lacking any evidence of violations of known physical laws in the brain, it's scientifically useless.
This is a tautology. Introducing concepts that are beyond what can be scientifically experienced is useless from a scientific POV, like e.g. the concept of color is useless from the point
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On the other hand, the concept of color is absolutely critical from the point of view of counting from one to tan.
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Oh noes, not the Church of Tantology again!
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Think of this...you have nerves that tell you when you are damaged by detecting the contents of cells (which can be released through necrosis, gross cellular damage, etc.). The experience of this information is "pain." Where does the experience occur?
If you attend the symphony, they make all the vibrations that tickle the mechanical rece
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I don't think that the idea of the mind as separate from the brain is any kind of magical thinking...anymore than the assumption that it isn't. But so far as I know, outside of serious academia, potheads, and slashdot (or the intersection of all three) there are no really good counter-examples
Seems like I should go review the literature some m
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If you attend the symphony, they make all the vibrations that tickle the mechanical receptors in your ear. Where does the experience of enjoying the sound of the cello occur?
It's not easy finding an answer to that question. However, that may not be because the answer is difficult to find, but rather because it's the wrong question to begin with.
A bad /. counter-example:
"I'm downloading a torrent, as the connection breaks. Looking at the screen, I register a popup describing the condition. Where does the experience of a broken connection occur?"
We're seeing a chain of systems, with a high-order intelligence at the top capable of influencing the subsystems in an abstract way
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I read recently that there is a ton of processing that goes on before we "experience" things. Like when you flick your eyes around the room--you don't "see" what exists between Point A and Point B; b
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I read recently that there is a ton of processing that goes on before we "experience" things. Like when you flick your eyes around the room--you don't "see" what exists between Point A and Point B; but your eyes do. Weird.
Yes, this is a very interesting example of the parallellism of the human brain. Somewhere between the process of conscious, rational thought and the visual sense, some part of the brain might see something interesting. Only moments later will one then consiously realise that, and turn the eyes back to verify what it was, and only then comes the full realisation of what one had been seeing all along.
Building on that, to further explain my original point: the experience of listening to pleasant music is mor
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Ever since man discovered that the physical world is 100% controlled by the laws of nature. The neuronal activity in your brain and everything that your brain and rest of your body does is caused by the laws of physics, not by little green aliens living in an invisible 5th dimension that don't contrubute (dualism) to those laws.
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There's never been a single molecule of neurotransmitter, or anything else, that's stepped out of line and obeyed some mysterious dualistic force rather than the laws of nature that we have painstakingly discovered.
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Untestable assumptions generally belong in metaphysics, not neuroscience!
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Ahh, the joys of pot.
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It's all in your head.
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How did we get that info? Well, we used the senses we have at our disposal...but those are mediated in the brain. And they do not always reflect what we think of as "objective" reality. This is not about subjectivity; this is about our experience being distant from actual events, like how chemical data can be transmitted as either taste or as
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Anyway, in short: the mind is not
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Again, the idea that the mind is a construction of the brain is an assumption, nothing more; a useful assumption, with a lot of explanatory power, but as yet no data to back it up. Consider: we say that the brain makes the mind, based on some data. What apprehends the data?
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Indeed. Most people do behave as if they were buggy software running on a meat box.
The further they are up the ladder, the more they need an upgrade, eh?
There's a concept for Sci-Fi...(mebbe already been done?) the day they find they can actually reprogram brains (and I don't mean with a big helmet, which looks like a collender with lights and wires on it.) wooooo.
64,000 bugs in the bean, 64,000 bugs, whack one back with a service pack, 64,008 bugs in the head
Re:Mind (Score:4, Interesting)
Let's go to a movie. We'll sit in a comfy chair, and watch Indiana Jones dodge boulders. What happens?
1. Usually, a person enters a state that can be described as focused monomania (just as Hypnosis can be described). For an hour and a half, they focus on the film so that they are unaware of anything beyond the edges of the screen. They believe the events shown are every bit as real as real life until the film is over. They jump when Ripley opens a hatch and the ship's cat pops out. They cringe when Michael Myers swings an axe. They get aroused when
2. A conscious person, typically of normal mental health, has had an out of the body experience lasting typically 90 minutes or so. The other things in life that can allegedly normally cause such an effect aren't present. There's no chemical disturbance of the brain (as from a hallucinogen). There's no physical disturbance (as from a blow to the head). There's no build up of fatigue toxins (as is sometimes used to explain sleep related mental effects). There's nothing but images, images which in the hands of a skilled artist can be so compelling that we choose to become entangled, enthralled, enraptured.
3. Now describe it in evolutionary terms: We observe some members of a species that has just developed many of its unique brain functions over the last million years. They have lived for 99.999% of that time in small groups typically numbering less than 30. The single most common predator for that entire time was members of other small groups of humans, who typically were just as virulently cannibalistic as we observe today in chimpanzees. Without any of the causes we normally consider to cause a brain dis-function, these members of that species have become totally oblivious to large numbers of strangers, not of their tribe, they have made a deliberate, determined effort to become so, and to stay in that state for an extended time.
4. The mystery is, why, after doing that once, do humans not realize what they have done, run out of movie theaters screaming, and never return?
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Thanks and keep up the good work!
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Your points 1-3 are compelling. However the existence of a mystery in point 4 leads me to believe that 1-3 are either a) incomplete, b) incorrect, or c) both incorrect and incomplete.
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Your post has a lot of [citation needed]'s. For instance, I only experienced movies the way you describe when I was a child. Is that really how most people watch movies? I think at the very least we recognize actors we've seen before--"hey, that's Harrison Ford!". We make judgments about the movie. We aren't thrown off by scene changes, which never happen in real life. We accept (without wonder or question) improbable events and technologies. Yes, our senses tend to focus on the screen, but there are many i
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Maybe
we think we're in an "us" group, so we're not concerned about the "them" eating us, as we're surrounded with other "us".
or
the people that thought they should run away screaming from situations like this all died out a long time ago having woken up screaming from sleep, swore never to do it again, lost their edge and got eaten.
or
(this is really a red herring, as it doesn't matter if someone is going to kill y
You cannot see the sky by painting the window blue (Score:1, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I love science. It's fruits are in evidence and I study neuroscience as a hobby. However, I do not love arrogan
Re:You cannot see the sky by painting the window b (Score:1)
No offense, does that have anything to do with your anonymity? I am just curious about the landscape in today's neuroscience research community.
testing methods (Score:3, Funny)
This study would have been way more exciting if they had used goatse to elicit the neural response.
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Maybe, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
While that may be the case, how does one rule out that the possibility that the activity is a delayed reaction to sensory input, rather than an immediate one? Even assuming that the anesthetization is really enough to rule out the possibility of it being the result of immediate sensory input...
Re:Maybe, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Might be, but if you are trying to force a "mechanical" model of the brain (which I don't assume you're doing) think about this: a degree of randomness helps avoiding stalling or deadlock situation (think about old toy cars with stupid algorithms to avoid obstacles that get stuck hitting the same spot over and over, or how ethernet devices cope with packet collisions).
On another perspective, the one of behavior, predictable patterns are weaker than randomized one, because the external world is subjected to chaotic changes and because you will never catch by surprise a competitor who's studying you. So a degree of randomness is likely an evolutionary advantage.
Besides, if there were a delay it would be quite variable not to have been yet detected as such by all but superficial analysis, so a more general theory of something random inside the brain would hold.
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It can also be selected against evolution-wise. If you had predictable patterns, a predator of comparable evolution-al tendencies would evolve to exploit such behaviors.
Another theory (Score:2)
It's the same thing (Score:2)
Pretty much anything that is not too simple has plenty of internal states. You can still boot and run a computer without keyboard, mouse and network card attached, and the same goes for a simple cell or a clock.
of course you have to supply the energy that th
When I find myself at my witty best (Score:1)
1. Early in the morning when I'm fresh
2. When I'm really really tired or slightly drunk and think I'm funny.
Also tend to come up with humourous ideas when I'm under pressure and mind is racing through problems -- I'll think, "Hey what if this were like so..." and the inevitable side-tracking happens. The Bob only knows how many funny things I'm come up with over the years and remember bugger all about any more. Good to know the well doesn't run dry though, there's always a fresh batch of insanity right
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Do you think you're funny, or do you think other people don't think your funny because you've been drinking?
That, I think was what I referred to with the italic think. I was at the pub last evening and someone interjected a bit of humour about something I was talking about. It was a clunker, perhaps because the jester was 3, nay, 4 sheets to the wind and working on adding another.
We may think we're funny at times, but it's all subjective. Some people really are funny (frinstance a humourous book sel
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Whah? (Score:3, Insightful)
First paragraph of the Neuron article (which is paraphrased in Ars Technica):
Does anybody who has spent more than 2 minutes thinking about the human mind really believe that first argument? Somebody should introduce these guys to William James [yorku.ca]:
The experiment may well be scientifically interesting, but not for the reason advertised.
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Well it's way simpler and much more deterministic. Perhaps a good first try, but, like you, I think it's not even wrong [wikipedia.org]. But I'm not a neuroscientist.....
It is an over-simplification (Score:4, Interesting)
In the sense that it is an oversimplification, useful to establish things in a word-count limited introduction, but whose primary role seems to be to lead laypeople to grotesque and frightening misapprehensions, no, neuroscientists don't believe that first argument.
It is unquestionable that there is neural activity in the absence of sensory stimuli or motor response. It is also known that this activity is not unstructured but correlated across the neuronal population (though the significance of this fact is a point of dispute). Nor does anyone assume that this activity does not have the ability to influence the response of an organism -- neuronal activity is neuronal activity.
At the same time, the paramount task of the nervous system is to process the environment around the organism and respond to it appropriately. To be successful in the natural selection sense, you cannot ignore pain, mating signals, fire, loud noises, sudden movements, etc., and when something comes up, you must be able to formulate and implement a strategy which can actually deal with the situation that stimulus describes. Sensory experience is a huge part of neural activity, and if deprived of it long enough -- so that the only activity is the spontaneous activity mentioned above -- the brain enters a degenerate state. Or, to put it another way, you go insane.
The nervous system, then, is a massively complex system which has a baseline pattern of activity, is receiving constant input from a variety of sensory organs (even when you close your eyes, or plug your ears, you receive input from them; it's just meaningless), all of which is being modulated by "supervisory systems" (e.g, the dopaminergic and serotonergic systems) that control meta-response properties such as attention, anticipation, learning, expectation, and so on. The debate can be reduced to two issues. The first is: once you have accounted for stimulus-driven activity and the effects of the higher-order supervisory systems, does the baseline activity contribute any significant fraction of the organism's final response? And if so, is the baseline activity no more than the muddled-together echo of past stimulus-driven activity rattling around the recurrent network that is the brain and can thus be regarded as simply random noise, or is it meaningful in its own right?
The paper in question [neuron.org] tries to address the first of these questions. Their results seem to demonstrate that a large fraction of the inter-trial variability in a motor task cannot be explained by known modulating factors such as attention, and thus can be attributed primarily to the baseline activity. Thus, baseline activity would appear to be a major influence on response. The second question remains open, and it is really the core of the issue. These results, however, go a long way towards making it a pressing issue.
The experiment may well be scientifically interesting, but not for the reason advertised.
The experiment is scientifically interesting, and for exactly the reasons advertised. There is a fundamental difference between neuroscience and psychology. One studies the operation of the nervous system, and the other studies the nature of the human mind. The basic element of study of neuroscience is spikes, of which you are never aware; psychology interests itself in thoughts, which (from the perspective of a neuroscientist) we can't even meaningfully define, let alone measure. Perhaps one day we might be able to unite the two, but at this point, a criticism of neuroscience based on psychological principles is no more well-founded than lambasting the mathematics of game theory because it runs afoul of sociological thought.
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I prefer the term "rampant," thank you very much.
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In this case, these neuroscie
caveat (Score:2)
it has to with tiny variations, not large coordinated sustained activities
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Perhaps variations, er, vary from person to person. Some vary widely, others very little. I recommend a massively expensive government subsidised research grant to follow this up.*
*the dribble-glass made me do it
aha (Score:1)
Bah (Score:5, Funny)
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Rules of the Office
1. The boss's jokes are always funny.
2. When in doubt, see rule 1
Are you certain you want your co-workers (or are these cow-workers?) to be funny?
I worked with someone once who was silly at the most inappropriate of times. I finally hit him (just a tap) in the shoulder and insisted he be serious. I regretted hitting him, but not because he didn't deserve it.
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I got the joke. But I've just gotten out of a horrible end-of-week meeting, so I was forced to write this by Higher Powers.
This makes sense from a dynamical point of view (Score:1)
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Our whole modern world is an artifically controlled environment that is nothing like what we have evolved for.
The only thing that's dynamic about my experience at the moment is the banner ads.
You there! (Score:2, Funny)
Push your chair slowly away from the desk (use your legs). Disconnect the power cord to the computer (the black rubbery thing that is poking out of the wall).
Find the stairs - go UP them.
Find a door - go OUT the door. Keep doing this until you determine that you are out-of-doors (hint: no more roof).
Look around, walk a bit. Careful of the cars. Watch out for women - they're much more dangerous in real life.
Keep goi
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Of course having ingested many hundreds of micrograms of LSD at the time couldn't have impaired my judgement, could it?
How sad (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh my God, this is so stupid. I bet people really argue about this.
Put it this way: does Linux respond to stimuli or do its own thing? Is there any experiment that could help us decide? Two people could know the entire Linux source code back to front and inside out, and the source of every application running on it, and still disagree over this stupid question. Don't these people have real and meaningful phenomena to investigate?
How sad indeed (Score:2)
Wow. I belive that trying to understand the human mind is about the most important thing anybody can be doing.
Seems an easy question to answer. (Score:3, Insightful)
If system A has a direct connection to external stimulus B, and system A moves to a non-deterministic state for at least one value of B, then A is a quantum device. (Quantum systems are the only physical systems in which true ran
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That's true, but I don't see why you conclude that such a system can't exist. Our brains are in a constant state of uncertainty, weighing imperfect sensory data and imperfect memories, holding contradictory possibilities in mind while waiting for further evidence, often having to make decisions b
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Oh my God, this is so stupid. I bet people really argue about this.
It's stupid, but not because it's a non-question, it's stupid because it's a stupid question.
The brain doesn't have a Wake-on-LAN function - it is always on.
The question is like asking d
Free will. (Score:1, Interesting)
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Or were you just joshing us?
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Having said this, nothing at all is "random". Everything abides by causality at some physical level; you cannot escape it, and there is also no reason to fear it. The free-will vs determinism debate is pointless. Science can only accept reason.
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So you consider random brain activity to be free will? Fine with me, but how does that support dualism? Randomness can come directly from nature due to the uncertainty principle.
Tin Foil Hat (Score:2)
Spontaneous activity (Score:1)
Hmm (Score:1)
Lead time (Score:2)
Stuck in a Strange Loop (Score:5, Insightful)
I think, therefore I am.
I realize I am, therefore I think.
But after than I'm a broken record!
Horribly simplistic to keep the post short:
Without some "spontaneous activity" injected into the strange loop that is a self-aware entity, might we not get stuck in the loop, and end up being less cognizant than a fruit fly?
Someone with a knowledge of real-world AI can flog me, but you CAN program a computer to be self-aware. It patches itself, reports crashes in it's own log, recognizes intrusions (hopefully). But without that bit of "spontaneous activity" the system can never gain an outside perspective. It can never "unask the question" [wikipedia.org]. So it's just as dumb as a Bach fugue playing itself on a player piano.
To sum up, it's Self Referentiality PLUS this "spontaneous activity" that is at the very core of sentience.
At least that's how I understand it.
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And there are answers. Just maybe not the easy ones we would like.
From Wikipedia: [Hofstadter] is a College Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science; Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology at Indiana University, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition.
Also he won the Pulitzer for Gödel, Esc
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Ever read Darwin's "Origin of the Species" ? It was full of observations, theories, and propositions. Decades later the Great White Hunter bone safaris lead by the Leakys were still not providing good answers, just more questions and dubious science, not to mention bones that would have been better left lie for awhile than torn out of the ground and waved around for the media.
When it comes to cognitive science, we're in a pre-Darwinian age. We know so
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wow! (Score:5, Funny)
(Of course, looking at the media and politicians, perhaps people do come to the conclusion that all humans are simple input/output response systems.)
Misunderstood, of course (Score:2)
In some fMRI studies (I'm a post-doc in the field), the brain resting state is studied. Now, if you know what fMRI actually measures, you'll know that that means the blood flow through the brain while there is a minimum of external stimuli (plus the task to try to think of nothing, which is quite hard). So all this study claims is that some of the variability you see in normal fMRI studies (those that have stimuli and a
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I don't think you can safely pass that off as a minor little clause in your point - The same problem this FP seems to make.
Of course we have "spontaneous brain activity" that influences our performance on certain tasks. Most of us call that "thinking", preferably about the problem, but also quite possibly about lunch or that cute tech's short skirt or about why the FSM lets good pasta get overcooked.
This seems like a non-article. No one s
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I would not go as far as to call this rest activity thinking. Subjects in the scanner do not think about lunch or a short skirt. Perhaps briefly, but that i
By the way (Score:2)
What next? (Score:2)
In follow-up research these scientists will investigate if there is any correlation between the loud humming noise cars make when they move and the wheels rotating.
Its Alive... uh err, I'm alive, I'M ALIVE (Score:2)
I shall patent me. and then Charge to much for licensing.
That will solves all the worlds problem.
http://abstractionphysics.net/pmwiki/index.php [abstractionphysics.net]
On a more serious note, this
What? (Score:2)
WOW! (Score:2)
You mean the brain is active even while I'm asleep?
I wouldn't have imagined that even in my wildest dreams...
Contrary to Popular Ignorance (Score:2)
I'm glad to see someone has finally replicated Donald O. Hebb's 1939 work.
Next, hopefully someone will discovery neurons.
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So basically what this paper is saying is that everybody has a random number generator running in his head to slightly alter his action from what everybody else would do.
I wonder if they can explain that rate at which people create humour. Clearly some are so witty they require a sledgehammer to the foot to get them to settle down and be serious for once, while others, such as Mr. Bent (of TP's Making Money) have suppressed or severly underdeveloped funny bones.
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This is a natural product of interconnected neurons, and can be observed in minimal systems, such as ganglia, as well as in the brain.
Think of it as an emergent property of suitably connected finite state automata, and it makes sense - the brain is constantly active with more or less noisy signals passing through it, and it is the modulation of those signals by sensory
Re:Random Number Generator (Score:4, Insightful)