6 ms·
If this were true wouldn’t fMRI machines cause either loss of consciousness or extreme hallucinations?
by apolloartemis 9mo ago
If this were true wouldn’t fMRI machines cause either loss of consciousness or extreme hallucinations?
- ggm 9mo agoI believe in dead salmon, they do.
- lgas 9mo agoThey cause hallucinations in dead salmon? I find that hard to believe.
- furyofantares 9mo agoLoss of consciousness seems equally unlikely.
- lgas 9mo agoTrue, though an easier mistake to make, I imagine.
- ggm 9mo agohttps://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/scicurious-brain/ignobel-prize-in-neuroscience-the-dead-salmon-study/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/scicurious-brain/ign...
- lgas 9mo agoI'm not 100% sure I'd call that a hallucination, but it's close enough and interesting enough that I'm happy to stand corrected.
- bitwize 9mo agoWhen improper use of a statistical model generates bogus inferences in generative AI, we call the result a "hallucination"...
- baq 9mo agoIt should have been called confabulation, hallucination is not the correct analog, tech bros simply used the first word they thought of and it unfortunately stuck.
- K0balt 9mo agoUndesirable output might be more accurate, since there is absolutely no difference in the process of creating a useful output vs a “hallucination” other than the utility of the resulting data. I had a partially formed insight along these lines, that LLMs exist in this latent space of information that has so little external grounding. A sort of deeamspace. I wonder if embodying them in robots will anchor them to some kind of ground-truth source?
- lgas 9mo agoI was referring to the dead salmon in the study seeming to show increased activation in the brain and spinal coord.
- exe34 9mo agoThank you for the giggle, I misread this as a statement of faith and a non-sequitur.
- moffkalast 9mo agoI had an fMRI and also believe in dead salmon now, it's a common side effect but it's worth it for the diagnostic data they get.
- oniony 9mo agoYeah, really needed the comma on the left side of the parenthesis.
- rdgthree 9mo agoNot necessarily - I think it works like Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2. Your conscious system is System 2 - when it's not working correctly, you just fall back to System 1. Independently, since the whole idea relies on resonance, it may be the case that an fMRI doesn't actually interfere with the "stochastic resonance" mechanic quite like TMS (transcranial magnetic simulation) seems to. If you model the brain this way, dementia looks like a clear breakdown of System 2, which is an interesting thought experiment even if the mechanics aren't perfect: https://1393.xyz/writing/alzheimers-is-the-symptom-not-the-problem https://1393.xyz/writing/alzheimers-is-the-symptom-not-the-p...
- neuah 9mo agoYou know the mechanism of TMS is not mysterious. It requires no magnetoreception or "stochastic resonance". It is simply inducing electrical currents to modulate neural activity. Its effects are consistent with the known laws of physics, known properties of neurons, and decades of neuroscience research.
- rdgthree 9mo agoOf course! But also: > Although the biology of why TMS works isn't completely understood, the stimulation appears to affect how the brain is working. https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/transcranial-magnetic-stimulation/about/pac-20384625#:~:text=Although%20the%20biology%20of%20why,effective%20ways%20to%20perform%20treatments. https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/transcranial-mag... I think it's reasonable to assume there's room to sharpen our understanding of it quite a bit.