How far neuroscience is from understanding brains (2023)

Is this because we're misapplying the analogy to ML? I.e., in an effort to communicate and understand ANNs, we "pretend" it's like a brain. Just like before, we used "file retrieval systems" to understand the brain, or electricity is like "water in a pipe", which are also wrong. Analogies often only go so far, beyond which they do more harm than good.

I think therapy can be used very strategically. Maybe you want to end a friendship and don't know how to break it to them. Or maybe you don't like the way you are being treated by someone and you want to know effective ways of setting boundaries. Therapy can be super useful in giving you the tools to confront difficult emotional/psychological situations.

>"hey, maybe if you'd invest more in hobbies, social relationships and a healthy lifestyle you would feel better"

"Just saying" the above is not what CBT is, though. I've had a lot of CBT and other kinds of therapy, and I've never had a therapist just tell me "so don't do that", or "do more x".

It's about analysing your own thinking(cognitive) and actions/habits(behavioral) in cases where those are keeping you stuck in a miserable situation, and identifying what you can do to change them.

Sure, if you put the most inanely over-abstracted construction on it like "just live healthier and you'll feel better", it sounds meaningless, but the implicit assumption there is that's something you can just decide to do, and succeed in. That's not the case for many people, and those people can benefit from CBT.

It generally is. People like being heard. But usually they sort themselves out during the first therapy. If that fails usually more therapy doesn’t solve anything either.

As somebody who studies psychology.. If a psychological study says A, it’s more likely to be actually B. The quality of research is much, much worse than people think.

> CBT as proposed and studied in lab settings can't really be applied in the wild like most evidence based therapists try to,

Because that part is wrong, apart from the underlying inner working being dissected in labs (the cognitive science part), the therapy part it is well studied in the wild - and it works.

> and the results of therapy I come across always seem extremely underwhelming.

So you mean anecdotes? Of course you recognize the underwhelming results - the people where it worked well are less noticable, by definition.

> Maybe for some cases like severe phobias there is something to be solved, but do we really need to be paying thousands of dollars a year

That you have to pay money has been a decision of the society you reside in. It doesn't have to be this way, and in fact it isn't in most industrialized countries.

> for a therapist to say "hey, maybe if you'd invest more in hobbies, social relationships and a healthy lifestyle you would feel better"?

That is a strawman, not CBT.

Eh, therapy can vary widely in quality.

And peoples lives can also vary in quality. If you're raised in a nest of narcissists it is likely you'll have a very skewed view on relationships and your idea of normal could be considerably different from the average and have negative effects on your social relationships. Sometimes you just need a 3rd party to tell you that's not normal.

Coming from a family of narcissists myself they quite adamantly stuck to the idea that therapy was a total scam. Though my observing their behaviors it is my believe they are really saying "Therapy is a total scam because they didn't tell me what I wanted to hear".

What’s the practical difference wrt. psychology (whether it can solve it) between the problem of not being able to get over a phobia and the problem of not being able to apply rationally simple life advice? Why is the former “something to be solved” but the latter one is not?

You can only get out of therapy what you put into it, so if there only problems you are bringing to your therapist are a need for investment in hobbies, social relationships, and a healthy lifestyle, then that's all you're gonna get. Now, it's entirely possible that really is all you need, but for those stuck in traumatic response loops due to eg PTSD from respressed memories of childhood, leading to, say, a string of failed relationships with toxic people who don't respect your boundaries because you didn't have a good model for them growing up, therapy can be quite useful for helping people heal from generational trauma and break the cycle. It sounds cliché to blame it all on bad reaction to things that happened in childhood, but, well, we did all have one (unless you didn't; early parentification is an acknowledged failure mode), and even if the worst was emotional stunted parents (as documented by the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents), childhood that was totally fine on the surface may not have been.

Again, of course, if you are a well adjusted adult, and no one in you life is clamoring for you to get therapy, then chances are, either you've pushed anyone and everyone away that cares for you that deeply, or you don't need it, both of which are totally possible.

As for if it's a scam? That word gets thrown around too easily these days. Do they cost a lot? Yes. Are you worth it? Also yes. That's not to say all therapist are equal, and someone that's great for you might be terrible for the next person, and some of them are just bad. (There are also those that are quite good!) As there are with all things. Going into therapy with specific goals on things you want to work on (eg irrational anger at some specific thing that's ruining your life) tends to help it not be just an ongoing extra expense like a gym membership, if that's not what you want. At the end of the day, they're stuck in the system as much as you are, and paying them also makes it feel more balanced in that they're being paid listen to you go on and on and help you with your ish. You wouldn't/shouldn't treat your friends so one-sidedly. That said, it's entirely possible to pay to see a therapist and not get anything out of it. I will admit to that as a possible failure mode, but it's a failure mode and there are certainly success stories out there of people turning their life around and becoming happy well-adjusted adults.

I love Dennett. I think he’s a n incredible philosopher, at least when it comes to biology, but philosophy always leaves me wanting for the actual mechanisms.

On a high level, I think Calvin’s theory is in the exact same vein as Dennett’s. Seems like we could sum them both up by saying the brain is paralleled and there is competition between thoughts?

What grabs me about Calvin’s work is he gets much closer to how this might work than anything else I’ve seen. Even cooler, I think he provides enough depth that we could potentially design a new architecture around his theory.

> Gives another dimension to being 'in tune' with someone.

Love this.

> I think the clinical shift to focus on 'the individual' instead of the ensemble has overlooked the importance of inter-brain synchronisation

My sense is this is also the case for our cultural story of neuroscience. We can run massive analysis of the brain and what brain regions or neurons or transmitters are being used/activated and it all boils down to something we can't conceptualize. Even the principal components seem to be too complex for us to grock.

With this barrage of complexity I feel like we have a (bad but understandable) habit of reducing to the individual. We talk about the grandmother neuron or what region x is responsible for. We harp on the cog sci of individuals and we run experiments where we try to isolate them for "confounding factors" (other people).

I keep coming back to evolutionary theory as the middle ground between this over and under simplification of cognition.

It provides a clearer direction than any other theory of how the brain works that I have come across. But no, it’s not going to be simple project to implement. Maybe if you’ve got a strong background in ML you could hack something together?

Still I can’t recommend it highly enough. Act I is enough to grock the concept and you can crush it in an evening.

Since we don't yet have anything remotely like AGI and at the same time, don't even really know how the brain works or what consciousness is aside from being aware that we feel it, you and nobody else really know if our path to consciousness is just one of many. For all we know it might be the only one. There could be some very big unknown unknowns in those waters.

Who knows? Maybe it’ll turn out like flying and birds.

Studying birds gave us some data, but mimicking them wasn’t what got us jumbo jets.

> I've never seen a concrete goal, just vague stuff like "better than humans at a wide range of tasks."

I think you're pointing out a bit of a chicken vs. the egg situation here.

We have no idea how intelligence works and I expect this will be the case until we create it artificially. Because we have no idea how it works, we put out a variety of metrics that don't measure intelligence but approximate something that only an intelligent thing could do (we think). Then engineers optimize their ML systems for that task, we blow by the metric, and everyone is left feeling a bit disappointed by the fact that it still doesn't feel intelligent.

Neuroscience has plenty of theories for how the brain works but lacks the ability to validate them. It's incredibly difficult to look into a working brain (not to mention deeply unethical) with the necessary spatial and temporal resolution.

I suspect we'll solve the chicken vs. egg situation when someone builds an architecture around a neuroscience theory and it feels right or neuroscientists are able to find evidence for some specific ML architecture within the brain.

I remember reading an article about this years ago - a non-transferable FPGA configuration which had some logic that should be unreachable but didn't work without it. Very faschinating but I've not been able to find it since.

According to Wikipedia the personality barely changes and the tests is mainly done to detect which side is on charge of language and memory

How do you simulate something you don't understand?

The basic problem here is that we don't understand what a neuron does, so how would we model it?

I did mention people specifically. Mammalian brains are fairly more complex than piscine brains.

People are important because we can't tell a fish to perform an action or to think of an elephant, etc. So while we can image, we can't know what correlates with a high degree of certainty.

But even in other cases, a working brain is an entirely different object than a non-working one. Finding those foundational ideas and basic operating principles because we can't test a living brain. It's almost chicken/egg. Being able to experiment on a living human brain would probably give us much better ideas of the basic operating principles. And once we know those principles, we could probably move from experimenting on living human brains.

Like, we can dick around with muscle. We can force it to perform as it were living and receiving signals. And that's partly because you can cut open a living person and watch those muscles operate. You can manipulate those muscles in a living person. You can measure things, etc. It's much harder to do that with a brain. Because it's incredibly easy to make irredeemable mistakes.

We just don't have a general solution of the 3 body problem in the form of equations. Practically speaking it's a solved problem because we can simulate the motion. We could do the same with brain. That's basically what neural networks are.