This reminds me of Dr. Adrian Thompson's interesting findings from the mid-1990s on the influence of electromagnetic phenomena in evolvable hardware on FPGAs.
It 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.
Undesirable 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?
Reminds me of a study I read once on binaural beats[0], that found the effect disappeared when they used pneumatic (non-magnetic) headphones.
[0]the theory that playing a different tone in each ear, that when superpositioned by the brain to produce a low frequency, would entrain the brainwave frequency to the modulated frequency.
Nothing as in lasting effects, or “nothing” as in you can’t hear the bineurality.
If the latter, it could be your headphones- and I assume you are using headphones, or the compression, or your ears might be non-equivalent in hearing capability.
If the former, then thats the point OP is making.
At least for me, the sound is strangely pleasurable, not incredibly dissimilar to the kind of “multiple audio sources colliding into one nice stream” that you get from a real life orchestra.
There use to be one Google video (out of many) that would completely fix my migraine in 3 minutes. Used it about 200 times for that. Hangovers, lack of sleep and spontaneous headaches. At other times it just gave great clarity, very refreshing regardless of the time of day.
I didn't use headphones. I had the link at the top of my blog menu. It was that important.
When Google video shut down I forgot to download it. Caused a slight panic lol The headaches now remind me of it but it is not the right mood to search and the videos online are all useless garbage.
I played it for a friend one time. He instantly put both hands on his head and screamed that I should shut it of immediately. He was really upset and thought I did it on purpose. Also didn't understand how I wasn't negativity affected like him.
If I didn't find that video I'd be convinced it's bullshit.
This feels just north of conspiracy theory logic. It's proven that humans can just barely sense large-scale magnetic fields, so how about if they can also sense extremely finely detailed fields in a way that solves long-standing philosophical and medical problems? Here are some supporting coincidences that have any number of alternate explanations, but it would sure be cool if this whole tower of conjecture was true, right? If you've seen conspiracy-theory debunks, the resemblance is rather strong.
This paper starts to go downhill around "The easier-than-expected problem of consciousness".
The Meta paper [1] is much more useful. They claim to be reading out what someone is seeing,
in a rather approximate way.
The sensing is improving. One project was able to sense magnetic fields at 13 points at 1KHZ using a custom helmet fitted with sensors.[2] The technology is still in the early stages, but they got rid of the high vacuum and cyrogenics needed for SQUID sensors. Progress.
This currently has fewer data points than functional MRI, but more bandwith. fMRI, after all, is measuring blood flow. It's like trying to figure out what an IC is doing by watching its infra-red heat emissions. "Look, the FPU is working hard now."
That paper is a few years old. What's been going on since?
This is further info because I think it’s interesting rather that any sort of correction but fMRI doesn’t quite measure blood flow - at least not directly.
Oxygenated and deoxygenated blood have slightly different magnetic properties. So the fMRI is trying to detect from that how oxygenated the blood is, with the assumption that active areas are using more oxygen which causes a small dip then blood flow increases so then there’s an increase that follows over about 5-6 seconds. I don’t know if more advanced things are used now but when I messed about with it you’d measure the change then apply a 6s linear convolution to the signal to estimate activity.
There’s an interesting set of layers of assumptions in all this, and to me the idea that the mri part works at all seems like wild magic.
> It's proven that humans can just barely sense large-scale magnetic fields
It's tentatively proven that humans react to large magnetic fields. The reaction can come from simple interference, without ever being processed as a sense.
But there's so much more bullshit. That an MEG measurement was decoded only means that the brain produces a magnetic field that correlates with the information it is processing. So there's no Faraday cage in our head. Great. But the brain already knows what it is doing. All that information is there, very fast and reliable. Why should it try to decode its much less detailed and very weak magnetic field then? Where are the sensors? MEG needs super-conduction to work, and doesn't work when there's any disturbance. In the institute where I worked, it was forbidden to use carts (for moving equipment or coffee or whatever) on all floors in the corner where the MEG was located when there was an experiment going on, because it would disturb measurements. A few crystals aren't going to overcome those problems.
> The easier-than-expected problem of consciousness
Contrast this with trans-cranial magnetic stimulation and claims this can induce the feeling of religiosity in people: you may believe in god, because your ferromagnetic particles align to believe in god in the right magnetic field..
(not really.. but still. the thing about induced states of mind by TCMS is true)
(Slightly more seriously, the diamagnetic properties of Sn would in actuality very much interfere with the B1 field modulation of the (f)MRI sequence; and disturb the local B0 homogeneity; and thus disturb the experimental results.
Although that was of course not what I meant when initially responding)
I agree. It’s an inversion of the usual pattern: AI-generated “thoughts”, written up by a human.
I’m surprised this made it to the front page of HN. I think AI tools are making it easier to create increasingly plausible-sounding bullshit, and gradually overwhelming the defenses of this community.
The brain could be using the weak magnetic field to glean info on what the brain is thinking...or you know, the brain could use the fact that its electrically connected to...the brain.
Hmm this leads me to recall a bunch of ancient pseudoscientific sounding beliefs and see whether or not they might be plausibly explained by this mechanism:
* Is it possible for humans to get a vague impression of other humans' thoughts via this mechanism? Not via body language, but "telepathy" (it'd obviously only work over very short ranges). If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
* Some animals have a preference for sleeping direction in alignment with magnetic pole, are some sleeping directions "healthier" than others for humans?
That aside, I didn't follow the part about how this is an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. Why couldn't the brain achieve global summarization via another mechanism, and why does having this "global summarization" result in qualia?
> If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
For what it's worth, I have a disorder that causes me to see "auras" around people quite often. The nature of the disorder is that my brain can't filter out its own sensory noise properly, giving rise to a lot of visual artefacts that non-disordered brains filter out. These range from 'TV static' to stuff that's not a million miles away from diffusion model artefacts, but the auras around people I see pretty much all the time especially against plain backgrounds. It's not very well-known or studied but fMRI studies have recently implicated the same serotonin receptor psychedelics target, and it's also linked to migraine.
I think this disorder being more prevalent than expected would be a good explanation for auras. It was once thought to be very rare, but many people who have it aren't actually affected enough to seek out a diagnosis. It wouldn't be an unreasonable source for images like auras, saints' haloes, and other things like that since they're just an ordinary part of vision for me. I also think it somewhat vindicates Aldous Huxley's thoughts on the subject.
I really like the idea of electrical fields being somehow important for consciousness, and it's not something I'd rule out off the bat. I just think that disorders of perception are a better explanation for auras and similar phenomena.
> If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
I've always held two complementary beliefs regarding auras and similar senses:
1. It's plausible that some humans can sense subtle information about things like emotional states or reactions in other humans using non standard sensing mechanisms (so maybe electric fields rather than sight, for example).
2. I'm very certain that for overwhelmingly most humans who claim they can see auras, it's one of: bullshit, fakery, self delusion, wishful thinking, charlatanism, a scam.
Yeah, synesthesia combined with being attuned to body language and emotions could account for lot. I even remember there was some anecdote of a famous physicist (Feynman?) who investigated this soviet mind reader and found that he was picking up on subtle bodily clues.
“Wouldn't” is being used in the logical-conditional sense, not in the sense of willingness, requesting, nor opinion.
It's literally “What's the reason that the machinery of the brain doesn't use this mechanism, given this proof that the effect could in principle be used?”. A similar question can be made for quantum mechanical interference in the brain (which to be clear I feel is adequately answered by “the brain is a wildly inappropriate vehicle for harnessing interference effects).
whenever I remind about mind reading - I get down voted and called schizophrenic. it's worse - tech is being actively used to sway large groups of population
Well how far do these fields propagate and do you need to read them from different directions to make sense of them? Think you’d want to answer those questions first. The sensors from the study are very close and all around the head. Also demonstrate there is some phenomenon to explain in the first place.
I’ve long thought it would be unsurprising if we eventually found evidence of certain kinds of telepathy. It would just be too damn useful, and tuning up one exquisitely complex magneto-electro-chemical instrument in close proximity to another similar one seems like a good way to at least get resonance. Who knows?
This reminds me of Dr. Adrian Thompson's interesting findings from the mid-1990s on the influence of electromagnetic phenomena in evolvable hardware on FPGAs.
https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/
Of course, the substrate being researched back then is different from human wetware.
If this were true wouldn’t fMRI machines cause either loss of consciousness or extreme hallucinations?
I believe in dead salmon, they do.
Thank you for the giggle, I misread this as a statement of faith and a non-sequitur.
Yeah, really needed the comma on the left side of the parenthesis.
I 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.
They cause hallucinations in dead salmon? I find that hard to believe.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/scicurious-brain/ign...
I'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.
When improper use of a statistical model generates bogus inferences in generative AI, we call the result a "hallucination"...
It 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.
Undesirable 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?
Loss of consciousness seems equally unlikely.
True, though an easier mistake to make, I imagine.
If a camera can see your eyes, why can't you?
Mirror sold separately.
Reminds me of a study I read once on binaural beats[0], that found the effect disappeared when they used pneumatic (non-magnetic) headphones.
[0]the theory that playing a different tone in each ear, that when superpositioned by the brain to produce a low frequency, would entrain the brainwave frequency to the modulated frequency.
Just the fact that your brain 'sums' those signals somewhere, to let you hear that interference frequency, has always fascinated me.
Do you have a link to the pmeumatic headphones study you mention?
I did some digging, I couldn't find the paper but I found a reference to it on a wiki page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Monroe#Hemi-Sync
Is there any actual science behind binaural beats? They do nothing in my experience…
“nothing”, how?
Nothing as in lasting effects, or “nothing” as in you can’t hear the bineurality.
If the latter, it could be your headphones- and I assume you are using headphones, or the compression, or your ears might be non-equivalent in hearing capability.
If the former, then thats the point OP is making.
At least for me, the sound is strangely pleasurable, not incredibly dissimilar to the kind of “multiple audio sources colliding into one nice stream” that you get from a real life orchestra.
There use to be one Google video (out of many) that would completely fix my migraine in 3 minutes. Used it about 200 times for that. Hangovers, lack of sleep and spontaneous headaches. At other times it just gave great clarity, very refreshing regardless of the time of day.
I didn't use headphones. I had the link at the top of my blog menu. It was that important.
When Google video shut down I forgot to download it. Caused a slight panic lol The headaches now remind me of it but it is not the right mood to search and the videos online are all useless garbage.
I played it for a friend one time. He instantly put both hands on his head and screamed that I should shut it of immediately. He was really upset and thought I did it on purpose. Also didn't understand how I wasn't negativity affected like him.
If I didn't find that video I'd be convinced it's bullshit.
Did you ever find the video again or another like it?
go visit a doctor.
edit: lol. downvotes on friendly reminder, what a classic.
my friend was not sure what everyone sees on 3d TVs. then got rid of it. later it turned out it was because of eye cancer.
take care.
This feels just north of conspiracy theory logic. It's proven that humans can just barely sense large-scale magnetic fields, so how about if they can also sense extremely finely detailed fields in a way that solves long-standing philosophical and medical problems? Here are some supporting coincidences that have any number of alternate explanations, but it would sure be cool if this whole tower of conjecture was true, right? If you've seen conspiracy-theory debunks, the resemblance is rather strong.
[delayed]
This paper starts to go downhill around "The easier-than-expected problem of consciousness".
The Meta paper [1] is much more useful. They claim to be reading out what someone is seeing, in a rather approximate way. The sensing is improving. One project was able to sense magnetic fields at 13 points at 1KHZ using a custom helmet fitted with sensors.[2] The technology is still in the early stages, but they got rid of the high vacuum and cyrogenics needed for SQUID sensors. Progress.
This currently has fewer data points than functional MRI, but more bandwith. fMRI, after all, is measuring blood flow. It's like trying to figure out what an IC is doing by watching its infra-red heat emissions. "Look, the FPU is working hard now."
That paper is a few years old. What's been going on since?
[1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/brain-ai-image-decoding-meg-magneto...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6063354/
This is further info because I think it’s interesting rather that any sort of correction but fMRI doesn’t quite measure blood flow - at least not directly.
Oxygenated and deoxygenated blood have slightly different magnetic properties. So the fMRI is trying to detect from that how oxygenated the blood is, with the assumption that active areas are using more oxygen which causes a small dip then blood flow increases so then there’s an increase that follows over about 5-6 seconds. I don’t know if more advanced things are used now but when I messed about with it you’d measure the change then apply a 6s linear convolution to the signal to estimate activity.
There’s an interesting set of layers of assumptions in all this, and to me the idea that the mri part works at all seems like wild magic.
> It's proven that humans can just barely sense large-scale magnetic fields
It's tentatively proven that humans react to large magnetic fields. The reaction can come from simple interference, without ever being processed as a sense.
But there's so much more bullshit. That an MEG measurement was decoded only means that the brain produces a magnetic field that correlates with the information it is processing. So there's no Faraday cage in our head. Great. But the brain already knows what it is doing. All that information is there, very fast and reliable. Why should it try to decode its much less detailed and very weak magnetic field then? Where are the sensors? MEG needs super-conduction to work, and doesn't work when there's any disturbance. In the institute where I worked, it was forbidden to use carts (for moving equipment or coffee or whatever) on all floors in the corner where the MEG was located when there was an experiment going on, because it would disturb measurements. A few crystals aren't going to overcome those problems.
> The easier-than-expected problem of consciousness
OMFG. There's really no point in reading this.
The whole article is making a category mistake.
Contrast this with trans-cranial magnetic stimulation and claims this can induce the feeling of religiosity in people: you may believe in god, because your ferromagnetic particles align to believe in god in the right magnetic field..
(not really.. but still. the thing about induced states of mind by TCMS is true)
FWIW that’s debunked
Good find. Here's a paper reference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7887692_Sensed_pres...
Maybe there is a correlation between religion and the proximity to power lines.
> The result: some of those people showed a response to the magnetic fields on the EEG!
I wonder if that correlates with people who believe in astrology.
If you don’t want the EEG to capture your brainwaves you can wear a tin foil hat to lead the magnetic field astray.
tinfoil hat does NOT help with that. field tested
It works, weber you like it or not (⌐⊙_⊙)
(Slightly more seriously, the diamagnetic properties of Sn would in actuality very much interfere with the B1 field modulation of the (f)MRI sequence; and disturb the local B0 homogeneity; and thus disturb the experimental results. Although that was of course not what I meant when initially responding)
I don't want to be mean but this honestly reads like an AI-fueled delusion.
+1. The article itself hides it well, but the draft paper linked at the end is clearly 100% AIGC.
And the paper is clearly the ancestor to the article itself, based on the date (5dec -> 11dec)
That's exactly what I read out of it. I should yave stopped midway.
I agree. It’s an inversion of the usual pattern: AI-generated “thoughts”, written up by a human.
I’m surprised this made it to the front page of HN. I think AI tools are making it easier to create increasingly plausible-sounding bullshit, and gradually overwhelming the defenses of this community.
The brain could be using the weak magnetic field to glean info on what the brain is thinking...or you know, the brain could use the fact that its electrically connected to...the brain.
Hmm this leads me to recall a bunch of ancient pseudoscientific sounding beliefs and see whether or not they might be plausibly explained by this mechanism:
* Is it possible for humans to get a vague impression of other humans' thoughts via this mechanism? Not via body language, but "telepathy" (it'd obviously only work over very short ranges). If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
* Some animals have a preference for sleeping direction in alignment with magnetic pole, are some sleeping directions "healthier" than others for humans?
That aside, I didn't follow the part about how this is an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. Why couldn't the brain achieve global summarization via another mechanism, and why does having this "global summarization" result in qualia?
> If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
For what it's worth, I have a disorder that causes me to see "auras" around people quite often. The nature of the disorder is that my brain can't filter out its own sensory noise properly, giving rise to a lot of visual artefacts that non-disordered brains filter out. These range from 'TV static' to stuff that's not a million miles away from diffusion model artefacts, but the auras around people I see pretty much all the time especially against plain backgrounds. It's not very well-known or studied but fMRI studies have recently implicated the same serotonin receptor psychedelics target, and it's also linked to migraine.
I think this disorder being more prevalent than expected would be a good explanation for auras. It was once thought to be very rare, but many people who have it aren't actually affected enough to seek out a diagnosis. It wouldn't be an unreasonable source for images like auras, saints' haloes, and other things like that since they're just an ordinary part of vision for me. I also think it somewhat vindicates Aldous Huxley's thoughts on the subject.
I really like the idea of electrical fields being somehow important for consciousness, and it's not something I'd rule out off the bat. I just think that disorders of perception are a better explanation for auras and similar phenomena.
Haha yes, I developed the same thing following a blackout! It was scary at first but now it doesn't bother me, sometimes can be distracting though.
> If it is possible, maybe it is what some people supposedly feel as "auras"
I've always held two complementary beliefs regarding auras and similar senses:
1. It's plausible that some humans can sense subtle information about things like emotional states or reactions in other humans using non standard sensing mechanisms (so maybe electric fields rather than sight, for example).
2. I'm very certain that for overwhelmingly most humans who claim they can see auras, it's one of: bullshit, fakery, self delusion, wishful thinking, charlatanism, a scam.
Yeah, synesthesia combined with being attuned to body language and emotions could account for lot. I even remember there was some anecdote of a famous physicist (Feynman?) who investigated this soviet mind reader and found that he was picking up on subtle bodily clues.
I feel like the title should read: "If an Meta AI model can read a brain-wide signal, why couldn't the brain?"
"Wouldn't" suggests that the brain is choosing not to. I'm not sure this is the case here.
“Wouldn't” is being used in the logical-conditional sense, not in the sense of willingness, requesting, nor opinion.
It's literally “What's the reason that the machinery of the brain doesn't use this mechanism, given this proof that the effect could in principle be used?”. A similar question can be made for quantum mechanical interference in the brain (which to be clear I feel is adequately answered by “the brain is a wildly inappropriate vehicle for harnessing interference effects).
Using your explanation, let me try this on an example, say the extinction event that killed off many dinosaur species.
If some mammalian species were able to survive this extinction event and subsequently flourish, why wouldn't dinosaur species?
Not sure that works for me. I'd put "couldn't".
whenever I remind about mind reading - I get down voted and called schizophrenic. it's worse - tech is being actively used to sway large groups of population
That’s because that’s obviously mind writing not mind reading.
This reminds me of the study about dog poop being aligned to magnetic north/south.[0]
It seems a bit silly, but I suspect that more of our life may be effected by biomagnetism than we yet realize.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1742-9994-10-80
See this pubpeer discussion about critiques of plausibility of the papers conclusions: https://pubpeer.com/publications/155C1B85C0680A558D4431D059A...
>may be effected by biomagnetism
Bioelectricity too, which is just now starting to get properly researched (see Michael Levin's stuff).
This is cited
Well how far do these fields propagate and do you need to read them from different directions to make sense of them? Think you’d want to answer those questions first. The sensors from the study are very close and all around the head. Also demonstrate there is some phenomenon to explain in the first place.
I’ve long thought it would be unsurprising if we eventually found evidence of certain kinds of telepathy. It would just be too damn useful, and tuning up one exquisitely complex magneto-electro-chemical instrument in close proximity to another similar one seems like a good way to at least get resonance. Who knows?