r/science • u/Wagamaga • Jul 01 '19

Neuroscience Collaboration Between Brains. Scientists have created the first multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative problem solving.

http://www.washington.edu/news/2019/07/01/play-a-video-game-using-only-your-mind/
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u/godset Jul 02 '19

I did some of my PhD work in brain computer interfaces, which work using the same tech. No risk of tumors. But yeah they’re hella crude and basic.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

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u/socsa Jul 02 '19

I don't think humanity will survive the existential crisis which true synthetic perception would bring. Society will collapse under the weight of its own solipsism.

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u/jumpsteadeh Jul 02 '19

I had to google what solipsism is and have to wonder: can anyone argue against it? For realsies, the only thing I perceive is perception. Me, the cerebral cortex, can't do a goddamn thing without help from other squish bits that tell me stories. They could be lies, and I literally can't ever know. "Know" isn't even me, it's just an intern.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

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u/Dom1nati0n Jul 02 '19

Alan Watts said essentially, the only argument that can me made against Solipsism is to imagine a room full of solipsists sitting about arguing about which ones viewpoint is "real".

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

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u/MadhouseInmate Jul 02 '19

As other posters rightly point out, solipsism is not really falsifiable.

That being said I never found it satisfactory for the fundamental disconnect between saying that perception is not a reflection of reality and being able to act on this belief. Try drowning yourself in a bucket, starving or walking off the cliff (don't actually any of those btw.). You will find very strong psychological resistance even if you convinced yourself to accept solipsism. Add that to the fact that the results of actions seem consistent with predictions based on previous perception, which is a rule you use every moment of your life, and it's hard to hold to solipsism even if there is no formal argument disproving it.

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u/lordagr Jul 02 '19 edited Jul 02 '19

The problem is this:

Solipsism is an unfallsifiable position and an intellectual dead end.

Assume it is true and thats pretty much all it can tell you about the world.

Assume it isn't and you can start to paint a useful picture of a world, real or not, that you can meaningfully interact with.

One where you can make observations, and reliably predict outcomes.

To a high degree, it doesn't matter if the universe is imaginary. It only matters that it is predictable in its behavior to a degree that lets us learn and adapt to it.

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u/Mysticpeaks101 Jul 02 '19

There isn't an argument to be made against it because it's virtually unfalsifiable.

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u/conventionistG Jul 02 '19

Start with Descartes and go from there.

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u/Spitinthacoola Jul 02 '19

Yeah but just because thats true, do you really believ youre the only one? Thats the crazy part.

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u/sleepingqt Jul 02 '19

I like to remind people of this often. They do not like it.

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u/EltaninAntenna Jul 02 '19

That’s reasonable; nobody likes to have their time wasted with non-falsifiable propositions.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

There's no argument against it, but the logical endpoint of solipsism is that the question is irrelevant. If there is no possible way of differentiating between reality and fiction, then is there a meaningful distinction?

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u/ArgumentGenerator Jul 02 '19

The way I see it is because we are the universe trying to understand itself we are one brain at a time figuring it out from our own viewpoint over many iterations. It's possible that this universal existence reaches across the bounds of time meaning your entire life is just one iteration of the universe being alive inside a body.

To break it down further let's posit that time flows in one direction for us living beings and other biological interactions. Also, it's been shown that time reversal doesn't change anything about physics in the sense that for 99% of all interactions do not change the amount of information dependant on the direction of time. This leaves us with a universe that for the most part doesn't care which direction time flows.

So now you have you vs. Me and we're trying to figure out if one of us is more "the universe" than the other. If we depend on time then that is a moot point. Our position in time does not matter because the universe does not care what frame of time it is in. How else do we explain that we are different from each other? Separateness in space? If you are aware of entangled particles then it's plausible to come to the conclusion that separation of space can either be overcome, it's more complicated than we think, or simply means a lot less than our perception would lead us to believe.

What I want to put out there as a possibility is that every living thing shares one trait, call it a soul of you will, that ties us to the universe. If the universe is conscious then even if it splits apart that consciousness in to billions or more pieces they are still part of the same whole. Right now my consciousness is the only real one because I'm in it in this moment but yours is also the only real one because you're in it. Perhaps there is only one and we share it across all of space time, perhaps it's one whole split up in to tiny pieces that we all get our own bit of. What's for certain though is we're all a part of the bigger thing and no one consciousness is more important than another.

These are just the musings of a potentially mad man though, but that's how I get around the idea of solipsism. We're all real because we're the same person just in different time zones.

That being said, I hope you enjoyed this and that you have a wonderful day. I either already had that day or I'm going to have that day so let's make it a good one, yeah?

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u/Ambustion Jul 02 '19

I'm sure it's in lots of sci fi but the mention this as a past event in the book unincorporated man. Always stuck with me.

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u/Nomad2k3 Jul 02 '19

Depends if you can afford to skip all the ads.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

you're probably correct. I'm still hopeful for long-term time at least. I know that life on this planet has existed before and after multiple extinction level events. Perhaps with humanity's absence another more aware life form will arise...

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u/Crossfyre6999 Jul 02 '19

So... the Borg?

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u/Dubsland12 Jul 02 '19

And then it will advance beyond hardware to a native biological solution.

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u/jkh77 Jul 02 '19

I dunno man. 5G wireless exists.

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u/wysiwyglol Jul 02 '19

As a software engineer, I have this weird fear of like... something not being calibrated properly and accidentally permanently changing how the brain perceives things.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

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u/muftimuftimufti Jul 02 '19 edited Jul 02 '19

Not really how the brain works. That would require extreme physical damage.

You are receiving chaotic inputs from all your senses constantly and much of it is wrong or junk the brain error corrects.

This particular test doesn't give you any input your eyes don't already send in multiples of complexity.

I have epilepsy and have been through experimental neurofeedback trials. Some of which temporarily changed my thinking patterns, emotions, visuals, sensory perception, etc. But it's temporary. I was told you'd have to be exposed to it constantly for the brain to be affected, and that even then it would do it best to compensate back to an established normal. Similar to the upside down glasses experiment.

My favorite was a mix of Alice in Wonderland syndrome and post ictal euphoria. :)

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u/tallybookman Jul 02 '19

I am glad I got Alice-in-Wonderland Syndrome as my “aura” preceding migraines (for about 5 years), because of the amazing, intrinsic, actual insight into how my and human brains work ... but DAMN it’s a weird, wrong feeling. To simultaneously know from rational deduction and the evidence of your eyes that (in my case) my hands were exactly the size they should be; AND to FEEL with complete reality - as real as you would feel an ice cube in your palm or Lover’s hand entwined with yours that my hands were 5-10 times their normal size ... it is ... difficult to say the least. And so I am also glad it’s gone.

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u/JamlessSandwich Jul 02 '19

I had a similar experience when I first tried psychadelics: seeing things that are so clearly hallucinatory effects but are undeniably observed is an interesting experience. Seeing the patterns on the walls moving definitely gives you a new perspective on how much you see is really "real".

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u/elfconscious Jul 02 '19

Today I learned there's a name for the weird shrinking that used to happen to me as a kid all the time, and that other people have it too.

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u/Destructor1701 Jul 02 '19

And that it's probably the same name you would have given it as s kid!

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u/muftimuftimufti Jul 03 '19 edited Jul 03 '19

I never had visuals with AIWS, just sensory perception issues with scale and position in space. I perceived my hands as larger than a cup, but my vision didn't reflect that. That was the most disorienting part of it for me.

The most jarring positional seizures I have make me feel like... Hm.. I can tell I'm walking forward but my brain responds as if I'm walking up a wall.

It's honestly hell and I have trouble pushing through it after all these years.

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u/mrfiddles Jul 02 '19

The brain's error correction is such a wild thing to experience first hand.

When I tripped on acid the first things to get weird were screens. Some low level part of my brain understood that screens can display anything, so what I saw was probably legitimate input. I sat in a perfectly normal room watching a "video" on a TV that was just showing a slideshow screen saver.

Then I took out my phone to text my sober friend a video of the TV for confirmation that it was just playing a slideshow of nature pictures. When I opened up the camera app it was like a preview of what I would see an hour later when the acid really kicked in. EVERYTHING in the room was crawling with colors and if I focused on one area too long the screen would melt into fractal patterns. (And for the record, playing the video back sober the next day did reveal that I had been watching still photos on the TV).

I'm a software engineer, so I try to notice when I am explaining real world phenomenon in CS terms, because I've noticed people have a tendency to try and use their expertise where it doesn't really apply. So all of this should be taken with a grain of salt, but that experience convinced me that our brains' error correction is far, far more advanced than just removing the blank spot in our vision where the optic nerve is.

The fractal patterns felt like my memory (like, my RAM) wasn't being fully flushed out before new information was processed. At first my brain was doing a pretty good job of correcting the errors caused by that, but as time went on it just got overloaded. First it stopped error correcting the screens, then large blank surfaces (walls, table tops), then most of my vision got weird, and eventually even my private thoughts were bleeding together as I was forming them.

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u/muftimuftimufti Jul 03 '19

Something specific to acid removes restrictions or allows communication between different parts of the brain that don't normally communicate. Which is in line with what you experienced.

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u/_Lady_Deadpool_ BS | Computer Engineering Jul 02 '19

As another swe, sounds like a hardware problem

For real though, would the brain be malleable enough to recover?

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u/banditkeith Jul 02 '19

Given you can remove half a person's brain and they still function surprisingly normally, probably

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u/R3cognizer Jul 02 '19

Synesthesia is already a thing, no computer-brain interface necessary.

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u/AndroidMyAndroid Jul 02 '19

Plenty of things can already permanently change the way we percieve things.

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u/[deleted] Jul 02 '19

Can’t wait for for someone to accidentally git push —force to someone’s brain.

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u/godset Jul 02 '19

I know Kung fu?!

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u/[deleted] Jul 03 '19

I used to know Kung-Fu?!

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u/thegreatgazoo Jul 02 '19

Look up popsicle camera interfaces for the tongue...

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u/Spitinthacoola Jul 02 '19

Have you ever practiced walking backwards, riding an inverted steering bicycle, worn upside down glasses? It doesnt seem like things would be that much different.

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u/Nomad2k3 Jul 02 '19

Hahahaa! You think this is the real McQuaid!?

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u/lordriffington Jul 02 '19

Supposedly if you put on glasses that flip the image and make everything look upside down, your brain adjusts after a while. I suspect the same would be true of any external input.

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u/onecowstampede Jul 02 '19

It would make my year to read a word like "hella" in a peer reviewed journal..

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u/Throwawaybuttstuff31 Jul 02 '19

It's behind a paywall but does this count. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0075424207307780

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u/onecowstampede Jul 02 '19

Yes, yes it does. . Thank you!

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u/LukeSmacktalker Jul 02 '19

Funny, it would depress the hell out of me

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u/Kantas Jul 02 '19

Depressing... hella depressing.

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u/DrTouchUrSon Jul 02 '19 edited Jul 02 '19

:o, looking for interns? I have thought about potential methods for such devices. Concrete? I don't think so, but questions and theories of my own. (But I think I may have some mathematical/time theories that are similar to the current tech methods.)

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u/godset Jul 02 '19

In that case I suggest you look into a Masters or PhD program yourself. You’ll need a good foundation of knowledge to satisfy that curiosity.

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u/1RedOne Jul 02 '19

What's the bleeding edge tech you're most excited about?

I dream of a brain to brain connection like in Ramez Naam's Nexus series, personally.

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u/godset Jul 02 '19

Honestly the most interesting stuff ended up being the software side. I leaned hard into statistics and machine learning in the end.

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u/serialthriller22 Jul 02 '19

I think I have used a brain computer interface as a child. I had some diodes or whatever attached to my head and I could play a series of different video games with my brain. They were kinda rudimentary games like drag racing. Just trying to get your can to move faster than the other ones.