Sheeple

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But there is a deeper challenge the brain must tackle, without which feature-binding would rarely be possible. This is the problem of temporal binding: the assignment of the correct timing of events in the world. The challenge is that different stimulus features move through different processing streams and are processed at different speeds.Note to humans: your model of the universe is subtly but consistently broken.
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So if the visual brain wants to get events correct timewise, it may have only one choice: wait for the slowest information to arrive. To accomplish this, it must wait about a tenth of a second. In the early days of television broadcasting, engineers worried about the problem of keeping audio and video signals synchronized. Then they accidentally discovered that they had around a hundred milliseconds of slop: As long as the signals arrived within this window, viewers' brains would automatically resynchronize the signals; outside that tenth- of- a- second window, it suddenly looked like a badly dubbed movie.
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It has been shown that the brain constantly recalibrates its expectations about arrival times. And it does so by starting with a single, simple assumption: if it sends out a motor act (such as a clap of the hands), all the feedback should be assumed to be simultaneous and any delays should be adjusted until simultaneity is perceived. In other words, the best way to predict the expected relative timing of incoming signals is to interact with the world: each time you kick or touch or knock on something, your brain makes the assumption that the sound, sight, and touch are simultaneous.
While this is a normally adaptive mechanism, we have discovered a strange consequence of it: Imagine that every time you press a key, you cause a brief flash of light. Now imagine we sneakily inject a tiny delay (say, two hundred milliseconds) between your key-press and the subsequent flash. You may not even be aware of the small, extra delay. However, if we suddenly remove the delay, you will now believe that the flash occurred before your key-press, an illusory reversal of action and sensation. Your brain tells you this, of course, because it has adjusted to the timing of the delay.
The MONIAC was approximately 2 m high, 1.2 m wide and almost 1 m deep, and consisted of a series of transparent plastic tanks and pipes which were fastened to a wooden board. Each tank represented some aspect of the UK national economy and the flow of money around the economy was illustrated by coloured water. At the top of the board was a large tank called the treasury. Water (representing money) flowed from the treasury to other tanks representing the various ways in which a country could spend its money. For example, there were tanks for health and education. To increase spending on health care a tap could be opened to drain water from the treasury to the tank which represented health spending. Water then ran further down the model to other tanks, representing other interactions in the economy. Water could be pumped back to the treasury from some of the tanks to represent taxation. Changes in tax rates were modeled by increasing or decreasing pumping speeds.Like a Babbage engine, only messier.
Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.
Both my home and work computers decided to go blooey over the weekend, so I’ll be spending my evenings’ spare time trying to resurrect them. So it’ll be light posting from me for the foreseeable future. And no, I’m certainly not spending all of my time playing Bioshock. What a silly idea!