BrainPsyence

I am a Cognition and Neuroscience PhD student, studying MRI, functional connectivity (interactions among brain regions), and big-data statistics. _______________________ I want to learn about how we measure brain activity, and how we can learn more from those methods by asking better statistical questions.

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Thad Roberts

- How to imagine multiple dimensions. From 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 10. 

- - > There’s one set of laws for the physics we experience (classical mechanics) and another set of laws for microscopic physics (quantum mechanics), and they don’t play well together. But if we make the mathematical assumption of not 3-4, but 10-11 dimensions, then a new set of laws is able to explain both sets together. 

- Space is quantized, meaning it’s made of quanta. A quanta is the smallest possible particle of space. 

- - > This also implies that although space and time (and your thoughts) *feel* continuous, they are discreet. 

[The Torah’s timeline is also discreet. Human consciousness is strongly 3-dimensional. The “4th” dimension is time. But also, this dimension is different. Space we can move back and forth, left and right, in time we are falling forward.]

- Thad explains that time doesn’t really exist, it is the experience caused by moving through space, past quanta. 

- Each quanta appears to us in 3-dimensions. But each quanta--each point in space--actually has 7 dimensions inside it. Underneath it. 

- - > For a moment, take the perspective of a single quanta. You’re at eye-level, where ever in the universe you imagined yourself. Maybe that’s on land. You could also imagine the feeling of jumping into a pool, feeling the pressure all around, not just seeing but feeling the space all around you. Then, imagine jumping up out onto land again. Now that you’re on land, recognize that air surrounds you just like the water did. This shift in perspective, realizing that space can be conceived in more ways than we imagine it in daily life. Physics says, in reality, each 3-D point in space, a quanta, contains 7 invisible dimensions.

[3, 7, and 10 are fundamental numbers of physics, and of Torah. 3 are physical, 7 are spiritual, together 10 gives consciousness. 3-D consciousness feels like 4. 10-D consciousness feels like 11]. 

  - > Gravity is explained as the density between quanta. Although from the (3-dimensional) human eye, quanta are imperceptible (we just see space in front of us), the additional 7 dimensions allow imperceptible amounts of space between the quanta. 

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Stop studying and go to sleep!

BrainPsyence:

Although we all implicitly know that good sleep is good medicine, a recent study showed that the brain is learning while you're sleeping. That is, after learning a motor task (balancing on a rotating rod), mice who slept formed more new synapses and outperformed their sleep-deprived pals. Better yet, mice performed better after 1 hour of practice and sleep, compared to 3 hours of practice and no sleep.

The moral: if your goal is to learn, you could be better off sleeping than reading your notes a third time (the second time is probably still recommended).

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BrainPsyence:

Best of animal photobombs

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BrainPsyence:

Richard Feynman, the legendary physicist, lays the smackdown on this poor interviewer. I won't ruin it for you, because watching his train of thought unravel is so entertaining. But ultimately he provides some insight on WHY magnets are so fun, and more importantly, the mindset necessary to explain how the world works. 

Also, the other videos of Feynman in this chair, which should be offered at the end of this video, are pretty interesting as well. Check out the one about Fire. 

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From the journal, Neuron: A Nonvisual Look at the Functional Organization of Visual Cortex

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The future of the kilogram, and the roundest object in the... universe?

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The iris of a husky

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So it seems that TEDxBoulder was a good one. This is a great "theory" of what makes things funny, and is itself enjoyable to watch. It's sort of like a magician explaining his tricks as he goes, but you find that you are still equally amazed. 

Peter McGraw highlights a central principle of humor, the benign violation, as well as another principle, distance, that seems to be slightly more complicated. 

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Just yesterday, I realized that although I was familiar with the idea of spacetime, I really didn't get how the two could be a single fabric. You might be familiar with images of the fabric of spacetime--often used in sciencey documentaries to show that, say, the Earth orbits the sun because the mass of the sun stretches (down) the fabric of spacetime, which we feel as gravity. So this type of image visually explains that mass pulls on the fabric of spacetime to create gravity, but I still didn't (and largely don't) understand other properties of this fabric or how this fabric relates to time. It is afterall spacetime. 

I didn't realize when I began watching this TED Talk that it would help explain these depictions of the fabric of spacetime. It did, as promised by the title, "Visualizing Eleven Dimension", address how to imagine 11 dimensions, the number of dimensions predicted by string theory. But more importantly, the real value I saw in this video was that the speaker briefly described several consequences of an 11-dimensional universe. For me, this was one of the first descriptions of string theory that didn't sound like poorly-written science fiction (notably, from my understanding, these are consequences of string theory, which itself is not mentioned). Even better, it came with an explanation of spacetime, in which the fabric of spacetime and the existence of 11 dimensions are each needed to describe the other. Maybe in a future talk someone will explain the time part of spacetime!