For context, the debate in the field has been whether these are epiphenomena of the actual neuronal activity, or a meaningful driver of further activity.
I don’t think these studies quite rest the case. As Buzsaki comments in the article, the action is in the cells to create these waves. Do the waves themselves get measured and impact what happens next? The issue at hand is: synaptic currents are stronger and we know neurons respond to them. The wave behavior is in the extracellular fluid as well, and that part we have evidence neurons don’t respond much to.
That said, thing the article doesn’t talk about is astrocytes. Especially in the cortex, most synapses are tripartite. There’s an astrocytic end foot that sheathes the synapse and regulates how much of the bulk extracellular space has access to the synapse. And one astrocyte can touch thousands of synapses and in humans, hundreds of thousands. They also form a syncitium, through gap junctions/electrical synapses.
Do astrocytes respond to the extracellular wave behavior, which potentially changes the extent and behavior of the syncitium, and thus impact the neurons they touch?
That’s still an open question but that’s what I’d be interested to find out more about.
Bit of a sensationalist title - EEG/iEEG measurements have led to worthwhile clinical outcomes but also are an avenue for bunk pseudosccience so it pays to be careful whenever you see the words 'brain waves' paired with some large claim.
More accurate, much less sexy title: Intracranial Recordings Uncover Spiral and Concentric Brain Waves During Memory Tasks" (study completed only on small cohorts of epilepsy patients performing constrained memory tasks).
No inner workings revealed or laid bare, just another piece of evidence contributing to a small part of the debate in cortical electrophysiological studies on whether or not some data measures can be discarded as the downstream, messy noise of the neurons firing or actual, high-fidelity signals of activity
I work in neurotech and specifically with EEG, some would find it surprising that I 100% agree with this take.
When we understood the world of fluid-dynamics, we looked at the body as blood going through a pump delivering materials (oxygen, minerals, etc) to different parts of the body. We though to ourselves "we know how this works!".
Then we discovered electricity, slapped our collective foreheads and said "oh! It's electrical!" now I get it.
We still don't.
Let's learn what we can from what we can and use this knowledge to our benefit, but let's not assume we understand the underlying mechanisms just because we can find correlations.
Idk… I follow EEG science pretty closely now that the BCI industry is exploding post-DL, and this seems like a very accurate title.
Inner workings are indeed being uncovered; what would that look like, if not this…? We’re not going to find, like, a blueprint hidden in there somewhere with marginalia from god. Spiral and concentric brainwaves sound pretty damn compelling and specific, not just a tweak of our definition of noise in this data.
A better piece of evidence is that this is quanta. I’ve literally never seen a sensationalist or inaccurate or less than fascinating article make it to their site. I’m gonna need a ton more critique from randos on HN to seriously consider that this might be the first.
BTW, hug your loved ones, y’all. EEG has been mostly bunk applications for consumers/non-scientists for years, like “biofeedback” therapy, but we are now extremely likely to see the first polygraph that actually works in our lifetimes, not to mention all the other crazy shit. Imagine how seriously things change when every government can load a truth-telling helmet into every cop car :(
On the upside it’ll make for some wild HCI someday, perhaps, if we make it that far. The scene from Westworld S04 (my favorite piece of lost media) with Dolores creating a 3d narrative world with words and gestures that matches what she’s envisioning comes to mind, for one thing… the dream.
It's way out of my area of expertise, but my suspicion is that all these 4-12 Hz waves bouncing around in a 3D structure may be interfering to produce signals that tick much faster, and some functionality of the brain is clocked on that.
There's this thing called "scissor effect", where when you have two wavefronts colliding at an angle, you get an apparent wave that moves much faster than either of the input waves - if you do that with light, you can trivially exceed the speed of light. Now this isn't an information-carrying wave, but I believe you can still use this phenomenon as a "virtual clock", to synchronize a bunch of independent receivers to act on a frequency faster than the real, interfering clock signals.
Well, that, or the brain is just such a mess that it acts as a spread-spectrum source and none of the high frequencies are above the noise floor.
EDIT: and of course a little background research after writing this comment revealed it's already settled (through more invasive probing) that the human brain has elements operating in kilohertz range - the mystery isn't whether this happens, but how it adds up to cognition and consciousness.
There are faster waves than that, but the brain just doesn't seem to be fully synchronous. It doesn't have to have a fast "clock tree" if a lot of the low timescale activity is inherently async.
It's not at all how humans build computational devices. But humans run digital signals at gigahertz rates and do intelligent design. Nature doesn't do either.
I suspect that there are numerous advantages to silicon computation that biological neurons can't touch, but the brain is no slouch either - it was optimized for millions of years to be good for what it does. It's very good at what it does - sometimes because of, and sometimes despite its architecture.
It's honestly amazing that the brain even works as well as it does, given how slow neurons are. I suspect that distributed population coding that seems to be endemic to neural networks can also serve as a workaround for neurons being unreliable, slow to recover and subject to fatigue.
I wouldn't be so sure that the brain necessarily clocks faster than that. I think it's more likely that faster chains of thought are defined by the flow of the waves rather than their frequency.
Sentience / consciousness is “hosted by” or “seated in” structured EM fields. Neurons are just the mechanism.
I’ve not yet thought of a way to falsify this hypothesis, but I continue to think there’s something to this framing.
One reason I like it is that it doesn’t completely succumb to total dualism. Also it doesn’t say WHY this would be the case, or HOW. It just says “that thing you call experience? That’s a special kind of structured EM field configuration.”
What would you expect to happen of a brain were "unfolded" in some complicated way? Surely that would significantly change any structure in the em field.
This hypothesis doesn't sound immediately wrong to me like many other non-materialist/non-physicalist ideas, but it does sound like a suspiciously convenient way of excluding non-biological entities from ever possibly having a human like experience.
I don’t think it would exclude non biological entities. If neurons are simply the way for such a structured field to be generated, sustained, and modulated, then presumably any physical apparatus that produced “that type of field” would produce experience.
Or a hybrid. We already know there’s a long range binding problem in neuroscience: how do physically separated neuron assemblies construct what we report as a gestalt experience.
This is a non spooky answer that also points to possible applications like cybernetic EM field modulators.
All of this is complete fantasy, of course, but the hypothesis at least has the virtue of not getting too far over its skis.
Well, GP would have to define "EM fields" a little more precisely, in which case for a subset of such definitions, there would be some experiments possible - strong enough EM fields, or EM fields calibrated to specific frequencies, would then wipe out consciousness (possibly unrecoverably) without seemingly damaging the physical substrate of the brain.
I think there will be a lot to be learned if we can scale up the high resolution measurement methods here to map exactly how brainwaves travel when performing specific tasks.
Maybe they should recruit experienced meditators who can give accurate introspective self-reports to be compared to the measurements, then we would start to have a relatively confident map between brain physiology and psychology. (e.g. X brain pattern in Y region specifically corresponds to the Z step of reasoning when solving the problem)
> Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain's Inner Workings
From my ignorant point of view I can't quite make sense of the title. Brain is probably the last organ one would be surprised to find complexity in. I can see "surprisingly complex wave reveal spleen inner workings" being a good title, like "wow, we though it was a dumb blood filter, but look what we found!" kind of a thing. But for the brain isn't the default assumption that has it complexity we haven't figure out yet?
Could you please stop posting low-quality comments, such as snark, flamebait, and provocation? Your account has unfortunately been doing a ton of this lately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I know it's anecdotal and irrelevant to the real science, but whenever neuroscience comes up, I think about the Exhalation short story Ted Chian, about a civilization with brains that rely on air pressure, and a deep explanation of these alien brains and at the same time made me appreciate that we also still know so little about our own, they may as well be the same.
Brain waves are to biological neural populations what large-scale, low-dimensional activation modes in the transformer’s residual stream are to an LLM.
“The work coming out is moving this from ‘Are they relevant?’ to ‘This is a major motif of how the cortex processes information,’” said Earl K. Miller(opens a new tab), a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It’d be interesting to try and model the various waveforms observed as time crystals and see if the mathematics of the latter can (partially) predict the former.
Stopped reading here when I recognized the slop
“The work coming out is moving this from ‘Are they relevant?’ to ‘This is a major motif of how the cortex processes information,’”
I think skepticism is healthy for the vast majority of sensationalized titles especially those coming from corporate entities. You'll very often find me in those OAI/Anthrop threads being very critical of their claims.
I like applying that same rigor to articles like this one. This is not a revolutionary discovery, it is a possible, un-replicated new avenue that could become revolutionary with enough of an evidence base. But there are many dozens of these same kinds of discoveries published all the time often leading to dead-ends (which is actually great since that's another rabbit hole you no longer have to chase - here's to null findings!)
In the same way you shouldn't accept PR regurgitated by so-called 'independent' journals when they come from corporate and government institutions, the same rigor should be applied to PR from universities seeking grants
I suspect, if our conscious experience === the waves created by neuron's firing, that the hum of the GPU when running a LLM doesn't have the dynamic range to meaningfully talk about having a conscious experiences.
Why would you assume waves with LLMs? What about the structure or function of an artificial neuron prompts you to hypothesize they generate continuous waves in a bunch of nested frequency ranges?
For context, the debate in the field has been whether these are epiphenomena of the actual neuronal activity, or a meaningful driver of further activity.
I don’t think these studies quite rest the case. As Buzsaki comments in the article, the action is in the cells to create these waves. Do the waves themselves get measured and impact what happens next? The issue at hand is: synaptic currents are stronger and we know neurons respond to them. The wave behavior is in the extracellular fluid as well, and that part we have evidence neurons don’t respond much to.
That said, thing the article doesn’t talk about is astrocytes. Especially in the cortex, most synapses are tripartite. There’s an astrocytic end foot that sheathes the synapse and regulates how much of the bulk extracellular space has access to the synapse. And one astrocyte can touch thousands of synapses and in humans, hundreds of thousands. They also form a syncitium, through gap junctions/electrical synapses.
Do astrocytes respond to the extracellular wave behavior, which potentially changes the extent and behavior of the syncitium, and thus impact the neurons they touch?
That’s still an open question but that’s what I’d be interested to find out more about.
Bit of a sensationalist title - EEG/iEEG measurements have led to worthwhile clinical outcomes but also are an avenue for bunk pseudosccience so it pays to be careful whenever you see the words 'brain waves' paired with some large claim.
More accurate, much less sexy title: Intracranial Recordings Uncover Spiral and Concentric Brain Waves During Memory Tasks" (study completed only on small cohorts of epilepsy patients performing constrained memory tasks).
No inner workings revealed or laid bare, just another piece of evidence contributing to a small part of the debate in cortical electrophysiological studies on whether or not some data measures can be discarded as the downstream, messy noise of the neurons firing or actual, high-fidelity signals of activity
I work in neurotech and specifically with EEG, some would find it surprising that I 100% agree with this take.
When we understood the world of fluid-dynamics, we looked at the body as blood going through a pump delivering materials (oxygen, minerals, etc) to different parts of the body. We though to ourselves "we know how this works!".
Then we discovered electricity, slapped our collective foreheads and said "oh! It's electrical!" now I get it.
We still don't.
Let's learn what we can from what we can and use this knowledge to our benefit, but let's not assume we understand the underlying mechanisms just because we can find correlations.
Idk… I follow EEG science pretty closely now that the BCI industry is exploding post-DL, and this seems like a very accurate title.
Inner workings are indeed being uncovered; what would that look like, if not this…? We’re not going to find, like, a blueprint hidden in there somewhere with marginalia from god. Spiral and concentric brainwaves sound pretty damn compelling and specific, not just a tweak of our definition of noise in this data.
A better piece of evidence is that this is quanta. I’ve literally never seen a sensationalist or inaccurate or less than fascinating article make it to their site. I’m gonna need a ton more critique from randos on HN to seriously consider that this might be the first.
BTW, hug your loved ones, y’all. EEG has been mostly bunk applications for consumers/non-scientists for years, like “biofeedback” therapy, but we are now extremely likely to see the first polygraph that actually works in our lifetimes, not to mention all the other crazy shit. Imagine how seriously things change when every government can load a truth-telling helmet into every cop car :(
On the upside it’ll make for some wild HCI someday, perhaps, if we make it that far. The scene from Westworld S04 (my favorite piece of lost media) with Dolores creating a 3d narrative world with words and gestures that matches what she’s envisioning comes to mind, for one thing… the dream.
wow, they made a forth session of West world...?
>also are an avenue for bunk pseudosccience so it pays to be careful whenever you see the words 'brain waves' paired with some large claim.
What makes you make such an accusation?
His brain waves
this was the first web search result for brain wave pseudoscience:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/brain-wave-pseudoscience/
And still all slow stuff, 4 to 12 Hz. There must be something in the brain that clocks faster, but nobody seems to have found it yet.
It's way out of my area of expertise, but my suspicion is that all these 4-12 Hz waves bouncing around in a 3D structure may be interfering to produce signals that tick much faster, and some functionality of the brain is clocked on that.
There's this thing called "scissor effect", where when you have two wavefronts colliding at an angle, you get an apparent wave that moves much faster than either of the input waves - if you do that with light, you can trivially exceed the speed of light. Now this isn't an information-carrying wave, but I believe you can still use this phenomenon as a "virtual clock", to synchronize a bunch of independent receivers to act on a frequency faster than the real, interfering clock signals.
Well, that, or the brain is just such a mess that it acts as a spread-spectrum source and none of the high frequencies are above the noise floor.
EDIT: and of course a little background research after writing this comment revealed it's already settled (through more invasive probing) that the human brain has elements operating in kilohertz range - the mystery isn't whether this happens, but how it adds up to cognition and consciousness.
There are faster waves than that, but the brain just doesn't seem to be fully synchronous. It doesn't have to have a fast "clock tree" if a lot of the low timescale activity is inherently async.
It's not at all how humans build computational devices. But humans run digital signals at gigahertz rates and do intelligent design. Nature doesn't do either.
I suspect that there are numerous advantages to silicon computation that biological neurons can't touch, but the brain is no slouch either - it was optimized for millions of years to be good for what it does. It's very good at what it does - sometimes because of, and sometimes despite its architecture.
It's honestly amazing that the brain even works as well as it does, given how slow neurons are. I suspect that distributed population coding that seems to be endemic to neural networks can also serve as a workaround for neurons being unreliable, slow to recover and subject to fatigue.
What makes you think that a clock-timing analogy even applies to brains doing work?
I wouldn't be so sure that the brain necessarily clocks faster than that. I think it's more likely that faster chains of thought are defined by the flow of the waves rather than their frequency.
Seems to be pretty much in line with human reaction times?
My hypothesis:
Sentience / consciousness is “hosted by” or “seated in” structured EM fields. Neurons are just the mechanism.
I’ve not yet thought of a way to falsify this hypothesis, but I continue to think there’s something to this framing.
One reason I like it is that it doesn’t completely succumb to total dualism. Also it doesn’t say WHY this would be the case, or HOW. It just says “that thing you call experience? That’s a special kind of structured EM field configuration.”
What would you expect to happen of a brain were "unfolded" in some complicated way? Surely that would significantly change any structure in the em field. This hypothesis doesn't sound immediately wrong to me like many other non-materialist/non-physicalist ideas, but it does sound like a suspiciously convenient way of excluding non-biological entities from ever possibly having a human like experience.
I don’t think it would exclude non biological entities. If neurons are simply the way for such a structured field to be generated, sustained, and modulated, then presumably any physical apparatus that produced “that type of field” would produce experience.
Or a hybrid. We already know there’s a long range binding problem in neuroscience: how do physically separated neuron assemblies construct what we report as a gestalt experience.
This is a non spooky answer that also points to possible applications like cybernetic EM field modulators.
All of this is complete fantasy, of course, but the hypothesis at least has the virtue of not getting too far over its skis.
An unfolded brain works fine.
One of the requirements for a random thought to be an hypothesis is that it has to be falsifiable with some kind of an experiment.
What would falsify this?
You can seamlessly replace EM in your paragraph with something quantum and it'd still be sort of a reasonable thought.
Well, GP would have to define "EM fields" a little more precisely, in which case for a subset of such definitions, there would be some experiments possible - strong enough EM fields, or EM fields calibrated to specific frequencies, would then wipe out consciousness (possibly unrecoverably) without seemingly damaging the physical substrate of the brain.
This would finally validate the tinfoil hats! :)
To be fair, I have a room that is a bit of a faraday cage (almost no 5g and really atrocious wifi) and I get much better sleep there than other rooms.
There are things like magnetic stimulation of the brain, but there's no EM-field equivalent to Propofol.
I think there will be a lot to be learned if we can scale up the high resolution measurement methods here to map exactly how brainwaves travel when performing specific tasks.
Maybe they should recruit experienced meditators who can give accurate introspective self-reports to be compared to the measurements, then we would start to have a relatively confident map between brain physiology and psychology. (e.g. X brain pattern in Y region specifically corresponds to the Z step of reasoning when solving the problem)
> Surprisingly Complex Waves Reveal the Brain's Inner Workings
From my ignorant point of view I can't quite make sense of the title. Brain is probably the last organ one would be surprised to find complexity in. I can see "surprisingly complex wave reveal spleen inner workings" being a good title, like "wow, we though it was a dumb blood filter, but look what we found!" kind of a thing. But for the brain isn't the default assumption that has it complexity we haven't figure out yet?
[flagged]
Could you please stop posting low-quality comments, such as snark, flamebait, and provocation? Your account has unfortunately been doing a ton of this lately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I know it's anecdotal and irrelevant to the real science, but whenever neuroscience comes up, I think about the Exhalation short story Ted Chian, about a civilization with brains that rely on air pressure, and a deep explanation of these alien brains and at the same time made me appreciate that we also still know so little about our own, they may as well be the same.
Brain waves are to biological neural populations what large-scale, low-dimensional activation modes in the transformer’s residual stream are to an LLM.
Wow!!
“The work coming out is moving this from ‘Are they relevant?’ to ‘This is a major motif of how the cortex processes information,’” said Earl K. Miller(opens a new tab), a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It’d be interesting to try and model the various waveforms observed as time crystals and see if the mathematics of the latter can (partially) predict the former.
Stopped reading here when I recognized the slop “The work coming out is moving this from ‘Are they relevant?’ to ‘This is a major motif of how the cortex processes information,’”
This is what Walter J. Freeman III* spent his career working on, surprised he wasn't mentioned. I used to be very obsessed with him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Jackson_Freeman_III
Nonlinear brain dynamics as macroscopic manifestation of underlying many-body field dynamics, https://arxiv.org/html/q-bio/0511037
https://web.archive.org/web/20070609235302/http://sulcus.ber...
-----
[*] No, not that guy; the son of that guy.
Edit: I've never seen a wikipedia page with so many typos.
Is there any evidence the brain is a quantum device?
It could be and more. Nature is not constrained by what human beings know at any point in time.
Now do Beavis and Butthead.
[flagged]
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I think skepticism is healthy for the vast majority of sensationalized titles especially those coming from corporate entities. You'll very often find me in those OAI/Anthrop threads being very critical of their claims.
I like applying that same rigor to articles like this one. This is not a revolutionary discovery, it is a possible, un-replicated new avenue that could become revolutionary with enough of an evidence base. But there are many dozens of these same kinds of discoveries published all the time often leading to dead-ends (which is actually great since that's another rabbit hole you no longer have to chase - here's to null findings!)
In the same way you shouldn't accept PR regurgitated by so-called 'independent' journals when they come from corporate and government institutions, the same rigor should be applied to PR from universities seeking grants
I wonder what the "waves" in LLMs are; The global firing patterns that can help us interpret what the weights are doing en-masse
I thought this research had already been done and published by Anthropic. https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
Care to define 'waves' in this context?
I suspect, if our conscious experience === the waves created by neuron's firing, that the hum of the GPU when running a LLM doesn't have the dynamic range to meaningfully talk about having a conscious experiences.
But that's armchair conjecturing.
Why would you assume waves with LLMs? What about the structure or function of an artificial neuron prompts you to hypothesize they generate continuous waves in a bunch of nested frequency ranges?