David Eagleman - What the actual fuck?

[P3nT4gR4m]

This guy is just a crackpot, talking gobshite, right

[Reginald Ret]

9 minutes in, everything he says is true.

[Reginald Ret]

One of the implications of the brain's plasticity is that you can give people artificial senses in crazy ways.

Cool huh.

[P3nT4gR4m]

This is a total mindfuck! I googled him and it turns out he's a bona fide neuroscientist. I never thought neuroscience had reached a place where it was starting to understand stuff like this

Encouraging!

And the sensory stuff is totally new to me. Shit needs explored, immediately. BRB - doing science!

[P3nT4gR4m]

Okay, that's it, I'm following him as a prophet, until someone better comes along

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

You might enjoy Ramachandran, he's an asshole but he's a sensory neuroscientist who specializes in neuroplasticity.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Cheers! So much of the neuroscience I'm exposed to is what I'd call "chip-level" stuff as analogous to the electronic form of computation. I have only a passing interest/focus in the chip-level branches of my scientific field. What they're calling "Neuroplasticity" is something I've only heard about in relation to the way the hardware behaves at this tiny scale.

While I think this is an important field of study, especially when applied to a reverse-engineering problem, as consciousness presents, It's something other people than me do, the same as the guys who forward engineer the chips that I currently employ to perform my professional line in voodoo.

Likewise my interest in neuroscience is much more a software - focussed endeavour. I have this machine, I don't necessarily need to know the mechanics of what the hell all the little gizmos and doodads are doing, in order to achieve results but I did find it damned useful when I sussed out that one of their characteristic functions is that they can be "flashed" much like their electronic counterparts, with new computational structures. The thing on the second vid I posted there about the yellow bar biofeedback monitor, it hints at how this substrate may be reprogrammed.

It's pretty rudimentary but the clip is from 2010 so no doubt things have advanced a bit since then?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Welllll... yes and no. Depends on what you mean by "advanced". A lot of what he's talking about wasn't even really "new" at the time... neuroscience is one of those weird fields where we know a lot of what because we can observe it, but the how is elusive. Most of the heavy research being done now is investigating the how, and it may come across as both ridiculously specific and hopelessly dull to the non-neuroscientist.

It's a deeply unsexy field, really.

I know I've posted a few journal links that were probably only interesting to me at the time, and when I get back from my volunteer gig this morning I'll dig them up and repost them here so you can get a sense for the state of the research.

In the meantime, the neuroscience articles at Science Daily are a great place to kind of skim what's going on in the field: http://www.sciencedaily.com/search/?keyword=neuroscience

[P3nT4gR4m]

Thank you muchly, my current neuroscience feeds are sketchy at best. Academia/research science frustrates the hell out of me as an outsider as it seems it's becoming an increasingly fragmented thing that's kinda hard to follow. I suppose this makes sense, as the limits of out understanding expand, like a balloon, individual disciplines become too broad to be useful and are subdivided into discrete disciplines and avenues of research but understanding that doesn't make it any less of a pain in the ass.

I often feel like I'm waiting on this huge leviathian that is the scientific establishment, spitting out something I can use. It does this regularly and I love it for doing so but it always seems to catch me unawares and new stuff will generally come flying out of leftfield, the ball hit by some weird new offshoot discipline, rather than the ones I've been paying attention to which, in turn, are plodding away and not really producing much in the way of practical application.

At some point I expect a programming methodology is going to emerge, no doubt from some weird new psychology/neuroscience hybrid or other that I'm not even aware exists and I've even less doubt that it'll be a million times more powerful than the cobbled together bullshit I'm using right now but, until that happens, I'm kinda watching a myriad of rabbit holes, wondering which one my upgrade is going to emerge from. 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Sounds like what you want to follow is computational neuroscience: http://www.frontiersin.org/computational_neuroscience

UW offers a free online course that is taught at an undergraduate level, if you're interested: https://www.coursera.org/course/compneuro

The reason science seems so fragmented is exactly what you said; once a broad body of knowledge is built, subfields emerge, and as they are studied subfields of those emerge, and so on down the line into infinity. As the saying goes, good research generates more questions than it does answers. We used to think glial cells were just support systems for neurons, and that they were about equal in number; now we have labs that just study glia. We used to think that DNA that didn't code for proteins was literal junk, useless leftovers from who-knows-what; now we know that it does something incredibly important and vastly more complex than the protein-coding DNA we've sequenced. We used to scoff at Lamarckian inheritance, and now we're learning that not only can some acquired physical changes be inherited from one generation to the next, so can some forms of memory.

Every single advance in neuroscience serves to highlight the fact, as Eagleman pointed out, that the more we learn the more we realize how much we don't know. This bothers some people, who don't care for the idea of an ungraspable universe. For many scientists, though, it's the most delightful idea possible; an infinity of discovery.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I dig the hell out of computational neuroscience. It feeds cognitive computing with lots of good stuff that can be biomimic'd but where my interest really lies is something that I'm not aware is happening outside of psychology at the moment. Best way I could describe it would be a sort of structured psychological semantic interface. Right now the only place you'll find this kind of thing is in hokey old occult literature and those come with a lot of belief-system fuckery, which I don't go in for.

My method, mainly employs the imaginative faculty to brute force overwrites by state-repetition. It's not for the faint hearted and it's not the kind of thing I'd encourage anyone to go fucking around with but, unfortunately (or fortunately) for me, I was kind of forced into it, following a system crash. So I know this is possible and there are psyche approaches that kinda deal with the same things but any I've investigated seem to fall a bit short of full potential. Maybe it's just too fucking dangerous and it's a road they'll never go down but I hope not. Would make my life much easier if there were trained professionals developing this kind of thing.

I'm definitely in the "infinity of discovery" camp. If we knew everything (with a capital 'E') I suspect there'd be fuck all left to do