

How your brain remembers the future   - cwan
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627545.200-how-your-brain-remembers-the-future.html

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eagleal
Some relevant/related papers:

# _Original paper_ : Alink, Arjen, Caspar M Schwiedrzik, Axel Kohler, Wolf
Singer, and Lars Muckli. Stimulus predictability reduces responses in primary
visual cortex. The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the
Society for Neuroscience 30, no. 8 (February 24, 2010): 2960-2966.
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20181593>.

# _A relevant paper_ : Alink, A., W. Singer, and L. Muckli. Capture of
Auditory Motion by Vision Is Represented by an Activation Shift from Auditory
to Visual Motion Cortex. Journal of Neuroscience 28, no. 11 (3, 2008):
2690-2697. <http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/short/28/11/2690>.

# _An interesting paper to HN_ : Alink, Wouter, Valentin Jijkoun, David Ahn,
and Maarten De Rijke. Vries. Representing and querying multi-dimensional
markup for question answering. (NLPXML-2006): 3--9.
[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.129....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.129.4698).

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Alex3917
You should check out the papers by Renee Baillargeon on testing infants'
knowledge of the physical world, they are pretty cool.

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eagleal
Nice, thanks. During the previous summer I tried to study how my very young
cousin (1y at the time) perceived the physical world, against the movies ones
(yeh, he watched movies :).

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emanuer
Ever tried to catch a ball? in the case you succeeded you "remembered the
future" Correct when I am wrong, but this article said nothing other than, we
can estimate where an moving object will be in a few seconds. As far as I
understood the abstracts of eagleal's linked articles, the describe that by
tricking those pattern recognition abilities of our brain we can create
optical illusions.

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kurtosis
Whoa! I remember trying an experiment a lot like this when I was in high
school with a girlfriend that was really into psychology. She would go onto my
bookshelf and place a book there that was new or should be unfamiliar to me
and then we measured how long it took me to find a different book that was
familiar to me. We thought having a new unpredictable book on the shelf slowed
down the search. I now think our methods were bogus, but there was undoubtedly
something that caused the new book to stand out when I was looking over the
bookshelf.

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pavel_lishin
I think that this is a different type of effect.

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inevaexisted
I'd be interested to see the results of this experiment on people with autism.
As I understand their brains process more of the visual stimulus than normal
people do.

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csbrooks
One thing that comes to mind is that people with autism tend to react
negatively to changes of plans, or disruptions of routine. (That may be a
longer time-frame effect than we're talking about here, though, and not
related.)

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tarkin2
This article is paywalled for me. Flagged.

A summary would be nice.

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pavel_lishin
Weird. Here's the article as I see it:

IT'S like remembering the future. Our brain generates predictions of likely
visual inputs so it can focus on dealing with the unexpected.

Predictable sights trigger less brain activity than unfamiliar stimuli,
bolstering the view that the brain is not merely reactive, but generates
predictions based on the recent past. "The brain expects to see things and
really just wants to confirm it now and again," says Lars Muckli at the
University of Glasgow, UK.

He and Arjen Alink at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in
Frankfurt, Germany, asked 12 volunteers to focus on a cross on a screen, above
and below which bars flashed on and off to create the illusion of movement. To
test a predictable stimulus, a third bar would appear in a position timed to
fit in with the illusion of smooth movement. For the unpredictable stimulus it
would appear out of sync. fMRI scans showed that the unpredictable stimulus
increased the activity in parts of the brain which deal with the earliest
stages of visual processing (Journal of Neuroscience, vol 30, p 2960).

The finding supports the "Bayesian brain" theory, which sees the brain as
making predictions about the world which it updates when new information comes
in.

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idm
So now I'm curious - is that the full article? That's what I see, too, but I
wonder if there's more to the article that is behind a paywall?

