
Goals and Rewards Redraw the Brain’s Map of the World - Osiris30
https://www.quantamagazine.org/goals-and-rewards-redraw-the-brains-map-of-the-world-20190328
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taliesinb
Evidence for
[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/07/27/097...](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2017/07/27/097170.full.pdf)
?

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pizza
Have you seen this?

A compressed sensing perspective of hippocampal function

Abstract: _Hippocampus is one of the most important information processing
units in the brain. Input from the cortex passes through convergent axon
pathways to the downstream hippocampal subregions and, after being
appropriately processed, is fanned out back to the cortex. Here, we review
evidence of the hypothesis that information flow and processing in the
hippocampus complies with the principles of Compressed Sensing (CS). The CS
theory comprises a mathematical framework that describes how and under which
conditions, restricted sampling of information (data set) can lead to
condensed, yet concise, forms of the initial, subsampled information entity
(i.e., of the original data set). In this work, hippocampus related regions
and their respective circuitry are presented as a CS-based system whose
different components collaborate to realize efficient memory encoding and
decoding processes. This proposition introduces a unifying mathematical
framework for hippocampal function and opens new avenues for exploring coding
and decoding strategies in the brain._

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4126371/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4126371/)

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clairity
this mechanism also could underly apathies like privilege blindness--having
the world seemingly match your expectations makes you unaware of how it can be
skewed in your favor and against others.

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EGreg
Most likely the gap happens because, on the one hand:

1\. The privileged do not see enough actual evidence of the lack of privilege
— for example all those little or big moments when someone who doesn’t have
the privilege has a much harder time

and on the other hand:

2\. The people who seek to speak on behalf of the underprivileged group as a
whole tend to play up the claims of hardship and bias, often using anecdotal
evidence or partial explanations while ignoring or dismissing out of hand
rebuttals to their assertions.

The truth is somewhere in between. The best way, in my opinion, to call
attention the plight of a group of people is to massively document what is
being spoken about, and show the disproportionality. It is tempting to
cherrypick isolated incidents and blow them up into a global narrative. That’s
what mainstream media in all countries does, including (funny enough) some
Russian and North Korean media claiming the US is building internment camps
for its citizens, or US seizing on isolated extreme incidents and alleging
there are millions of them (in China, for example). We absolutely need a
platform for regular people to document claims at scale. Not Wikileaks, but
for regular people. End to end encrypted, anonymous but with reputations, and
able to aggregate videos under different topics.

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AlchemistCamp
This is completely expected, important and very easy to overlook.

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sfink
Nice way to put it. I was struggling to articulate what parts of this seem
brutally obvious with a moment's introspection, and what parts felt like a
very significant (and nonobvious) tie-in with physical mechanisms.

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tmilard
Thank you for the info. Very interesting.

