
The Human Brain Can Create Structures in Up to 11 Dimensions - respinal
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-find-evidence-the-human-brain-can-create-structures-in-up-to-11-dimensions
======
ianai
Key to understanding the thesis:

“They found that groups of neurons connect into 'cliques', and that the number
of neurons in a clique would lead to its size as a high-dimensional geometric
object (a mathematical dimensional concept, not a space-time one).”

Edit-more to the point;

“"Networks are often analysed in terms of groups of nodes that are all-to-all
connected, known as cliques. The number of neurons in a clique determines its
size, or more formally, its dimension," the researchers explained in the 2017
paper.”

~~~
wbhart
Right. In other words, it has nothing to do with the human brain creating
structures in 11 dimensions. It's a total misreading of the science.

This particular claim has been making the rounds for quite some time. It's
total rubbish.

~~~
fao_
> In other words, it has nothing to do with the human brain creating
> structures in 11 dimensions.

I think you misread that. It means that the title is technically correct but
relies on a different definition of the term 'dimension', not that the title
is wrong.

~~~
wbhart
I don't agree. The brain does not create structures in up to 11 dimensions,
full stop. This is a popular science article. To use that word from standard
vocabulary to describe something that just happens to use the same word as
some utterly esoteric mathematical definition is misleading at best. And then
to imply that the brain creates such structures is just compounding the
problem.

What about, "The amazing connectivity of the human brain", or "Researchers
unravel the mathematics of connections in the human brain"?

There's absolutely no need to confuse readers by conflating unrelated
concepts.

I could make up my own definition of dimension, e.g. the dimension of a
manifold needed to embed some bizarre variety with some cleverly defined
homological correspondence to slices of brain material I looked at under the
microscope, thought of as simplices. I might then get 276 dimensions. Do I
then get a press release for this? It's utterly meaningless. "Mathematician
discovers that our brains live in a 276 dimensional universe".

~~~
vinceguidry
> _To use that word from standard vocabulary to describe something that just
> happens to use the same word as some utterly esoteric mathematical
> definition is misleading at best._

So are we trying to raise or lower the quality of public discourse? If a
journalist uses a technical term in a headline, and then goes on to explain
what the term means in the article, how is that not fine? It sounds like you
only want journalists talking at a eighth grade level.

Why don't you try to re-write the findings yourself then? I think you'll find
it difficult to say the least. Your first obstacle might be finding a better
word to describe the mathematical shape of the structures other than
'dimension'. That's what mathematicians use, why can't journalists use it too?

~~~
aeternum
Journalists of all people should understand the connotation of words.

The title was likely picked to be confusing on purpose as click-bait.
Misleading headlines lower the quality of public discourse.

~~~
fao_
> Misleading headlines lower the quality of public discourse.

Misleading headlines only affect people who have not read the article. People
who have not read the article, or can't bother to read the article, are
essentially incapable of giving a proper high-quality response to the article.

I don't see how you can lower the quality of discourse any further than
someone commenting on an article that they didn't read.

~~~
aeternum
Time is a valuable commodity, it is disingenuous to trick people into reading
articles through the use of clickbait headlines.

The article itself also continues to conflate the definitions of dimension by
referring to 3-D. When little timmy draws a star on his paper we don't say
"congrats on your 5 dimensional drawing".

~~~
fao_
> Time is a valuable commodity,

Right, so don't waste other people's time by commenting on an article that you
haven't properly read.

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vankessel
Tangential but I've always thought it may be possible for a human brain to
experience higher spatial dimensions, it's just that all it ever experiences
is 3. Imagine a video game is designed in 4 spatial dimensions and is fed
directly into the brain through a neuralink type interface. The brain is
pretty adaptable, would the recipient correctly experience those 4 dimensions?

~~~
nothis
Probably not exactly what you’re talking about but you are aware of the indie
game “Miegakure”?

~~~
p1mrx
There's nothing to be aware of; Miegakure has been vaporware for a decade.

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mirimir
Tangential question: What are good ways to visualize multidimensional data?
Excel etc can chart 3D data, but even that is hard because stuff overlaps. And
years ago, I had some Excel code that generated 3D views of 4D data.

But with five or more dimensions, it's too tedious and unworkable. So I end up
guessing a lot about what projections are useful. It's like that story about
blind people trying to perceive an elephant.

Anyway, just thought I'd ask.

~~~
vankessel
Use non spatial dimensions as well, like color, size, and shape. You can also
use clever projections like t-sne to reduce the number of dimensions while
retaining some of the structure of the data
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVL80Gg3lA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJVL80Gg3lA))

~~~
Der_Einzige
There's an improvement to T-SNE called UMAP

~~~
bitL
I've used them both recently and couldn't really tell which one is visually
better; UMAP is supposed to be a bit faster though.

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youdontknowtho
This is going to be used by woo woo types for years. Did you know that our
brains operate in 11 dimensions? Or, how can we get our brains to operate in
all the dimensions it's capable of? Or, brains operate in 11 dimensions...and
the soul makes up the other seven. Seven? That's a spiritual number. Etc...

That guy who looks like David Spade with a brain tumor on Ancient Aliens will
be all over this.

The article is super interesting. I'm just enjoying imagining how someone will
tie this to the great pyramid of Giza.

~~~
stallmanite
I wonder what is the underlying urge behind the woo purveyors. There is more
than a lifetime’s worth of weird trippy stuff that is 100% legit. There’s no
need to muddy the waters; mystery abounds in the real world.

~~~
tux1968
It's hard to be an expert in Legit. You're instantly the sole authority on woo
you invent.

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nabla9
I remember reading this article few years back.

> A version of this story was first published in June 2017.

It seems like they just reposed it and added "back in..." It would be more
honest if they would just have "news from the past years section". Trying to
sneak old articles as news in the front page is bad form.

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buboard
I hate these titles, clickbait articles of that magnitude are just
unacceptable to science.

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wrnr
There is a great video serie by infinite series[1] that goes into detail how
the neural network of a brain processes information. The way I understand it
is that the more abstract thoughts can are represented as higher dimensional
structures of a directed graph.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akgU8nRNIp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akgU8nRNIp0)

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ivan_ah
Here is a direct link to the paper from 2017:
[https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.0004...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.00048/full)
(paper has 102 citations according to google scholar see
[https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1164894527853060941...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=11648945278530609413&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en)
)

regarding "dimension" it's used in this sense of dimension of a simplex:

> Following the conventions in algebraic topology, we refer to directed
> cliques of n neurons as directed simplices of dimension n-1 (which reflects
> their natural geometric representation as (n-1)-dimensional polyhedra) (see
> Figure S2; Section 4.1.3). Correspondingly, their sub-cliques are called
> sub-simplices.

Figure S2 is in the Supplemental Material (and extra PDF 15 page of bonus
materials)
[https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.0004...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.00048/full#supplementary-
material)

Also related def'n on wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex#Algebraic_topology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex#Algebraic_topology)

From what I understand of simplex of dim n-1 == clique of n neurons (in a
directed graph)
[https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~daddel/linear_algebra_appl/App...](https://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~daddel/linear_algebra_appl/Applications/GraphTheory/GraphTheory_9_17/node10.html)

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PhasmaFelis
> _Just to be clear - this isn 't how you'd think of spatial dimensions (our
> Universe has three spatial dimensions plus one time dimension), instead it
> refers to how the researchers have looked at the neuron cliques to determine
> how connected they are._

> _" Networks are often analysed in terms of groups of nodes that are all-to-
> all connected, known as cliques. The number of neurons in a clique
> determines its size, or more formally, its dimension," the researchers
> explained in the 2017 paper._

Can anyone give me a coherent summary of what this (both the quoted paragraphs
and the entire article) is _trying_ to say?

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swiley
Personally the best abstraction I've seen for how the brain works is a
"pointer and cell machine" similar to how people introduce s-expressions. It
works well with how I find myself thinking about lists (like the alphabet)
where I have to "cdr" down it to find any of the items.

~~~
ad404b8a372f2b9
Could you elaborate? I'm not familiar with the terms you use and I don't
understand the parallel you're drawing when I look them up.

~~~
inimino
A cell holds some datum (like "Q" and all its associations) and a pointer is
something that can reference another cell, for example ("Q", <rest of alphabet
after Q>) includes a pointer to the rest of the alphabet after "Q". This
(datum <ptr to the rest>) pair is exactly the LISP list, usually written as
s-expressions.

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bitL
11D tensor? Where would that get us with TensorFlow? To hierarchical
attention?

~~~
DoctorOetker
Hahaha!

Surely you must be trolling ;)

spoiler alert: in math and physics, the dimension of a tensor is simply the
dimension of your space, i.e. the number of basis vectors, and the number of
indices is called the order (also degree or rank) while datamonkeys on
MatrixBurp or TensorFart call the latter the "dimension" and the former ...
the ... euh depth? So just like many here are objecting on the usage of
"dimension" in the submitted article, (s)he is trolling the very same practice
many ML people do with respect to mathematicians and physicists regarding the
"dimension" of a tensor.

so in math or physics terminology an 11-dimensional rank 2 tensor would take
up just 11 ^ 2 = 121 values, while a 2-dimensional rank 11 tensor would take
up 2 ^ 11 = 2048 values.

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KaoruAoiShiho
Wow what a title to make me feel stupid, a handful of covariants is enough to
confound me nevermind 11.

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michaco33
I dislike that we can't downvote.

~~~
Zircom
FYI downvoting is possible, just have to reach a certain karma threshold(500 I
think?)

~~~
grzm
Your parent is likely referring to downvoting on submissions as opposed to
comments. Submissions can only be upvoted or flagged, not downvoted.

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golemotron
It's kind of spooky that M-Theory (a unified consistent version of string
theory) has 11 dimensions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory)

Simulation much?

~~~
dx7tnt
I thought this straight away. It made me think that the brain's structure has
evolved in resonance with the fundamental dimensionality of the universe.

