
Scientists Can Read a Bird’s Brain and Predict Its Next Song - aq3cn
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609032/scientists-can-read-a-birds-brain-and-predict-its-next-song/
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mattkrause
Here's a link to the actual manuscript, instead of a strange summary that
somehow drags Elon Musk into this:

[https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/27/193987](https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/27/193987)

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dh5
The male zebra finch, like many other songbirds, purposely attempts to sing
the same song over and over without any variation, including in pitch and
volume. This is because singing is primarily a courtship ritual, and females
are attracted to high song stereotypy in males. A random song can be selected
out of the hundreds sung daily and 80 to 90 percent of the other songs will be
pretty much exactly the same.

While the research is of course impressive, it's a bit premature to
extrapolate it to humans, or any other animal.

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iak8god
I'd love to see this tried on Mockingbirds, which mimic other bird songs but
also a huge variety of sounds. The ones in my neighborhood even do car alarms,
and rapidly cycle through a whole range of noises at the top of their little
lungs. The repertoire seems to vary a lot from one bird to the next, I but was
never even able to pick out a pattern for the one guy whose venue of choice
every night all spring long this year was a bush right outside my bedroom
window.

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ilzmastr
"We implanted 16/32 site Si-probes in male, adult zebra finches and recorded
simultaneously their song and neural activity in HVC; then we used these data
to train a long-short-term memory network (LSTM 5) to translate neural
activity directly onto song. The goal of the network is to predict the
spectral components of the song at a time bin ti, given the values of neural
activity features over previous time bins"

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amelius
I wonder how much better the network performs than a network based on:
previous songs, time of day, motility, temperature.

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osrec
Extrapolating this to humans is scary (given the mental privacy we are used
to), but perhaps inevitable. In some sense, the security of our thoughts is
only through obscurity, and that may make them intrinsically insecure.
Untangling that obscurity may be some years away, but it's not beyond the
realms of possibility. I wonder if the brain has evolved some internal methods
of encryption - I would imagine not, as I can not think of a solid
evolutionary advantage for brain based encryption.

A very interesting topic, and I can't quite decide if a mind-machine interface
would end up having a net positive or negative effect on our society...

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trophycase
It's not inevitable unless people believe it. Seriously I don't know when
people collectively lost the will to actually trying and dictate the rules of
our society

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jonknee
When has legislation worked to prevent technology? Just look at North Korea
and see how well that's working.

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SomeStupidPoint
Just because you can't dam a river doesn't mean you can't divert it.

More explicitly: there are many cases of regulation shaping the course that
technology takes. It's a strawman (of the variety people are trying to call
out here) to say that we're either helpless in the face of technology or we
must halt its progress. There's a huge middle ground of regulating and guiding
the process.

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blumomo
Maybe it's time to start encrypting our thoughts as it's being applied all
over the internet ;p

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armada651
Next step: Editing the playlist

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unkown-unknowns
Then make the bird sing the complete soundtrack of Doom.

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conqrr
Can't wait for the day when BMI + VRD is advanced enough to not need a phone
anymore. It would be like having a computer inside you.

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leereeves
That's only exciting if it's secure, private, and completely under your
control.

If not, it's terrifying.

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dkersten
Given the frequency and severity of both security incidents and privacy-
related issues in recent history, I would be pretty confident in betting that
no technology is ever fully “secure, private and completely under your
control”.

At the very least, you know that the fancy new brainPhone will load tons of
third party analytics JavaScript...

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jlebrech
"help me"

