alt Hacker NewsBit of a sensationalist title - EEG/iEEG measurements have led to worthwhile clinical outcomes but also are an avenue for bunk pseudosccience so it pays to be careful whenever you see the words 'brain waves' paired with some large claim.
More accurate, much less sexy title: Intracranial Recordings Uncover Spiral and Concentric Brain Waves During Memory Tasks" (study completed only on small cohorts of epilepsy patients performing constrained memory tasks).
No inner workings revealed or laid bare, just another piece of evidence contributing to a small part of the debate in cortical electrophysiological studies on whether or not some data measures can be discarded as the downstream, messy noise of the neurons firing or actual, high-fidelity signals of activity
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And still all slow stuff, 4 to 12 Hz. There must be something in the brain that clocks faster, but nobody seems to have found it yet.
>also are an avenue for bunk pseudosccience so it pays to be careful whenever you see the words 'brain waves' paired with some large claim.
What makes you make such an accusation?
Idk… I follow EEG science pretty closely now that the BCI industry is exploding post-DL, and this seems like a very accurate title.
Inner workings are indeed being uncovered; what would that look like, if not this…? We’re not going to find, like, a blueprint hidden in there somewhere with marginalia from god. Spiral and concentric brainwaves sound pretty damn compelling and specific, not just a tweak of our definition of noise in this data.
A better piece of evidence is that this is quanta. I’ve literally never seen a sensationalist or inaccurate or less than fascinating article make it to their site. I’m gonna need a ton more critique from randos on HN to seriously consider that this might be the first.
BTW, hug your loved ones, y’all. EEG has been mostly bunk applications for consumers/non-scientists for years, like “biofeedback” therapy, but we are now extremely likely to see the first polygraph that actually works in our lifetimes, not to mention all the other crazy shit. Imagine how seriously things change when every government can load a truth-telling helmet into every cop car :(
On the upside it’ll make for some wild HCI someday, perhaps, if we make it that far. The scene from Westworld S04 (my favorite piece of lost media) with Dolores creating a 3d narrative world with words and gestures that matches what she’s envisioning comes to mind, for one thing… the dream.