[Unearned5161]

This is very similar to last week with that mind reading startup thing. Please read the paper before commenting.

This is a tool to help researchers in figuring out what different parts of the brain are actually for with less experimenter bias contamination of “well we think maybe it’s about this so let’s show it video of x to see”.

The essence runs on having someone sit in a scanner for a couple hours watching all sorts of things, and then feeding that to a model that will then build its own representation of said data and try different things on it until it’s found what makes a certain part sing in the model.

The purpose is a generalized understanding of brain function, more or less the same way we’ve been doing it all these years. Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.

[da_grift_shift]

>Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.

It also helps companies like Moonbug Entertainment (Candle Media) understand how to build better Distractatrons.

    It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.

    “It’s not mega-interesting, what’s on the Distractatron,” said Maurice Wheeler, who runs the research group. “But if they aren’t fully focused, they might go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and kind of drift over. We can see what they’re looking at and the exact moment when they got distracted.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelon...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/17/cocomelon-chil...

What a world.

[aswegs8]

I know a technology like that was used ~20 years ago for ADHD. EEG feedback, as soon as the kid looks away or zones out, the movie stops playing.

[hahajk]

Sounds like they took a cue from Sesame Street:

> p8: "A child watching television under normal conditions is subject to frequent interruptions and distractions. The TV must vie for his attention. In order to simulate this condition, we decided to program distractions into the laboratory situation... Slides could be used to fill the slide tray and they could be projected automatically, at regular intervals, onto a screen similar to that of the television set. The carousel projector allows the viewer to choose three exposure times. The 7.45 second interval proved most satisfactory with the preschool children.

THE FIRST YEAR OF SESAME STREET: THE FORMATIVE RESEARCH https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED047822.pdf

[inigyou]

And nowadays we think of Sesame Street as wholesome compared to today's content. They may have optimised attention but they were delivering positive-value content. That's not the case any more.

[PaulHoule]

I recently rewatched the movie Looker which was vastly ahead of its time in 1981

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looker

the same year as Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation, featuring computer generated characters, brainwashing television commercials, a light pulse gun that causes absence seizures, gun battles inside a plastic surgery clinic and an AR simulation environment, a sadistic computer, a physician who doubles as an action hero, and James Coburn giving a lecture explaining the enemy's evil plans in the opposite role that he played in the (excellent) The President's Analyst.

This time I was not so dazzled and saw it for as atrocious everyone else things it is. The minions of "Digital Matrix, Inc." manage several assassinations with the light-pulse L.O.O.K.E.R. gun but when they use real firearms they outdo Vader's stormtroopers by shooting each other. (Want to see the scene where somebody from E.Y. tells them to stick to the L.O.O.K.E.R. gun) The bad guys explain the penultimate secret to the protagonist early on but the ultimate secret is revealed in the L.O.O.K.E.R. lab which doesn't feel like a lab at all but rather a rather good room in a theme park experience where you're supposed to uncover the secret. (Contrast that to the lab Doug Trumbull outfitted in the Brainstorms movie a few years later which is packed with real surplus equipment... I've been to that lab!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBlWxXqH8vA

[x______________]

> ...the Distractatron

I can see it now.. The Distractatrons: a new chapter of protagonists in Transformers! The modern equivalent of evil in this day and age of ADHD and low attention span!

[customguy]

What is a "purpose"? Something people wish something would only be used for, right? How does it relate to, what influence does it have on what something will end up being used for?

[card_zero]

> The synthesized clips line up with what each region is known to care about, faces for FFA, places for PPA, bodies for EBA, motion for MT, patterns for V1 / V3A, and lively social scenes for pSTS / aSTS

(STS seems to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_temporal_sulcus in the temporal lobe, so I guess it's the "I sense a presence" region.)

Explain the potential to exploit strong stimulation of specific visual regions for evil. "Oh, I very much detect a face/place/body/motion/pattern/human", says the subject. What are you going to do with that, startle them?

[Timon3]

Do you know that strongly triggering these regions at the same time/repeatedly/in various patterns doesn't have any effect on your mood, wants, needs and so on due to experience in the field? Or why are you just discounting the idea?

IMO it's terrifying to imagine that adtech companies could plug this stuff into their optimizers and just run an experiment on broad swaths of the population to figure out if there's any effects.

[inigyou]

Apply the same technology several layers deeper. Stimulate the novelty or sexual attraction or general reward neurons. Stimulate the thirst center in a Pepsi ad.

[SubiculumCode]

Oh you are right. Let's just end neuroscience altogether. Also computer science, aerospace, and biology in general. In fact, let's go full Amish. Wait, no. Someone might use a buggy cart to run people over.

What exactly is your new fear here?

[customguy]

This isn't about "might", this is about "obviously will", and the sheer fact that questions that were 101 of scientific discussion now lead to instant freaking out and accusations, i.e. stupid cultish bullshit, show me we need to be more serious about it, not less. If that's not to your liking, is it okay for you if other people ponder such questions? Can you maybe stim your brain into believing they don't?

[nirvael]

Anyone have a link or more info on the "mind reading startup" being referred to?

[hsuduebc2]

This specific research may not be morally corrupt in itself, nor may his intentions be bad, but it could absolutely lead to something horrific. Nuclear technology was also initially developed with good intentions and provided much good for humanity. But of course it ended with biggest bad actors having a lot of nuclear weapons.