Neuromancer49
@Neuromancer49@midwest.social
- Comment on Homer Simpson irl 3 days ago:
Standard? Not really. But there’s a tutorial here: github.com/miykael/3dprintyourbrain
Happy to answer some questions if you have issues
- Comment on Homer Simpson irl 3 days ago:
Interesting question. It depends. I linked Ev Fedorenko’s Interesting Brain Project at MIT up above, they’re doing a deep dive into questions like those.
Broadly speaking, if you’re born with these anatomical anomalies, you’ll be more or less normal. The article mentions the person in question had an IQ of 70, so that’s lower than normal, but not intellectually impaired.
But acquired Brain damage almost always leads to impediments. Strokes and repeated concussions, physical injury, etc.
The brain is “plastic” when you’re young, we like to say. That is, it’s pliable and can mold into whatever shape it needs to in order to adapt to your environment. That plasticity disappears once you get older. It’s how kids can learn language effortlessly - when you’re born, you have the most neurons and synapses you’ll ever have in your life. You’ll keep the same neurons (unless you have a degenerative disorder or kill them with drugs), make new synapses as you learn, but broadly speaking as you grow up you prune synapses that aren’t helpful.
This is also why kids can undergo massive resection surgeries (or in the olden days, severing of the corpus callosum) and grow up more or less normal.
- Comment on Homer Simpson irl 4 days ago:
In the US getting an MRI for “no reason” can be very expensive. Probably wouldn’t have been covered by insurance.
- Comment on Homer Simpson irl 4 days ago:
Ev Fedorenko has done some of the best research in brain science, in my opinion. There’s no better rabbit hole than her research!
- Comment on Homer Simpson irl 4 days ago:
$$$
- Comment on Homer Simpson irl 4 days ago:
Eh, college is hard and so was his sport. Sure, it’s not an exhaustive battery of testing but I’m confident to say he’s a normal dude.
- Comment on Homer Simpson irl 4 days ago:
That’s the short of it - but we passed all brain data to a university affiliated neurologist for review. We also allowed participants to take a copy of their brain data if they wanted. I’ve got a CD of my own brain kicking around somewhere, and I even helped a few people 3D print their brains.
But, anything that I said about the participants brain opened me up to liability. What if I said their brain looked OK and there was a tumor? Or vice versa? The University felt I could be sued, so we were trained to not speak about their brain.
- Comment on Homer Simpson irl 4 days ago:
Well it’s not quite water, it’s cerebrospinal fluid and it plays a lot of important roles in waste clearance, immune protection, protection from concussion, and more.
- Comment on Homer Simpson irl 4 days ago:
Nope, not related to any disease I’ve ever seen. The best guess i have is fetal alcohol syndrome but it isn’t a perfect match. It’s just weird knowing he has a very odd shaped brain. And there’s a lot of unknowns surrounding it.
What if he sees another doctor and they mention it to him? Would he be upset I didn’t say anything? What if it is linked to some disease and I didn’t tell him, and he gets sick?
What if it’s hereditary and his kid has it, does it explain the motor delays? The premature birth? The problems they have with him sleeping?
Just a lot of unknowns.
- Comment on Homer Simpson irl 4 days ago:
We’ve actually seen a handful of them in the community. MUT has an “Interesting Brain Project” news.mit.edu/…/studies-of-unusual-brains-reveal-i….
If you’re born that way, odds are you’ll be more or less normal. It’s amazing to see how resilient the human brain is.
In fact, one woman in China was born without a cerebellum. She wasn’t exactly normal per se, but she was alive and more or less healthy. Even though the cerebellum is smaller by volume it has about the same number of neurons as the cerebrum. So she just had half a brain. newscientist.com/…/mg22329861-900-woman-of-24-fou…
- Comment on Homer Simpson irl 4 days ago:
I ran a lot of MRIs for my PhD. I saw somewhere around 100-200 different brains. About 10% of them had abnormalities. Of all the technicians, scientists, and (non-clinical) doctors I spoke with, we all agreed this was a very high rate of discovery. All my friends graduated without seeing anything weird. My advisor liked to joke that I was cursed. Eventually I stopped inviting my friends to do my experiments because I didn’t want to deal with the risk of them having an abnormality - thanks to some combination of HIPAA and medical liability laws, I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it, even if asked point blank. I didn’t like that very much.
I made one exception, as a friend of mine came in for a study and I saw a golf ball sized cyst in his sinus. He had it surgically removed and he told me he stopped snoring the next day. It felt good to make a difference for him.
But, I saw one brain similar to the one documented here. It belongs to one of my close friends. It was harrowing. Entire left hemisphere was malformed, the ventricles were way too big and the cortex was way too thin. But the right side of his brain was underdeveloped, maybe the size of a tennis ball.
The weirdest part, he is 100% normal. In fact, he competed at a high level of college athletics. Normal Cognition, normal motor function, great sense of humor, and a very caring person. Now he has a great job, wife and kid, and we hang out often. But I can’t bring myself to say anything, and every time I see his son I wonder about his brain.
- Comment on i wish it was a cheesesteak 4 weeks ago:
To be fair, people were treating mummies like cheesesteak for a very long time. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy?wprov=sfla1
- Comment on Google is now forcing gemini in their gmail app 1 month ago:
I saw a Copilot prompt in MS PowerPoint today - top left corner of EVERY SINGLE SLIDE - and I had a quiet fit in my cubicle. Welcome to hell.
- Comment on There's fucking ads in board games now 2 months ago:
I’ve seen publishers advertise their other titles within the box, which honestly, not an issue for me. These, however, are crossing a line.
- Comment on I'm literally a thinking lump of fat 2 months ago:
Don’t sell yourself short. It’s a salty lump of fat.
- Comment on Are implanted subdermal trackers in SciFi movies at all a realistic possibility? 2 months ago:
Subdermal is a lot easier than implanting in other compartments, e.g., intracranial. For example, hormonal birth control exists as an implant.
But, there’s fascinating research into how the brain rejects implanted electrodes, e.g., neuralink. Lots of work has been done developing materials that are less likely to be rejected by the brain and the brain’s immune system. For example, electrodes can be coated in chemicals to make them less harsh to the body, and flexible materials can be used.
- Comment on What's your favourite it's all in the gameplay game? 3 months ago:
I’ve been chasing the high from Elite Dangerous on my HOSAS setup for years. Thankfully, the recent updates have breathed some new life into the game.
- Comment on What's your favourite it's all in the gameplay game? 3 months ago:
X4. Come for the arcadey spaceflight simulator, stay for the galactic-scale empire building, leave for another save file once the Xenon start sending multiple I-class battleships against your Teladi allies but they cannot muster the strength to repel them and the entire gate network falls because you were too busy solving the Paranid Civil War.
- Comment on I just opened an overpriced can of fancy soup and on the label, along with the expected stuff like 'gluten-free' and 'GMO-free,' was 'mustard free' and 'celery free.' Is that a thing now? 5 months ago:
For me and mine, it’s carrots. Do you know how difficult it is to find carrot-free items? Impossible.
- Comment on Lord of the Rings Characters: Screen Time vs. Mentions in the Books 5 months ago:
Good riddance, Tom Bombadil. I don’t care how merry a fellow he was, those were my least favorite chapters of Fellowship.
- Comment on Do you agree with my unpopular opinion about height in fencing? 7 months ago:
Nah. Fenced epee for a bit in a college club. Height advantage was pretty great. I guess it just depends on the weapon.
- Comment on Academia to Industry 8 months ago:
+1 to all of this. See also: phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1296
- Comment on thoughts on arpgs? 8 months ago:
Can’t say I’ve heard anything since launch, so take my advice with a grain of salt.
- Comment on thoughts on arpgs? 8 months ago:
Grim Dawn Item Assistant is your best friend. While you’re at it, Rainbow Item Names (or whatever it’s called).
- Comment on thoughts on arpgs? 8 months ago:
Well if you liked PoE I doubt you’ll like D4. It’s a much simpler game. Sadly my only advice is to try GD and Last Epoch again. I’ve got hundreds of hours in the former and I just got 10 hours into the latter.
Last Epoch feels like a more approachable PoE. I thoroughly enjoy how the skills interplay with one another, but I still prefer the itemization in Grim Dawn.
The only reason I’m not playing GD currently is because I have too many QoL mods installed so my cloud saving doesn’t work, but I can cloud save for Last Epoch for my steam deck lmao.
- Comment on Do 9-5 jobs still exist in the U.S.? 9 months ago:
My job is 8:30 - 5 with a 30 minute lunch break. So almost.
But, we also get 2 days/week at home, and can flex time as required. Tons of international work, so the flexible hours are a godsend when time zones are against us.
It’s a salaried position and depending on your supervisor and stage of your career, you’re expected to work 40-45 hours a week. Deadlines and ugly projects tend to increase hours work. I’m very lucky, as my industry can be pretty brutal with sudden ends to projects and unexpected layoffs.
- Comment on Why can't people make ai's by making a neuron sim and then scaling it up with a supercomputer to the point where it has a humans number of neurons and then raise it like a human? 10 months ago:
We’ve got some really good theories, though. Neurons make new connections and prune them over time. We know about two types of ion channels within the synapse - AMPA and NMDA. AMPA channels open within the post-synapse neuron when glutamate is released by the pre-synapse neuron. And the AMPA receptor allows sodium ions into the dell, causing it to activate.
If the post-synapse cell fires for a long enough time, i.e. recieves strong enough input from another cells/enough AMPA receptors open, the NMDA receptor opens and calcium enters the cell. Typically an ion of magnesium keeps it closed. Once opened, it triggers a series of cellular mechanisms that cause the connection between the neurons to get stronger.
This is how Donald Hebb’s theory of learning works. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory?wprov=sfla1
Cells that fire together, wire together.
- Comment on Why can't people make ai's by making a neuron sim and then scaling it up with a supercomputer to the point where it has a humans number of neurons and then raise it like a human? 10 months ago:
Actually, neuron-based machine learning models can handle this. The connections between the fake neurons can be modeled as a “strength”, or the probability that activating neuron A leads to activation of neuron B. Advanced learning models just change the strength of these connections. If the probability is zero, that’s a “lost” connection.
Those models don’t have physical connections between neurons, but mathematical/programmed connections. Those are easy to change.
- Comment on Why can't people make ai's by making a neuron sim and then scaling it up with a supercomputer to the point where it has a humans number of neurons and then raise it like a human? 10 months ago:
I’ve been quoting Jordan Peterson for years?! Ahhh fuck.
- Comment on Why can't people make ai's by making a neuron sim and then scaling it up with a supercomputer to the point where it has a humans number of neurons and then raise it like a human? 10 months ago:
Actually, we’ve got some pretty sophisticated models of neurons. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project?wprov=sf…
See my other comment for an example of how little we truly understand about neurons.