My brain stalled for about 20 minutes just trying to get some thought around all of the implications of this. Then it was gradually replaced by a the sinking feeling one gets when watching tremendous opportunity lost.
Her husband, Doug, drums up business. “We deliver food, flowers, whatever anybody needs,” she says. “We charge $5 for delivery in town.” Money is tight. Each time they get ahead, there’s a financially draining trip to Vancouver.
What!?
Some of the greatest leaps in understanding about how our brains work, not to mention untold wonders in technological advancement might be presented to us on a platter via this once in a multi-generation opportunity and they're housed in some crap rental trying to deliver flowers to make ends meet??? This family should immediately be declared a national treasure and have the full support of the Canadian government.
Expensive? Morally nebulous? Look, we yanks will build a multi-100-million dollar prison and get over the moral gray-ness of water-boarding just to find a few bombs. Helping out what might turn out to be a simple disabled pair of twins in exchange for knowledge that may improve humanity forever shouldn't be that much of a stretch.
I know this might be an unpopular opinion and attract downvotes, but I just got a +70 for what I though was a throwaway one-liner. If that's how the karma flows, then bring it.
I went inarticulate while reading this, I was literally making noises that were not English because I did not have English words to express them. These could be the first and only real telepaths upon the face of the Earth. There could be things to learn here that we couldn't learn any other way short of waiting another two decades for the brain-computer interface technology and then another twenty years for the FDA to approve its use on children and then ten years after that for the children to grow up and by then the Singularity would have already happened. Their importance is indescribable.
My thoughts exactly! Particularly when I saw the bit about a reality TV show.
The family is of course entitled to do what it deems proper, but neuroscientists may have a wonderful opportunity here. Perhaps I'm over-reaching, but there seem to be many topics -- some of them very practical -- upon which the twins may offer insight: brain-computer interfaces, the sense-of-self, seat of consciousness, the semantics/syntax of thought, distinction between language and thought, information processing... etc.
At the very least, they might be fantastic at pair programming! Or even programming multi-core, being dual-core themselves might provide insights impossible for normal people.
It also seems sad that this might be the closest thing we ever get to a truly alien intelligence (depending on how tightly coupled they are). Imagine a creature that not only can't conceive of living a life uncoupled from its binary partner but may be horrified by the thought. And what will we do with this fantastic intelligence, unique in all the world? Reality TV.
They should, and I imagine they do, have enough support to ensure the children are clothed, fed, schooled and enjoy a minimum standard of living. However, incentivizing childhood disability opens up a whole new and rather dangerous gray area I think.
True, I'm thinking more of the dullards who might go from squeezing out more kids so they can collect the welfare, to squeezing out disabled kids in the hope of a bigger payout. It's perverse, but it's hardly as if the first case is rare.
I'm still assuming basic disability and child benefits of course.
If they were to agree, I think there is a way. How many people would you think might agree to pay monthly some symbolic amount, say, $5, if these folks were to help the neuroscience ? Only about a thousand needed to get them a decent living - though the number is mostly a SWAG.
This is probably the single biggest opportunity for mankind.
If there are some folks in Canada that could organize some kind of fund to help the kids - count me in. I hope they might agree to help us all back in return.
I know [just the billionaire](http://www.alleninstitute.org/) to spend some money on helping these people out, in exchange for getting to do some science.
Interesting. If one of them can distinctly originate a thought separate to the other then it's possible to say that they're separate people.
Where it gets really messed up is when you look at people who've had major parts of their brain removed. I remember reading about a man who had half his brain removed and was able to function almost perfectly after therapy. If you were able to take half of someone's brain out, then put that half into another person (who you'd removed the full brain from) would that make them two separate people or still one?
You can't just remove an arbitrary portion of the brain and still survive. There are bits of your brain that aren't duplicated, can't be bisected, and are absolutely necessary for survival.
So while it's an interesting question, it's impossible in practice (even if we had the capability of "reattaching" a portion of the brain).
My first thought was imagine the perspective on the world two people with a communication link between brains would have. It really provides an interesting prospect for the arts or sciences. These girls are naturally going to see and experience the world far different than the rest of us. Their unique experience could be very valuable to humanity, only time will tell.
This is fascinating. It reminded me of another documentary on conjoined twins who are fused partway down the spine. Almost the complement of these twins!
Article says near the end that their communicative abilities are limited to badly enunciated short sentences. AND they're four years old. Four years old tend to ignore difficult questions in favor of something more fun.
It's not just that they ignore such questions, such questions don't mean anything to them yet.
Something else I thought about was the supposed tendency of identical twins to have have a pseudo-dialect between each other. Perhaps these two don't communicate with the outside world as much because they're too busy communicating, silently, with each other.
Well, the problem is, how would they know? I wonder if they can differentiate between their own thoughts and their twin's thoughts - they could all just pop into both of their heads, just like a "natural" thought. Also, I'm not sure if they would understand the difference, since they've never experienced anything else to compare it to.
You seperate the two's sensory perception as far as possible (blindfold, ear plug, make sure they can't touch), tell one to think of something, and ask the other about it?
I think they share sensory perception, it was mentioned that tickling one will make the other laugh, and a few other things. If one imagines something, though, I'm not sure if the other receives it. Could possibly be that sensory input is doubled, but we don't know about generating thoughts.
Also - what would it be like to see from two sets of eyes?!
Bizarre?? Sorry to keep chaining replies, but it got me thinking... what happens when one sleeps and the other is awake? You could try that! Presumably the asleep one can't 'listen in'. Just tell the awake one to think of something when the other awakes (but dont say anything about it), and then ask the other!
Hell, what happens when one dreams while the other is awake! INCEPTION.
Can one sleep without the other also sleeping? That would be an interesting input into the "are they one or two people" questions (FWIW, I think they are two, from my limited information).
> what would it be like to see from two sets of eyes?!
Obviously, this is pure speculation but in the same way that we can fuse the signals from two eyes into one coherent image, I don't see why, in principle, the brain couldn't fuse the signals from four eyes into one image.
While their verbal development is delayed, it continues to get better. Their sentences are two or three words at most so far, and their enunciation is at first difficult to understand. Both the family, and researchers, anxiously await the children’s explanation for what they are experiencing.
Direct quotes from them: "come play" "No" "Bounce it!" "Stop that!" "Hug!"
Fascinating! Twins, being genetically identical and raised in the same environment, already seem uncannily similar sometimes. Imagine what they will be like, with they ability to share each other's sensory experiences...
It seems, as with many other things, everyone wants to see this as a black-and-white issue: "Are they one people or two people? They can share thoughts!" We're of course not used to it, but the fact is there's a continuum here. They are more linked than any other two people, but they do have separate brains, with separate connections. This is an example of an issue where you just can't pigeonhole them into one or the other.
Another thing is that we can't help but imagine what it would be like if we ourselves were today suddenly stuck with someone else like that, but that's not how they will experience life; they will be growing up like that, with no experience of any other life.
That's an interesting point. I'm reminded of the way we perceive colors. We may see completely different things as "green", but because they've been given that linguistic label, we can identify them as the same. However, if I see red when you see green, it's fundamentally impossible to explain or imagine that.
This being Hacker News, however, I think there are broader implications. Understanding what Tatiana and Krista experience may prove invaluable if we develop some sort of direct neural interface. It's already been shown that we can adapt to synthetic limbs or additional sensory inputs. (Interesting experiments done with magnetometer sensing http://feelspace.cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/en/index.html) However, I feel like this could prove it possible to directly inject data into the brain, since everything we experience is from sensory input.
Basically, is telepathy fundamentally possible? Or would the raw neural data be incompatible across brains? I think these twins could explain a lot about that.
That's an interesting point. I'm reminded of the way we perceive colors. We may see completely different things as "green", but because they've been given that linguistic label, we can identify them as the same. However, if I see red when you see green, it's fundamentally impossible to explain or imagine that.
I hear this analogy all the time but it makes no sense to me. A color is either physical light or the idea in your head of a particular color. If we agree on both of those, what is left that could be meaningfully compared to decide if we are "experiencing" it as the same or different?
Could I be experiencing a poodle as a banana, even though I think it's called a poodle and it actually is a poodle?
The only way that we agree on what a color is is through its physical manifestation. This has worked for all of our existence because when you tell me to think of green, we're referencing something that we both sense.
But this doesn't work if you convey "original" thought. If I imagine something, I can only describe it to you, and there's is no way to be sure you are experiencing what I imagined. What you experience is based on how you process that input and what you think of. Your brain may be set up completely differently from mine, so would they be compatible?
I guess the real question is, is it possible to agree on an idea without having a reference?
Your brain may be set up completely differently from mine, so would they be compatible?
That's my point.. to even ponder whether or not we have the same idea in our heads, there has to be some objective form of the thought that is compatible with both of our brains. Then, assuming there was some miraculous way to get the thought into my head, I could compare it with my own thought to see if they match.
If, however, brains are structurally unique to the point that thoughts are meaningless outside of the context of the particular brain that thinks them, then why is it interesting to ponder if our thoughts are the same or different? Of course they are different since the notion of their sameness is a non-sequitur.
The notion that we use the former type of thoughts to think about colors, and that they are interchangeable -- that I could see red in the same way that you see green, while seeing actual green as something else -- is conceivable, but completely unnecessary to explain anything about the mind. You can simply remove that step and get a simpler and equally adequate theory to explain color vision, so why would we even contemplate the step existing?
The exact scope of the term is not universal, but it might be well expressed as the atomic level of individual mental experience. Even if we experience the same physical wavelength of light and can address it on the same terms, we may nonetheless have entirely different qualia connecting that physical data and that shared mental construction of the color. And there's no way we would ever know!
The question is: how do you know that you agree on them? That he uses the same cultural naming convention to describe the experience does not mean the experience is the same. He may be a synesthete and you would never know it.
what is left that could be meaningfully compared
Why do you need to be able to 'meaningfully compare' something for it to be able to be different? My love for my girlfriend is obviously different from that of others for their significant others, because it is a patchwork of feelings tied up with innumerable impressions and memories. No two are alike. Yet I could not express the difference on any measurable scale. There's no reason to suppose once experience of 'a mere color' is any different. The memories colors evoke are unique and there is no 'raw experience' to separate from those memories. That's too simple a view of the human brain.
We can associate different memories with the color green, but we can't experience it as different colors while claiming it's the same color.
The experience of green is, by definition, whatever goes on in your head when you look at green. If you scanned our brains, you might find different patterns of neurons firing, but there is no sense in calling either of those patterns anything besides "green".
The experience of green is, by definition, whatever goes
on in your head when you look at green
You never 'look at green'. You can only experience the impression of instances of green things or have thoughts involving the abstract concept 'green'. You may be looking at a traffic light that just turned green and anxiously press the pedal to reach your destination. Or in the context of a psychological experiment, you may be looking at a green square, while remembering what it was that you were supposed to do when you saw something green. In the same context, you may be asked to think of 'green'. However, that will evoke images of grass, traffic lights, a girlfriend's dress. What goes on inside your head when looking at these instances of something 'green', or thinking of 'green' is a jumble of things, none of which could be described as the 'raw experience' of 'looking at green'.
On another note, not involving the actual experience: I was just reading the wikipedia entry on 'Grue and bleen'. It ends with:
Kripke then argues for an interpretation of Wittgenstein
as holding that it is not possible to state the meaning of
a word.
That's purely out of philosophical arguments concerning language. If you can not state the meaning of a word, then you can not agree upon your experiences of that word, firstly because you don't know what experience you are trying to relate and secondly because relating it requires other, vaguely defined, words.
This is actually a dramatic oversimplification. Green is what you experience when (roughly) the difference between the amount of light w/ those wavelengths and the amount of light w/ wavelengths outside that range is greater than it was a (temporally) little while ago, or in comparison with the light coming in from areas nearby, and strongly affected by reasoning about what color the object "should" be, and what the quality of light is that is hitting the object. As you say, green is a "feeling", not embodied in the light itself, but only meaningful in the brain. So the "color" of a neutral gray card (or even something which emits no light at all) surrounded by a bright red object or looked at just after a bright red object is just as "legitimately" green as the light reflected from a "green" piece of paper or emitted by a "green" LED.
I can also cause you to experience green by electrically stimulating your visual cortex, so ~500nm light need not be involved, nor your retina even. What is green now?
Unfortunately, these twins can't answer the question of neural data incompatibility, because, again, they grew up together.
My guess is that when we start inserting info directly into the brain, the most immediately successful way will be to hijack existing inputs directly (vision, audio, etc), and the most successful long-term approach will simply be to just lob the data in in some suitable encoding with some suitable high-quality feedback and let the neurons do the hard work.
Using existing inputs makes sense, but what format are the neurons in? Would it be possible to convert a digital signal to whatever our brain uses - how would you encode it?
Yes, as ay says the "format" of neurons isn't actually that mysterious. It's actually one of the few things we do know. We also have a pretty decent comprehension of the encoding for audio and visual stimuli, at least as they come out of the sensory organs. It's not a perfect understanding, but it's not a complete mystery either. (Cochlear implants actually to some extent directly interface with the nervous system.)
(Actually we can trace the visual input some ways up the core processing path, too, which is interesting. I don't know what the state of the art is now but a few years ago when I was learning about this in school we had a clue that there's a lot of neurons dedicated to edge detection, orientation detection, and movement detection. It's not a miracle that humans see better than computers, rather a lot of our brains are dedicated to doing a lot of computation in parallel long before this rises to the conscious level.)
Picking an appropriate encoding for a new sense may not be absolutely trivial but it is something we might be able to do today. What I wouldn't expect to happen any time soon is the direct memory interface, or anything that interfaces any more directly than a simulated sense or simulated limb. I can imagine a phantom limb interacting with a simulated computer desktop and overlaying the visual system without more than the expected leaps in technology; imagining something that allows you to simply remember Wikipedia just as if you memorized it is much harder to even imagine.
I did take the code he mentions and play with it. Is behaviour is fascinating. I hope to be still alive when we have enough computing power for simulating a single brain, and to be able to directly cross-connect it to mine.
The guy you linked to is using a simpler two-variable model with correspondingly lower fidelity. The goal of the Blue Brain Project, which this guy seems to think he has bested, is to model all of the features of a biological neuron and, more importantly, how they wire together.
Very interesting, thanks! I know about Blue Brain, but did not touch on any code of theirs - seeing you did.
How fast is your code performance-wise ?
I think the point he is making is that his model is "good enough".
The code that I was running was able to emulate ~40000 neurons and their connections on a Lenovo T60 laptop in realtime. (the number might be off by an order of 2-4, I remember playing with different numbers, but do not remember the exact value).
Interesting thing was that the "waves" that emerged by themselves, and with a certain size of the network they were sustainable even when I removed the initial "random noise" stimuli.
I did not figure out a decent way to attach the inputs/outputs to this "soup". Since this capacity does approach the brain size of an ant, might be fun to toy with a "virtual world" "inhabited" by connected computers running the simulation.
Could be a fun project, even if a little impractical. (Though I sadly lack the knowledge in the domain to make it happen).
Yes, I did an internship for the BBP last year. This is not based in any way on their work.
That code has problems simulating multiple neurons for some reason (possibly thread safety in GSL?). But, it can simulate one neuron at 20x realtime, with dumping traces to disk. If I were to disable dumping traces, it'd be primarily limited by GSL's differential equation solver.
(Sorry, too tired to respond to the second half of your comment)
I pulled the equations from Parameter estimation in hindmarsh-rose neurons (Steur, 2006), equation 4.1.
The Hindmarsh-Rose, Hodgkin–Huxley, and other mathematical models are phenomenological models. They are meant to reproduce the observable characteristics, like the peak potential, bursting behaviour, refractory period, things like that. They can reproduce the traces of biological neurons with good accuracy (like the link in the GP), and the papers describing the model mention ion channels and whatnot, but they're very abstract. They're not made to reproduce the biology.
I've always imagined that in the future humans will have some form of telepathy through neural implants. This sounds almost exactly like how I envision the experience of well-implemented telepathic communication.
Wow. This is so absolutely fascinating. I only wish they could grow up faster so we could see if they really can read each-others thoughts, or if it's just hopeful pattern making by the adults.
Her husband, Doug, drums up business. “We deliver food, flowers, whatever anybody needs,” she says. “We charge $5 for delivery in town.” Money is tight. Each time they get ahead, there’s a financially draining trip to Vancouver.
What!?
Some of the greatest leaps in understanding about how our brains work, not to mention untold wonders in technological advancement might be presented to us on a platter via this once in a multi-generation opportunity and they're housed in some crap rental trying to deliver flowers to make ends meet??? This family should immediately be declared a national treasure and have the full support of the Canadian government.
Expensive? Morally nebulous? Look, we yanks will build a multi-100-million dollar prison and get over the moral gray-ness of water-boarding just to find a few bombs. Helping out what might turn out to be a simple disabled pair of twins in exchange for knowledge that may improve humanity forever shouldn't be that much of a stretch.
I know this might be an unpopular opinion and attract downvotes, but I just got a +70 for what I though was a throwaway one-liner. If that's how the karma flows, then bring it.