https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-brain

[original post here]

On What Kind Of Thing Brain Waves Are:

Loweren writes:

In my undergrad biology program we visited a brain research lab near Moscow. The brain scientist gave us a brief intro to Fourier transforms, which made me understand how beautiful they are - something that 2 years of undergrad math classes didn't manage to do.

Then he explained the brain waves to us like this:

"Imagine you are standing outside the football stadium. You don't see what's happening inside, but you hear the chatter of the crowd. All the individual words blend together into indistinct mess and although there's definitely a local information transfer going on, from the outside you can't make out anything specific.

Then imagine one of the teams scored a goal. The crowd behavior is now very different! The fans of the winning team start to cheer and sing. You can easily pick this up from outside and infer what's happening. This is because the individuals behave in a globally coordinated manner, so their signals amplify each other in tune.

From this perspective, brain waves are a byproduct of globally coordinated neuronal activity, and it's the first one we historically learned to pick up. They appear when neurons stop chatting with each other and start chanting in unison."

Then he plopped some probes on my head and announced I have beautiful epileptic spikes (I'm not an epileptic)