tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post115876687276901543..comments2024-03-28T19:14:33.619-07:00Comments on The Splintered Mind: Can People Imagine Things from Multiple Angles at Once?Eric Schwitzgebelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1160075793355376512006-10-05T12:16:00.000-07:002006-10-05T12:16:00.000-07:00A belated thanks for your comments, genius and bri...A belated thanks for your comments, genius and brian! (I was on hiatus and only now got to checking this post.)<BR/><BR/>I think your comments speak for themselves, and I would encourage other readers to send in relevant descriptions of their experiences (in this post or in any other), which I find an interesting source of basic data.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1159190590945868702006-09-25T06:23:00.000-07:002006-09-25T06:23:00.000-07:00Regarding synesthesia, as a child I saw numbers as...Regarding synesthesia, as a child I saw numbers as though they were colored. This ability has disappeared with age. I have a friend that still see numbers as colored. He spots a shape or a single number in an array of numbers very quickly. So, synesthesia is for real.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1158928493805097232006-09-22T05:34:00.000-07:002006-09-22T05:34:00.000-07:00If I visualize a three D image I end up doing it w...If I visualize a three D image I end up doing it with a rotating see-through object. <BR/>I htink that is because I have seen them before on TV etc.<BR/>I dont know if I can imagine seeing somthing fundimentally different from what I have seen. probably what I would need to do is not actually try to see it and just "think it". I guessGeniushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11624496692217466430noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1158873141353686252006-09-21T14:12:00.000-07:002006-09-21T14:12:00.000-07:00Eric,I think you get the main points. It's not tha...Eric,<BR/><BR/>I think you get the main points. It's not that Hinton has 4-D objects in his head, it's that his cubes emulate the 3-D hypersurface of a 4-D creature's retina. I'm assuming, I guess, to flesh out the analogy, that normal visual imagery involves the emulation of the 2-D surface of a human retina.<BR/><BR/>I know that you've blogged on the important lack of flatness of human retina, but hopefully the above conveys the drift of what Hinton thought he was up to.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1158865732774164262006-09-21T12:08:00.000-07:002006-09-21T12:08:00.000-07:00Hi Eddy -- thanks for the comments! The Neisser w...Hi Eddy -- thanks for the comments! The Neisser work you mention sounds vaguely familiar, but I don't know if I've read the original. (One great thing about this blog are all the cool articles people point out to me.) And, indeed, if your last point is correct, it might be relevant to the issue of this post.<BR/><BR/>Pete: Sure, but why does that make it a 4-D imagining (if that's is what's being proposed), instead of just a 3-D imagining? Aren't you just restoring the dimension lost in a flat projection?<BR/><BR/>Maybe the thought is that we can imagine 3D objects by entertaining 2D visual images, so likewise we can imagine 4D objects by entertaining 3D visual images? I'm not sure if that's true; but even if it is, the image itself remains three-dimensional.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1158864731793289312006-09-21T11:52:00.000-07:002006-09-21T11:52:00.000-07:00Eric,The crucial idea behind Hinton's cubes is som...Eric,<BR/><BR/>The crucial idea behind Hinton's cubes is something like this:<BR/><BR/>Voxels in a 3-D array are to 4-D objects what pixels in a 2-D array are to 3-D objects.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1158864517117131952006-09-21T11:48:00.000-07:002006-09-21T11:48:00.000-07:00Hi Eric, this isn't really related but your post r...Hi Eric, this isn't really related but your post reminded me of an old paper by Ulric Neisser (and someone else) on the phenomenology of memory (perhaps you've seen it). The results coincide with my own experience: the more recent the memory the more likely we visualize it from the first-person perspective (i.e., from behind our eyes); the more distant the memory, the more likely we see it from a third-person perspective (i.e., as a "movie" in which we appear). There are, of course, questions about the reliability of the reports, but those are the reports (and that's what I would report). My guess (and I don't remember if Neisser suggests this too) is that it may have something to do with the difficulty of "taking on" a different body image (e.g., our childhood body)? It'd be interesting to know whether this phenomenon is influenced by the prevelance of photographs and home movies.<BR/><BR/>(Now that I've written this, I can't remember if you were there when I was talking about it at SPP--my memory of that discussion is already shifting to the third-person perspective. Oh, that's why your post reminded me of this--it also seems to me that I sometimes remember events simultaneously from both perspectives, or maybe it just shifts back and forth quickly.)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1158849484954068382006-09-21T07:38:00.000-07:002006-09-21T07:38:00.000-07:00Ah, right! Yes, that's pretty interesting. Since...Ah, right! Yes, that's pretty interesting. Since visual objects are subjectively located and since -- if Perky [and Titchener her teacher and Hume] are right -- imagery experiences are very much like faint perceptual experiences, so much so that one could mistake one for the other, then it seems to follow that imagined objects are also in subjective space.<BR/><BR/>Nice thought!Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1158835449492577552006-09-21T03:44:00.000-07:002006-09-21T03:44:00.000-07:00Oops, sorry Eric, that Perky reference was suppose...Oops, sorry Eric, that Perky reference was supposed to be about your previous post.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1158791781780145762006-09-20T15:36:00.000-07:002006-09-20T15:36:00.000-07:00Thanks for the comments, folks!Tad: I had been inc...Thanks for the comments, folks!<BR/><BR/>Tad: I had been inclined to be skeptical -- and not to know what to make of -- reports of synaesthesia. Then Ramachandran and Hubbard came out with a very cool experiment suggesting that synaesthetes found it easy to see shapes arranged by number, where non-synaesthetes don't. For example, if you have an array of letters scattered across a field, with the H's in a triangle, most people will not easily detect that the H's are in a triangle, whereas their synaesthetes (they reported) could detect this very quickly -- as non-synaesthetes also would if the H's were all colored red and the other letters were non-red. This suggested there might be some validity to their claims that they literally see different colors with different numbers!<BR/><BR/>About a year ago, though, someone told me that others have had trouble replicating Ramachandran's and Hubbard's work on this; so I don't know.<BR/><BR/>In any case, neural activation can spread between regions of the cortex associated with different sensory modalities; there's no reason to suppose that some people might have greater interconnection. I don't know if this has been studied with neural imaging in (claimed) synaesthetes; but I think there's some evidence for this related to the synaesthetic experiences associated with LSD.<BR/><BR/>Thanks for the links and references, Tanasije and Pete! I think I know the Perky experiment you're talking about, Tanasije; but I don't recall it being connected to multiple visual angles.<BR/><BR/>The possibility of representing four-dimensional images is cool, Pete. And why not, if the brain is plastic enough? Maybe I'm not getting something, but I don't see how the Hinton case does it, though.Eric Schwitzgebelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11541402189204286449noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26951738.post-1158772214571870972006-09-20T10:10:00.000-07:002006-09-20T10:10:00.000-07:00Hi Eric, I just wanted to mention experiment by Pe...Hi Eric, <BR/>I just wanted to mention experiment by Perky C. where the subject were asked to imagine a banana on a screen. Unknown to them a projector was put behind the screen, and slowly the intensity of the projector was intensified. The subjects didn't realize that they are looking at the real picture, while the projected banana image was clearly visible to other people.<BR/>BTW, tried to find some link about this on web, but you will never guess what shows up for "Perky C" search :)<BR/><BR/>Tad, you can watch Ramachandran talk on synaesthesia <A HREF="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4684607596399338611&q=almaden+cognitive+computing" REL="nofollow">here</A>. Very interesting stuff.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com