What’s Your Brain’s Role in Creating Space & Time?
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- Опубликовано: 14 мар 2023
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Physics is the business of figuring out the structure of the world. So are our brains. But sometimes physics comes to conclusions that are in direct conflict with concepts fundamental to our minds, such as the realness of space and time. How do we tell who’s correct? Are time and space objective realities or human-invented concepts?
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To me, space and time are relative, the more time I spend with my relatives the more space I need
Good one🤣🤣
Most sensible comment here!
Lolol....😉
Well, family is just those who you love and live with you, which includes pets and excludes most relatives.
You're welcome. 😉
@@MCsCreations I couldn't agree more!
it fascinates me how us, the result of these processes, are here trying to figure out the processes, through the processes themselves. it's like an AI looking at its own code while it executes
Kind of like an NPC trying to understand the code and the external world. I find the idea of this life not being my first, as absurd as question if it is real. I don't know, it is unbelievable may even be absurd, but makes for a useful analogy.
Recursion theory
What's really going to bake your noggin is how the universe can spontaneously become self aware from 8 billion different perspectives, and none of those perspectives realise that they are the universe looking back on itself as separate entities despite being made of 100% universe.
Imagine you program a video game and one day you notice the NPCs measuring the monitor frame rate and resolution
@@noahbrimhall3370 there’s a ChatGPT insight in there somewhere
I have once heard it said, "If the brain were simple enough that we could easily understand how it functions, then the brain would be be too simple to be able to understand how it functions." I feel like we're always fighting against this sort of thing whenever we try to understand how we process some form of information in a detailed way, and it is endlessly fascinating. :)
This is a conjectured corollary of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
There is bunch of mess inside. Imagine some AI that cannot remember what happened several hours ago - it will be typical brain.
What if multiple people each figure out part of a brain and then put their notes together?
@@RoelThijs The idea is that the logic that defines how a brain fully works is not something that a human brain can express.
There's lots of rather complex phenomena that we understand only on the scientific level, that is not a common knowledge. Even more, some knowledge (if not most of it) to be properly understood must be written down. So I'd say that understanding something is mostly a function of a brain + paper or other medium that stores information. I don't see why brain couldn't be understood the same way.
As a neuroscientist interested in physics, this episode was a marvelous meeting of worlds. The finding that hippocampal space/time navigation resides in the same area that governs episodic memory may be especially revealing about how humans think and experience the world/universe.Great explanation and graphics, as usual, but now closer to “home”. Many thanks, Matt and Spacetime.
I have trigeminal neuralgia. May I please have a word?
Hi, are there any books you would recommend on neuroscience? Probably low level but I’ve read a couple of David eaglemans books 🤷♂️ ty
Check out books by Gyorgy Buzsaki, Eric Kandell or Dean Buonomano. Academic intro books are good but more geared towards undergrad students.
@@vvdv99 wow these look super interesting thank you very much! 💙
Makes me wonder if memories are simply records of which neurons were firing at a given time.
While playing Hyperbolica, a game set in non-Euclidean spaces that will absolutely break your brain, I looked some of this stuff up to see if the grid cells were hard-wired from birth to a Euclidean plane or if they just formed this way during brain development because that maps to our experience. What I found seems to indicate that it is the former. Much to my dismay, however, nobody ever did an experiment on mice where they would wear tiny VR goggles from birth that simulate hyperbolic space. Until someone does, we don't seem to know for certain.
I believe an experiment has been done where someone wore a headset that flipped everything upside down, and over time the subject's brain was able to flip it the right way again. I'm guessing if we had to settle a colony in an alternate and hyperbolic universe, we would adapt, but it would never be ideal. So a little bit hard wired for euclidean space, and a little flexibility to adapt to non-euclidean, at least somewhat, would be my guess.
And I think some people are more tolerant than others, Antichamber literally made me freak out while with friends it was just harder work for them to keep track of the connections in, like, a secondary mental plane or something. I felt completely unmoored.
@@kaitlyn__L I think our ability to understand and track connections _in general_ of abstract things draws upon parts of the brain originally used for navigating space, but is clearly not limited to Euclidian space.
@@KevinBeavers
Good question and some good replies so far. I think Kevin probably has it right - it's not one or the other but a bit of both.
Natural selection ise a pretty good optimiser. Brains use energy and the benefits they bring have to be worth the expense. Brains have evolved to bring us the maximum benefit at minimum (energy) cost so it's not about how closely our mental models resemble reality but how well they enable us to reproduce (people often mention survival but it all boils down to one thing - reproduction). Understanding the fundamental realities of this uiverse simply wasn't necessary for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
@@KevinBeavers the upside-down thing has nothing to do with non-Euclidean geometry though, so I don't think we can derive any conclusions from that.
I love these episodes that cross into other fields of science and prepare us for even weirder fundamental information
Physics is everything.
This channel still feels like they’re trying to softly break some big news
Meh. Without hard evidence actionable in some way, still just philosophy.
You want weird information? Ive got it.
@ And at the same time it's no-thing
OK it's 5 months later now, are we ever going to get back to finishing up this series on the demise of space and time?
This episode is picking apart the fabric of reality at the most profound and mind-expanding level.
All I could think about is... 🐈😻🐈⬛😺🐱😸🐈😻🐈⬛😺🐱😸🐈😻🐈⬛😺🐱😸🐈😻🐈⬛😺🐱😸🐈😻
I love the direction this channel has taken and how Matt has grown into one of the best science communicators of our time
I wish he pronounced "human" like Carl Sagan though
Yes, actual information is presented instead of sanitized and repetitive, sensational babble and talking down.
and deeper into the rabbit hole we go! thank you PBS and Matt for this awesome journey over the last years
Brok was right. "It's not the shape of the thing that matters. It's the nature of the thing"
Here's to a six hundred more!
space is not real, it's a government conspiracy
This is the Rabbit Hole of Holes: The only place Spacetime exists is in the Brain! DoD dismissed Spacetime during SDI STAR WARS for the Vacuum Ambient EM Field Inertial Dipole aka Graviton Theory now used at US Navy NAWCAD UAP Propulsion Labs for decades! The Ambient EM Field is made of Planck sized Inertial Dipoles called Gravitons by Salvatore Pais one of many HFGWG Drive Inventor at the US Navy NACAD UAP Ambient EM Field Inertial Dipole Densification Drives that "liquify" of densify the Ambient EM Field to the point that they can operate at 10^9 Tesla condensing AT LEAST 10^35 GRAVITONS (Mass between 10^(-68) kg and 10^(-78) kg and more likely 10^(-78) kg in a particle with a volume of slightly less than lp^3 or the Plank length cubed. Read Salvatore's Patents specifically about Gravitons. They confirmed Graviton during the SDI Star Wars Weapons research of the 1980s and 1990s.
Indeed! And perhaps the rabbit hole goes deep enough to become higher dimensional! If we do indeed live in a higher dimensional construct, but can only perceive and comprehend a small slither of this hyper-world, that could also explain why our grasp on spacetime is fundamentally flawed!
In any case, Physics continues to be an exciting... Ever evolving subject! And long may that continue!!!
Wow, the neuroscience in this was astonishing. I hadn't heard of half the research you referenced. Amazing!
I think this also says something about those memory techniques some people use to memorize decks of cards by associating each one with a location on a memorized walk through an imaginary building...
magic castle
The more I learn about the brain, the more astounding similarities I find between a brain and a modern CPU. There is a distinct memory architecture, lots of clocks with their respective domains and frequencies, and now I've found out that a brain has, basically, hardware acceleration for mapping sequences, which gets used to do all sorts of things. Fascinating.
Very true. I find myself thinking of the brain more and more as just a meat computer every day. Really pushes the limits on what I would consider alive, In regards to AI and stuff
AI is a product ultimately of our creation, we are its creators. So its not surprising its similar to how we work. We understand principles and delibrately implement them in computing.
The hexagonal grid cells and place cells are fascinating. I love when "intelligence" gets broken down into simple rules that make me feel like a biological computer, makes me worry less about the bigger picture
Hexagons are the best-a-gons
So, you like being reduced to a series of chemical processes? How degrading. You must see nothing wrong with reductivism, logical positivism and scientism then.
@@thitherword I don't know what those things are and I don't feel like I've been "reduced" from anything that was greater than I am now
@@thitherword Here another human imagines they are somehow superior to the rest of the universe (while being made of it), created for a purpose, and have a fate to fulfill.
@@GrunOne Couldn't be further from the truth. My entire channel is dedicated to ecocentrism and non-anthropocentrism. I'm not religious. I just don't agree with machine metaphors and reducing everything down to their component parts. As Wittgenstein said, physiological life isn't life.
I minored in German Literature just to read Leibniz, Kant and Einstein in their original German. This is the fun stuff. Piaget is also a good read as he approaches all this from a psychological perspective.
(:
I hope you read Nietzsche too
@TheEasternQ
You would know.
LOL
Sometimes these videos go beyond informative and entertaining, utterly amazing. Pure magic.
This episode has delved more into philosophy than it appeared to be I thought. Some basic questions remain such as, "what is an observer?" If I had a matter anti-matter bomb with the trigger tied to a beam splitter at 50% 50% chance, let's say we got the "don't explode" result. What happens to the entropy of the "do explode" result? Start there and add to it the fact that you could be a brain in a jar. If the mechanisms we can interact with doesn't already tell us that we do know that we can induce sensory information directly upon the brain. If we did so continuously since birth, that may just be a reality you come to expect. I could very well not exist at all and you are actually testing a device that makes you appear like a 3+1 dimensional creature at the end of your "life" you take off. Perhaps everyone else on the planet is just there for the immersion effect for this 3+1 simulatior for the 5 dimensional brain in a jar. Maybe reality in that sense consists of something other than symmetry, or units. You can concieve it somehow, it could be, but it probably isn't because you appear to be a mammal just like every other primate with varying degrees of consciousness. No one is truly certain, that you can be certain of. Also what's up with chirality, CP violation and the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Why all electrons around stuff? Why is that one cobalt isotope decaying that way in the Wu experiment? That seems to be directly related to stuff happening at all if of course I am this simple primate in the first place. 🤔 I am certain of the uncertainty principle though. If symmetry isn't virtual and merely induced. I guess it will all make sense when I'm 100 years old in a coffin.... wait... no that's correct.
Just like Readibg Rainbow 🌈 or Magic School Bus. Both shows expanded the mind through exploring the natural world 🌎
What an interesting series you have started. I'm an old man now but as a kid and teenager physics was my main love. I manged well with it up until A-level (UK exams seen as essential for going to university) but I knew I didn't have the maths to study it at university and chose to do biology instead. The interview at the uni I went to was with a prof who was a renowned neurologist. I didn't know this at the time and when he asked what topic fascinated me I said 'The brain'. I've tried to keep up with biology and physics over the years, and find thinking about areas of overlap a way of keeping my brain active.
Keep up the good work.
What a lovely comment. Keep those up :)
Thank you for this fascinating presentation of new thoughts on space / time and the brain. Apart from opening up new ideas and concepts for me, your presentation skills are exceptional. I scraped a BSc. Physical Electronics fifty years ago and wish I'd had you on the lecturing team. Great stuff.
I knew at some point this channel would have to dive into neuroscience. Really after all this whole reality is being experienced this way through our brains. I truly believe the key to understanding reality, aside from physics, is understanding the brain and consciousness. Which we know very little about.
I echo this sentiment completely. I got into lucid dreaming about 7 months ago which blew my mind and got me really thinking about how all of science is subjective on human consciousness, and can only be conducted through the lens of human experience... when you experience a proper lucid dream it makes you really realise that the entire human experience is a construct of the mind. Not saying there isn't an underlying reality, just that our experienced reality isn't it. If when the lights are out, you're asleep, and all 5 senses are switched off, and yet you can experience a conscious reality of space and time equally as real as waking life, then that sort of gives the game away!
@@aquacruisedb that reminds me of my criticism of Plato back when I was in school. Plato said that we need to move beyond the “false information” gleaned from our senses, and move instead to the “true information“ from logic and thought. But there is no way to separate any human experience from our physical senses, as even our thought is a kind of physical sense, just a microscopic one. We cannot remove ourselves from our human biases.
@@kaitlyn__L Well that is why people invented things like transcendental meditation. and shamanistic rituals. To cease becoming a human being and become an implacable consciousness, and thereby get enlightened,,
Something for guys in the AI field to think about too!
If anyone is looking to create an AI that can help us learn more about the Universe, they may want to consider whether simply trying to copy the human brain is the best way to go. Our brains have evolved to process the maximum useful information at minimum possible energy cost. That is information that helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce as hunter-gatherers. We don't have quite the same goals nor the same constraints. Hopefully, this is already being taken into account.
Not neurological. Simply a social construct.
Matt is one of the greatest professors of our time. It's always a pleasure to watch his show.
Our time and space. Don't forget the space.
Of our… spacetime
@@EvillClown11 yes bro hhhh
Gantefoer ist better
@@sk8n854 yes i agree
On the subject of timekeeping, I've always made a game of guessing how much time has passed since I last looked at a clock, or alternatively, guessing when a timer I set is going to end. The interesting part is its totally unconscious. I've trained myself in the sense that I like to keep trying to do it, but the mechanism itself is opaque. I can set a timer for 45 minutes, and I'll forget about it, and then suddenly have a feeling like "I wonder if that timer is getting close to going off, its been awhile" and then it will go off 10 seconds later. I feel like this is something we ought to explore more, at the very least in a spiritual or meditative way, attempting to form a closer bond with our body, interfacing with these hidden systems that most of us aren't very aware of.
The ability of the subconscious mind is pretty amazing. I also regularly set timers, forget about them, and know within about 5 to 10 percent of the elapsed time. Another thing is "sleeping on it" when I can't find a solution to a problem while actively thinking on it for a long time. After concentrating on something for awhile, and failing, your subconscious can still work on a solution while you're doing and thinking on other things. I've spent hours trying to fix something to no avail, then decided to take a break and do other stuff, or sleep on it, and the solution appeared to me within a few minutes after waking up or after some time elsewhere. Nowadays, when I'm trying to remember a name I know is somewhere deep in my memory, for example, I stop trying to actively think about it after a few seconds. Not very long after, that info will pop right into my head as if out of nowhere while I'm on to thinking and doing other things.
Probably for similar reasons, I always found it easier to memorize stuff by studying before bedtime. It's as if, by doing so, I set my subconscious mind to imprinting that for awhile. I've seen recommendations regarding such study before sleep and, in my experience, it does help.
Our bodies do have an internal timer though. Sometimes it can be quite reliable and I'm sure we can train it up.
I can usually guess almost exactly what time it is whenever I wake up.
I have a very accurate internal clock. I always pick up my phone at 11.28am. Literally, always. Must be a bug lol
@@NefariousKoel the best way to study is to pause mid study and do nothing and/or add adrenaline right after you want to learn so something. The sudden stop mid study doesn't stop your brain from thinking about what you were doing and your brain fires the dame neurons needed for the task at 50 times speed and in reverse by stopping mid thing your trying to learn, yay neuroscience. Your body is built to remember moments of danger aka adrenalin rushes. In the olden times they would teach kids then toss them in rivers, that apparently was quite effective at teaching them quickly although I'm certain there were other issues with that teaching method lol
In the recent years I listen to Sean Carroll, Daniel Denett, Robert Sapolsky, Brian Green, Arvin Ash, Mark Solms, Lawrence Krauss, Andrew Huberman and you Matt. Nowdays I have a strange feeling that I start to see a complex big picture about what real is and how it works… THANK YOU GUYS!!!
Like your list, but Huberman is *way* too credulous for me.
Automated mapping is based on relationships between origin and destination so the relational view makes sense (topology). I love also how we can not only mentally map our world, but also worlds in media, from a real, first person, third person, or bird’s eye perspective. Or from a story someone has told us, we can imagine and generate a mental map
I think it varies person to person. I can for example always tell time within an hour without a watch or clock but leave me 20 miles away from home and I need a map to get back.
"Once you go full rhombicosidodecahedron, you never go back."
---Albert Einstein
In robotics, we primarily use relative changes in positions and velocities for calculating current positions. However, relative positing systems often drift. To counter this, we use absolute position landmarks to remove drift and calibrate the correct positions. Probably, our brains use both relative and absolute positions are needed to get the most accurate positions because each system alone has its flaws, but together they are way better.
@@Haskellerz think of a brain as of a negative-feedback system. We observe those everywhere around us in an engineering world, right? Why is our brain of any difference? We are just sensori-motor interfaces, after all. And those systems are incredibly effective in not just to converge, but they impose a "flexible adaptive threshold" - imho, that's the feature can tackle the problem, you mentioned.
I was thinking the same, while I'm reading a book, I don't really care about these restraints of space and time. The narrator could tell me anything and I simply fill in the gaps for myself. Yet I know there are people who struggle deeply with this (aphantasia for example), so I guess it's part of the imagination rather than tapping into "the fifth dimension of the Universe" or some other ethereal crap a spiritual guru will try and rub on me before he starts selling his workshops to develop my cosmic abilities even further lol
God, I love this channel so much. I just love having my brain blown away. Running headfirst into the limit of our collective understanding of the universe and daring to peak over the edge.
This stuff just makes me feel so alive and connected to everything around me.
These videos are lullaby to me. I play it in background and this is the fastest way for me to sleep
My simplistic and emotional view is that we are trying to understand things with the thing that doesn’t understand.
We will always find the answers we seek because we created the questions.
Everything we try to understand is worked on the bias and terms we created.
The part about the place cells and grid cells reminds me of the mechanism by which psychedelics may disintegrate the perception of space and time at high doses.
I want to see a study of place/grid cell's behavior in the presence of high DMT concentrations.
That would be interesting!
Very cool idea. People talk about being blasted into the center of the universe, a consistent experience among those who take it. I wonder what's going on there.
@@BrandNewByxor For me, I think it felt more like being dissolved? Like everything fragmented and suddenly I was in a non-euclidean space. With no connection to my body.
It felt extremely familiar, like I'd been there before but I couldn't remember it.
There was an opening into a deeper place, and something called to me from it to come inside, but then I regained connection to my body :P
That was two big hits, but the real blast off is supposed to be 3 big hits, so I didn't get as deep into it.
There is a lot of hippie magic-wumbo surrounding the topic, but I think we could figure out a lot about how we neurologically construct our realities by studying these kinds of states.
@@BrandNewByxor How about narcissism? What else would explain the belief that they're at the center of the universe?
@@dangerfly What else? Uhm I don't know....maaaaaaaaybe the DMT?
@@Linguae_Musicyou spend a third of your life sleeping. Your dreams are probably why that state feels vaguely familiar. You do it all the time.
I've got to say, I really enjoy these videos that incorporate physics with philosophical ideas. They are beginning to be some of my favorite videos!
Agreed. Been watching for years but particularly loved this video
Agreed as well. PBS Philosophy ❤️
If you are interested and still have not read "The Case Against Reality" , it is worth checking out.
i'd like to see an apisode on "how can we have consciousness when "now" is only a planck time long and each quark only sees its immediate neighbors"
Not sure what philosophy is discussed here...
As a mathematician I am involved in some pretty abstract reasoning, with logical structure at the core of everything I do. I often find that my path through "logic space" brings up images of physical structures whose nature I cannot quite put into words, but which undeniably feel like physical structures. Thus, though I rarely verbalize the analogy, there is a very strong analogy between logical structure and physical structure in my mind when I think through arguments. Then, you come along and say that the sequential structure of the brain which is used to map out space may have been co-opted for abstract reasoning. I guess I'm not crazy after all! I wonder how many others get the same sensations as they think through logical arguments?
As a Kantian philosophy graduate I’ve been waiting decades for this update. Thank you so much. Fascinating. Looking forward to your future speculations on Kant’s noumena.
This might be the single most mind blowing video you’ve made to date. Theories about space and time being emergent have always felt sort of distant, described in terms of minute subatomic particles or infinitely distant extremal boundaries, but this video makes me feel like the space between my eyes and the phone I’m typing this on is nothing more than a convenient perceptual illusion. Since watching this, it feels different to just focus my eyes to make out objects at different distances.
If so, you're just losing your mind. It doesn't matter what your brain think, the world is still there with our without your brains.
check donald hoffman ideas
it's pure magical thinking
@@jimicunningable it might be the path forward. naive to think the brain does not take shortcuts when we already know it does
@@officialmusictracks It definitely isn't, because smartphones didn't come dropping out of the air when someone thought of them. All this science stuff is really neat to think about, but you have to keep reminding yourself that it won't change a thing about the reality we live in, as it only seeks to describe its origins and how we relate to it. What OP describes is simply a meditation exercise that focuses on the optics of his eyes. He's not "breaking the Matrix" lol
Thank you Matt and everyone involved for all that you have done over the years. I can not accurately put into words what your effort means. Thank you :) ❤️
[30] And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent: [31] Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead
Long time lurker here, I'm a cognitive scientist and I'd like to direct you towards Hubel and Wiesel's (1964) experiment with kittens to reinforce the relational aspect, the second kitten never developed the ability to recognize space/proprioception or to 'see'. It supports the relational model! But the debate is far from settled and the whole idea of internal representations is far from settled too (I'm from the school of 4E cognition wouldn't you know!).
I wrote a blog post series on the hard problem of consciousness using the Everett interpretation (in my grad student days) that I can share if anyone is interested in the ramblings of a music therapist turned cognitive scientist... 😅😅😅 Love the channel and keep up the fantastic work!
A video spanning physics, philosophy, and neural science. Excellent work!
This actually reminds me a lot of the movie "Arrival". Training your brain into experiencing time as a whole, and not as linear path.
That was a surprisingly good movie!
Yes, funny fairy tale.
@@markiv2942 yes as per it being a movie. why are you so enthusiastic about pointing out that it's not real? lmfao
The brain isn't being trained; it is 'you,' your pure consciousness. The brain is merely an interface for consciousness to interact with a physical world. Without a brain, you would exist in a timeless void subject to pure thought.
@@pyropulseIXXI any proof of what you saying?
Excellent summary of Cartesian materialism versus Kant's transcendental Idealism. This is why metaphysics is so important to science.
Which part was that
Hi Matt. I think this is the first time I've commented, but that's because of a point I want to make. We watch PBS Space Time on our home televisions via Roku. I don't think Roku, or other smart TV operating systems, have a way to access comments. At least not that I'm aware of. Anyway, great program. We look forward to every new episode. I think that I'm what Don Lincoln might call a "physics fan". That is, I want to have the fun of learning how my world works without having to do any of the hard work. And watching it with a simple remote, and no keyboard, makes it possible to be a couch potato and a physics fan simultaneously. So don't forget us couch potatoes when making your shows! Thank you for all your effort.
I once had a dream while camping outdoors, sleeping out under the stars. I had become a two dimensional geometric object, a triangle of a certain color, lilac, I think. All around me were other geometric shapes of different colors, all moving around and bumping into me, as if jostling for room. I found myself in panic mode, like a rat trapped in a maze, and I knew I had to solve the puzzle or be forever trapped within the mosaic.
I searched around, looking for patterns, until I solved one level, only to find myself in another level, each level more complex than the previous, like steps up into higher and higher dimensions. The activity sped up with each level of achievement, until all the geometric shapes and colors were in a fascinating, colorful whirl. There was a popping noise, and it all finally resolved into a blank state of pure whiteness, my ears ringing.
Then I opened my eyes and found myself awake, looking at the incredible grid of the Milky Way and stars above me, the campfire now just a red glow of embers. It was profound, as though I'd seen through into a deeper level of reality than I normally experience in my day to day life.
To this day I have no idea what really happened-it was a dream-but I feel that it was my own brain revealing to me the deeper structure of the Universe and my own internal-wait for it-Spacetime.
What a great episode! I love the biology stuff. Thinking about biology and physics overlap is super cool. More of this please!
I was impressed that the concepts of absolute time and space are how our brain works. This is why Newton's ideas are so clear whereas Leibniz' ideas require us to take mushrooms
@@aididdat1749 😂😂😂
something else that's interesting, single-celled organisms are very good at navigating their environment! able to "learn", "remember", and "problem solve" in their own sort of way, somehow forming from their complicated and always changing internal structure. biology is extremely cool!!
There is no biology. Biology is just a virtual concept.
11:39 Chillingly familiar for those of us with Spatial Sequence Synesthesia. I perplexed my classmates as a child when I asked “what does your number line look like in your head?” only to find out years later that not everyone perceives time and ordered sequences this way. To my mind, the (unit-less) distance and the spatial trajectory taken between ‘now’ and ‘next Monday’ is every bit as ‘real’ as the recalled distance and path taken in my morning commute.
Parallels are even present with the ‘scale’ factor. My mental maps for hours of the day, days of the week, and months in a year are discrete and repeatable. I can crudely draw them. These scales unconsciously merge in a dynamic way whenever I’m processing time.
That’s fascinating. I’ve always had trouble keeping track of the relations between places, bad at directions or knowing how long it takes to get somewhere, and similarly my thought has usually been abstract, systems based, and often non-spatial. Flow charts are a lot of mental work for me to decode.
Schools teaching number lines baffled me. I had to think about numbers more mechanically and systems-wise, like the mechanism of a clock, or even better a mechanical tape counter or odometer. Relay logic like in an old pinball machine has always been more intuitive to me than logic circuits and a truth table too.
But I’ve also found I see a lot of similarities in behaviours of different systems where many people think of them as totally different things. I guess that’s one reason evolution produces all types of thinkers, everyone will come to different ideas from their own perspectives.
Hmm.... so is sensing time like experiencing physical distance? which if it is, would be difficult for you to answer because you wouldn't understand how others don't sense time that way. The mind is some amazing stuff
I'm not a scientist nor that smart but my earliest memories include being curious about these fundamental questions. "Horton hears a who" Kickstarted my imagination of space and time like an acid trip.
This is amazing!
Some time ago (I think...), someone told me about ADHD and why it gets treated with amphetamines, of all things. Now, before that it just seemed counterintuitive to me, why someone who's already hyper needed more speed. They described it as the brain running on different clocks, just like in the video. If those clocks are out of sync, it creates the mess that is ADHD, and apparently amphetamines help boosting the clocks that are running behind, after careful finetuning.
Also, those clocks remind me of what Ernst Mach said about the "divided" individual. "The I cannot be rescued."
Does this mean ADHD is related to autism?
@@markhathaway9456 Sorry, but on that topic, you'd be better off asking a professional, probably a neurologist.
That "someone" I mentioned is a patient themselves. It's just that it made so much sense to me then, and how well it correlates with what I see coming from other ADHD patients.
@@markhathaway9456 what makes you say that? Autism and ADHD symptoms do overlap.
People with the ADHD-Inattentive subtype do not present as "hyper", although that's definitely true of the (much more popularly stereotyped) Hyperactive subtype. ADHD is treated with stimulants due to the effects they have on dopamine (and possibly other neurotransmitters) which seems to play a core role in motivation, and critically, attention
As someone with ADHD-I, I've suspected for a while that the way my brain models concepts and relations between them is also somehow different. It's very interesting to learn from this video that there is literally hardware in the brain providing sequence modelling capability. Perhaps this means ADHD involves actual structural differences in brain cells and that it's possible to detect them with a scan? Might also explain ADHD's heredity
Love this connection because as I watched this video, I was connecting the dots between my poor perception of time, poor depth perception, and poor spatial mapping and ADHD diagnosis. Finding out that those are all using the same system makes a LOT of sense as to why I struggled with all 3 at about the same level of struggle. Tying this into the amphetamines regulating the clock makes a whole lotta sense too.
PBS Philosophy? Loved it!
Either way, I would love an episode about the possible find of a second time dimension and what it would imply.
More like PBS Neurology or PBS Earth Behaviorology
I read that if faster-than-light particles were allowed, they would have to exist in 1 dimension of space and 3 dimensions of time. Whatever it means ;)
@@maak6270 Don't look at me, dude. I'm lost as well. 😬
Time can’t have more dimensions than 1. I am pretty sure. It’s literally our way of giving a mathematical unit to the idea that we’re progressing forward thru space. That’s not to say it can’t be stretched and warped but it still Marches forward into the future.
or hawking's negative time?
Another lovely episode! Really love the inclusion of Kant as a way of uniting philosophy and physics.
As an objectivist, I hated it ;)
We can recognize the beat and tempo of our favorite song instantly, and know if is playing fast or slow. It therefore seems logical to believe that these memories must be calibrated to a master metronome in our brains.
I think that time has aspects of it that are both absolute and relational, because there is one direction that time always flows in, and while it may be passing at different rates for those within it, it always flows in the same direction.
Hence dog years
I have audited my brain and come to the conclusion that the universe is far too complicated for me to have invented it. 😅
That's OK, I invented it to have you do that in it.
@@watamatafoyu True story, I saw them do it!
But you’re God , so you did.
God was invented for people like you.
Ooh, deep stuff about the very nature of existence! My favourite
Subconsciously decided to make a new memory as I’m watching this excellent episode and so I’m eating Chinese leftovers at 6 am wearing underwear for a hat. This moment saved forever, one hopes. Thanks for all the teachings.
I think it would be really fascinating to see if and how these brain regions changed during sleep.
Since sleep seems to be a universal phenomenon, and one in which we create alternative realities, which don’t make sense in the “normal” sense, yet do have their own internal logic and (from my own experience, and that of others) do seem to relate to what has happened in our “normal “reality” it would be fascinating to observe any possible differences in these brain regions during sleep.
That stuff about place cells explains a lot about ADHD tbh, or at least, a lot of the “separate symptoms” seem to correspond to all these various different functions. People with ADHD often struggle to remember the order of steps in directions to a place, AND struggle to piece together the right order of actions for tasks, AND struggle to keep track of intended actions. Not to mention changing room often makes them forget what they were planning to do in the other room, which would also have a direct physical link via those place cells’ activation patterns. Those could all feasibly stem from less-ordered firing of those place cells!
I’ve also noticed people with ADHD and autism tend to have easier times visualising higher-dimensional space, such as immediately grasping an animation of a rotating hypercube, which maybe would also have something to do with that mental map created by the place cells? I’m less confident on that one though.
That’s funny I was thinking about same concepts. I am not sure about higher dimensions thing as main function at least on the second part. I was thinking opposite end of the spectrum. Maybe it’s why people with adhd have great long term and/or long term pictoral memory. Which is why it may by proxy help them with imagining higher order dimensional properties. Very interesting view point tho!
What is that profile picture from? I have seen it before
@@beringarius4065 HAHA have you now….idk man but that pic is of me. Lol if your a trader you might have seen me post stuff around the interwebs.
This is most interesting, great observations and I can only hope it will lead somewhere!
@@mattpickering4223 I was talking to OP lol
I'm working in the field of AGI for the last 10 years, and we are tightly dealing with Computational Neurobiology. Matt, at 7:15 you covered the Allocentric-Egocentric duality problem. In literature there is a term "path integration". We believe that it is a more general process of mapping external space to a graph representation - "general integration", and that's the Holy Grail for those trying to decipher our brain circuitry. Grid cells are playing a key role in the math enabling such process. You can look up research paper exploring the toroidal nature of our brain. But the picture is incomplete there - it rather operates in 4 spatial dimensions, more specifically as a SU(2) group.
AGI? Do you work in Alabama? How do you not get bored and depressed if so spending all day in a lab??
@@leif1075 I would assume he's referring to Artificial General Intelligence, not a specific organization.
I would also assume a work-life balance and non-lab workplaces are possible for many scientists.
To reduce these Mental processes to a GRID avoids facing the complexity of multiple simultaneously occurring processes contributing to real time mapping responses. Seems the description(s) offered try to divide and simplify what in effect is a continuously occurring synthesis of the aggregation of inputs of numerous types and from numerous sources. Thus I'm appreciating Your referencing "path integration", and "graph representation" as handy- still, I believe the toroidal nature of the brain is hugely preferable as a Modeling Tool. Gridding is for the FLAT UNIVERSers.
@@gringo1723 How do you know the brain has a "toroidal" nature and what exactly do you mean by that?
@@leif1075 easiest way to this knowledge would be for You to research it Yourself; IT's GOOGLE TIME! Good Hunting!
One of my favorite episodes. Very applicable to wisdom and how to live despite the brevity of being organic
I came to realize this concept while sitting on our front porch, when my ex-wife and I witnessed the same event on our street. When she recounted to me what she saw, it was exactly the opposite of the reality of what just happened. It brought to light many elements in physics and psychiatry in which I was previously unaware.
It's a very interesting question indeed! I wonder how digital and simulated environments like video games could be used to explore these concepts. Are space and time real in digital spaces, like my Minecraft world? I'm not physically moving through space but I know my way around that world despite it not being a physical manifestation. I wonder if VR could be used to study the grid and place cells?
read this comment again - and this time insert the word "other" between " I wonder how' and "digital and simulated environments..."🌎😁
It's incredible to me how philosophers like Kant and Schopenhauer grasped this problem so well. I was so sure of the reality of space-time until I read Schopenhauer and his arguments just made perfect sense. I didn't even know Einstein leaned toward this view so much, makes me better understand why the three portraits in his study in the 1920s were Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell and Schopenhauer.
Einstein vue is the consequence of his relativity theories.
If two people travel very fast toward each other in spaceships and talk to each other on the radio, they will both hear the other one talk slowly, meaning that instead of just moving at different speed in a common time dimension, they are both moving at the same speed in their own different time dimension.
@@franck3279 Einstein realized that the constant speed of light relative to the observer meant that time and space could not be the way Newton imagined them. He sacrificed absolute time and the flatness of space to square the circles. Quantum reality requires that we shift them behind a barrier called consciousness.
Really all the modern thinking that makes sense is coming round to Kant's model, Karl Poppers analysis of science implicitly endorses it as something not in the world, but in the mind.
Love that you have taken these challenging topics at the frontier of what we know! It is exhilarating to learn about new concepts that scientists and great thinkers are pondering!
Please keep exploring the frontiers!!
The watch and the personal yard sticks killed me! 🤣
Watching science converge with spirituality and psychedelics is exciting
Thank you for not putting distracting music or sound scapes in this episode. I found much easier to concentrate on what was being said. 👍
OK, the rats' brains building a hexagonal grid where specific neurons fire near the lattice points is totally mind-blowing. But once you think about it some more it makes so much sense. We've got multiple clocks running in the form of the alpha, beta, gamma, etc. waves, all with different frequencies. As soon as you've got a set of cycles to refer things against you are going to get something like a Fourier transform, and that's what this is. It is a lot like reciprocal space in crystalography. I love the fact that nature seems to take Fourier transforms all the time, no matter where you look.
One whole universe that you haven't mentioned is that by the Method of loci it becomes apparent that spatial memory is one of the most powerful memory systems, it can fuse pure spacial information like that of a room or a given picture with anything you can think of, from a shopping list to the complete list of PBS Space Time titles. From there we go into memory palaces and way down another rabbit hole
That’s because of the evolutionary advantage of remembering locations, in particular those key to survival, such as where prey, predators, food, friends & enemies are likely to be found…
Interestingly enough, I think the explanation about these "sequence" algorithms explains a lot of what I find as a musician and singer/performer. My tempo skills are fairly good (once I lock in a tempo I can maintain it - as a sequence I suppose). Similarly, with lyrics, I often only remember a song once I have the first line - the other lines follow - also like a sequence. It is actually somewhat comforting to know that those things are most likely related to the mechanism you were describing.
Similarly, I immediately associated the place cells to composing with pattern sequencers.
I think part of the fun of fairground rides is the tickling of these grid cells in our brains, not just the G-forces and senses of physical motion and directional change.
Matt, this is amazingly well put together. We've been dealing with these issues in the lab, and the graphics and distilled delivery by you and your team really hits home. Thanks for this awesome work!
Time is what allows us to move through space. Time is the ultimate PLAY button.
Pretty cool how the "hardest" science becomes the most abstract with a simple, "Why?"
Thank you Matt & PBS for the most interesting content on the internet.
I'm curious if there have been many studies involving how the brain handles virtual space.
As someone who has played a lot of videogames, I get the sense of actually going places while playing, and have used that to go on a virtual walk with my brother using google maps, around a place we lived when we were kids.
The idea that our neurons are just looking for patterns very much aligns with the view on language models and other such AI powered content generation that has been taking off recently, and the very reason that some in the field seem to think that if we just made them big enough all kinds of emergent properties would arise, possibly including self awareness.
Seems probable that we're just math.
We're just so much math that it's overwhelmingly too much math for us to understand, which is why we have certain illusions like free will.
Matt's voice sounds super nice this episode! My thanks to editing team!
Wow, this totally blows my mind. I can’t wait for the rest of the story.
You have an amazing ability to convey these highly complex scientific principals and theories in such a way that we normal people can understand them! This one was fascinating
great episode, more in this series please!!
Immanuel Kant is arguably the greatest philosopher of all time. I read his Critique of Pure Reason at the age of 16 and it blew my mind. I'm still recovering...
PBS SpaceTime meets computational neuroscience. What a time to be alive!
The details about the hippocampus being involved in both memory and spatial awareness neatly explains the "method of loci" (i.e. we try to remember things by mentally placing them in a familiar location and then retrieving them from that space... like a mental library) and "story method" (i.e. layout things in time by creating a little story... think xkcd's "correct horse battery staple") techniques. Perhaps by organizing things in an abstract temporal or spatial setting, we are speaking the hippocampus' native language and therefore get better performance out of it?
Also explains forgetting what you intended to do when your location changes, if future intent comes from the same cells as your location tracking
I think it depends on the person. For those of us with weird non-linear brains organizing things by time is almost impossible. Ask normal people what they had for dinner each night this week, and you typically get them back in order. Ask someone with ADHD and you get back a jumbled mess of dinners. Being the latter camp myself I find it far easier to remember things based on where then when. So I guess as the saying goes, your mileage may vary? 🙂
This is seriously such a good series. Thank you for all the work that you guys do educating and entertaining us all.
Wow, Kant appears in a physics video. Love it
I always return to Kant when I ponder subjective experience. It's a pleasure to see these topics given thoughtful treatment, and I appreciate the the connections made with lab experiments to probe these questions. The video presented these ideas with simple but effective breakdowns of the fundamentals. Hope to see more on the subject in the future!
Nooo it needs light background music like they’ve always had! Maybe just with some new music variety instead of just the same few clips they normally do. All music played quietly and it has to be light listening of course. A few of their recent ones have had no music and they feel super awkward to me
Timely video, as i also just got done reading "the case against reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes" by Donald Hoffman.
A couple years ago i had a question. "What is time". I kept digging, learned about gravity, got familiar with quantum physics....now i am at a place where i can no longer see the line between physics and philosophy. I've learned so much and im still struggling with my original question. Ive spent more time over the pastfew years listening to this channel and others than i have watching tv. Watching this channel, lectures by leonard susskind, brian green, sabine hossenfelder....philosophy from alan watts. yet i feel like i havent scratched the surface. What a wild ride. I still cant explain time in words but i can picture it in my head.
It's interesting how physics is delving directly into philosophy for answers.
Good episode Matt! Explaining this in even half understandable concepts and language is a formidable and admirable task. Well done!
Awesome stuff! Never stop questioning.
This is, ironically, mind-blowing
Really happy you took up this subject as I commented on this your last video about space and time.
I didn't think I'd have time to watch this, but I think I can
Matt O'Dowd, thank you for this marvelously done video! Anyone interested in or researching bio-inspired cognition should watch this since you gave a better intro grid and place cells than most research reviews I've seen. Great work!
This is a particularly profound episode, looking forward to future follow ups!
It's very important to understand that it's not that something doesn't exist, it's that we percieve it in a paticular way. I think. It's odd.
This is the coolest. So exciting to see fundamental shifts in perspective happening right before our eyes.
Matt and Sabine need to make a love child.
👏 This is exactly where I wanted to see this series go~ Love it
To insanity and beyond. 🤗🤯😵😱🥺
My neurons start firing whenever a PBS Space Time notification shows up
Perfect summation of the case as we know it thus far, thanks for your spectacular (and eponymous) work!
I think this really boils down to the fact that language is just sounds that we make to express feelings that we feel. We can call reality whatever we want, but as soon as the words we are using stop expressing what we all feel, it's going to feel like what we are saying about the world is wrong. As of right now, spacetime means a lot of different things to a lot of people. For some people, hearing "spacetime" might not be fundamental is the same as hearing "the fabric of reality is not real" and that won't sit well with them. What do we mean when we say "space" is relative? Because the word "space" doesn't invoke the same feelings in all people (and all scientists). When we start mixing science and philosophy, we start running into problems like this where the lexicon gets challenged and people start getting confused. I'm confident that regardless of what happens, scientists and communicators will be able to explain the truth in a way that everyone understands. Spacetime will always exist as a structure within our minds, butt the fabric of reality might be something more than that. Space and Time will always be our brain's interpretation of that reality. Regardless of if that interpretation is actually what exists or doesn't exist isn't something that we will ever truly be able to wrap our heads around. It's like when people first realized that you could theoretically count to large numbers and so we gave names to these numbers. We all understand scientifically what 27 trillion is as a number. But there aren't any humans who can actually grasp what 27 trillion actually is when compared to 5 trillion for instance. Does that mean a trillion is actually created by our brains? I really don't know. We are truly entering realms of science that our brains were never meant to comprehend. I feel like whatever we discover about the truth of reality, we will be cursed as this form of our species to never actually grasp what it means.
This was probably the best episode of Spacetime! Thanks, Dr O'Dowd!
Amazing episode Matt and the Team
Lately I don't even care much about the subject, the really inspiring part is "how" they talk about it. He is pretty good!
We are on the verge of a massive new era of thinking, I can feel it. Wish I had the time and intelligence to spend my life working on these questions
Just commit to eat a strong dose of psychedelic mushrooms once a month with a trusted person and safe environment.
I got really high once and thought that the only thing that existed in the universe was my apartment and everything outside I had only imagined.
And that was in fact the case. At that point.
I'm so glad theoretical physics, metaphysics, and even Buddhist philosophical and psychological frameworks are almost being forced into conversation with each other as we probe the fundamentals of phenomenal and noumenal reality
Buddhism calls the real world, the phenomenal world, the Dharma. Mind as the principles contained in the relationships of dharmas. They also don't claim which one came before the other. It's dialectical thinking. The look depends on each person, in their position. Doesn't help science either. It is more like an antidote to the mind.
What a marvelous episode. A great deal to ponder and learn. Thank you, so much.
Hello sir, my name is Dave. It's nice to meet you. I have to give thanks for all the tremendous effort that went into making these extremely wonderful, and informative videos. They are an invaluable source of information and for inculcating one's mind with cool astronomical facts. Thanks so much, buddy. And have a fantastic day.