Your Brain is a Prediction Machine

AKA Your Brain on Music

First, some sound tech:

Surround sound from lightweight roll-to-roll printed loudspeaker paper

Jan 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-01-lightweight-roll-to-roll-loudspeaker-paper.html

Sonorous paper loudspeakers: "Ordinary paper or foils are printed with two layers of a conductive organic polymer as electrodes. A piezoelectric layer is sandwiched between them as the active element, which causes the paper or film to vibrate. Loud and clear sound is produced by air displacement.

via Chemnitz University of Technology: Georg C. Schmidt et al. Paper‐Embedded Roll‐to‐Roll Mass Printed Piezoelectric Transducers, Advanced Materials (2021). DOI: 10.1002/adma.202006437

Image credit: Center for High Entropy Alloy Catalysis - Danish National Research Foundation

Next, some music science:

Hit songs rely on increasing “harmonic surprise” to hook listeners, study finds

Aug 2021, Ars Technica

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/08/hit-songs-rely-on-increasing-harmonic-surprise-to-hook-listeners-study-finds/

The end result is what the authors call "Inflationary-Surprise Hypothesis," which makes music (and all art, and all culture we would assume) to have more surprise over time. And so if you're kind of old, and you think the music of today sucks, and it's annoying, stupid, and makes no sense, then you're probably right. 

In other words, when a song "constantly defies the listener's expectations throughout", that's what you want to hear. Or, from the paper itself, you could say "human perception of tonality is influenced by exposure."

We heard this a long time ago when Leonard Meyer said it --

"A culture, like a musical style, is a learned probability system.” (p17, footnote 21)

-Music, the Arts and Ideas. Leonard B. Meyer, U. of Chicago, 1967

Or take a look at this infographic, titled The Anatomy of a Joke.

What to Expect When the Unexpected Becomes Expected: Harmonic Surprise and Preference Over Time in Popular Music. Front. Hum. Neurosci., 30 April 2021. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2021.578644

And more of the same:

The brain's 'prediction machine' anticipates the future when listening to music

Aug 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-08-brain-machine-future-music.html

When a musical phrase has an unresolved or uncertain quality about it our brains automatically predict how the melody will end. ... Like a sentence, a musical phrase is a coherent and complete part of a larger whole, but it may end with some uncertainty about what comes next in the melody. The new research shows that listeners use these moments of uncertainty, or high entropy, to determine where one phrase ends and another begins. ... The participants judged melodies that ended on high-entropy tones to be more complete—and lingered on them longer.

"This study shows that humans harness the statistical properties of the world around them not only to predict what is likely to happen next, but also to parse streams of complex, continuous input into smaller, more manageable segments of information," said Hansen.

via Association for Psychological Science: Niels Chr. Hansen et al, Predictive Uncertainty Underlies Auditory Boundary Perception, Psychological Science (2021). DOI: 10.1177/0956797621997349

For your listening pleasure:

Music Circles: An interactive data visualization tool that helps users discover new music

Mar 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-03-music-circles-interactive-visualization-tool.html

It's an advanced music recommendation system. Try it out, called Music Circles:

https://musiccircles.netlify.app/

via Seoul National University: Music-Circles: can music be represented with numbers? arXiv: 2102.13350 [cs.HC]. arxiv.org/abs/2102.13350

Post Script:

Taylor Swift releases a 'perfect replica' of Fearless

Apr 2021, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-56687699

Up to now, I thought Taylor Swift was a good musician but more importantly a good young female role model because she handles her celebrity status so well. Now she's in the pantheon of powerful and middle-finger-wielding artists because she straight re-mastered her master copies to fuck her record owners and take back control of her own work.  

If you're not sure why this is such a big deal, see David Byrne's How Music Works (2012) for a good intro to the world of musicians, their music and their rights. 

When you make a song, and then someone uses that song in the opening scene of their superfamous blockbuster movie, somebody gets paid, but it might not be you. It depends who owns the "master copy" of that song. Even if you play your own song live, and record that, and use that in a commercial or movie, it's still the "original" master copy that gets the credit, and the money. Somebody recorded that song in a music studio and made a physical copy of the recording. The music is ephemeral and nobody can own that. The idea for the song even moreso. But that recording, on that day, in that studio, is a physical thing, and it represents all the ephemera that come after, so whoever owns the master, owns it all. 

Swift's re-mastering makes the old master copies worthless, and puts her in full control of her own work, something that rarely happens to an artist as big as her. 

The Disease Model

That's what they call it -- Susceptible, Infected, Recovered. Disease transmission follows a fairly predictable pattern, just ask the covid epidemiologists.

Totally unrelated image credit: Marco Zoppo - Christ as the Man of Sorrows - 1470

It's about the way things spread within a network; nodes and links. Throw some complexity science in there, and you can model a pretty good simulation of waves of infection, where they spread, how fast. 

But it's not just diseases, which are spread by physical particles floating through the air. Behaviors follow the disease model too, and ideas, and preferences and tastes. They're spreading through people, just like diseases.

That's getting into the science of memetics though. For now, let's keep it more simple than that -- think about how you started using social media, what was your first account and who got you into it, what social networks were you a part of then?

You were being infected.

Honestly I won't even repaste any of this paper, because it does come from the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, which seems weird for a paper about disease modeling. But it is from Princeton, and that department does cover some pretty crazy stuff, and some of it is partially related. It concluded that Facebook is going through humans like a wave of the Delta variant, but at the same time, losing the people who recover from the disease. They said there won't be anyone left by 2018, because everyone's either still infected, or been recovered. (Luckily for Facebook, bots are infinite!)

And would you look at that, here's Facebook being called out for misleading investors by blending their actual user numbers with those of their Single Users with Multiple Accounts, i.e., among other things, the botnet.

But long before this information was divulged under congressional testimony circa 2021, this paper, from 2014, and generated from even earlier discussions at a 2012 research symposium, predicted this already -- they followed the disease model on a social network. It makes you wonder why there weren't other studies like it:

Epidemiological modeling of online social network dynamics, John Cannarell, Joshua A. Spechler. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University. arxiv:1401.4208v1 [cs.SI] 17 Jan 2014. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.4208v1.pdf

 

Think about the last few songs you downloaded (do people still?). Where did you hear them, from who?

They infected you.

Music download patterns found to resemble infectious disease epidemic curves

Sep 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-09-music-download-patterns-resemble-infectious.html

"The researchers found that downloads from the site very much matched patterns of diseases spreading. With infectious diseases, one-to-one contact is needed. With songs...hundreds of people might respond by downloading it." -link

"We draw conclusions about song popularity within specific genres based on estimated SIR parameters. In particular, we argue that faster spread of preferences for Electronica songs may reflect stronger connectivity of the ‘susceptible community’, compared with the larger and broader community that listens to more common genres." -link

via McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind in Canada: Dora P. Rosati et al, Modelling song popularity asacontagious process, Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2021.0457

Even ideas can be infectious. They're reproducing in our minds, after all. Memetically transmitted diseases, following the S-I-R model. Dairying was an idea that changed the genome of a lot of humans. And olfactory receptors make up the biggest family of your genome, like 2%, and they're changing all the time, and sometimes because of cultural reasons, like bacon. 

Probably the greatest example of an idea being infectious is the idea against vaccinations, because technically, under the memetic paradigm, the virus, any virus whether measles, covid, or syphilis, is figuring out how to fight the scientific advancement of vaccinations by infecting our minds with antivax thoughts -- they're evolving in more ways than one! (See below for more on this, but be careful, you may want to inoculate your brain first.)

Post Post:

If you're into this topic, prepare to go deep, very deep:

Adaptive Metamemetics, Infectious Disease Networks, and Ludwig Fleck's Thought Collectives

March 2020, Network Address

https://networkaddress.blogspot.com/2020/03/adaptive-metamemetics-infectious.html

I had no idea how prescient this would be when I wrote it, but studying Ludwig Fleck prior to a global vaccination campaign wasn't a bad idea.

Post Post Script:

They don't say it but I will, claim of memetic supremacy right here:

[I call it Memetic Supremacy] Parity and time reversal elucidate both decision-making in empirical models and attractor scaling in critical Boolean networks. via Pennsylvania State University, Broad Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Semmelweis University, and Center for Complex Network Research. Science Advances (2021). https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf8124

 

Deep Kuhn

Research papers that omit 'mice' from titles receive misleading media coverage

Jun 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-papers-omit-mice-titles-media.html

When authors of scientific papers omit the basic fact that a study was conducted in mice (and not in humans) from the article title, journalists reporting on the paper tend to do the same.

via Public Library of Science: Triunfol M, Gouveia FC (2021) What's not in the news headlines or titles of Alzheimer disease articles? #InMice. PLoS Biol 19(6): e3001260. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001260

Thomas Kuhn wrote something about the progress of science, and how it changes by abrupt paradigm shifts and not as a series of incremental changes. Way before that, Ludwig Fleck wrote about the life cycle of ideas and how they are transmitted among scientists and other human brains. He created the term "thought collective" and wrote Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact in 1935, although it wasn't translated to English until 1979, after Kuhn made his meteoric impact. I'm not exactly sure what any of this has to do with the way scientists title their papers, but I think it does. Language, like Science, is a lifeform, and behaves as such in the artificial arena of the human mind. 

Image credit: (This is what happens when you do an image search for "Deep Kuhn") From the company called Kuhn Farm Machinery: The 4000 Chisel Plow provides durable, economical compaction removal with a variety of shanks and point options to meet different requirements. This promotes breakdown of crop residue and allows good root development for the next crop.

Mostly Unrelated Post Script:

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates

Aug 2020, The Verge

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates

HUGO (Human Genome Organisation) Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC), the body that names genes, has changed 27 genes to avoid being confused by Excel's default naming protocols.

For example, SEPT2 is the short name of a gene called Septin 2, but it's also the name of September 2nd, if you speak Excel. A report from 2016 found 20% of papers with these errors. Genomic data is already big data, so when you factor this erroneous name conversion, we call that dirty data.  

Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature. Mark Ziemann et al., Genome Biology, 2016. https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7

What Were You Thinking

Brains are complicated, and no matter how much we think we know, there always seems to be more. 

Do we know what we want in a romantic partner - No more than a random stranger would, study says

Jul 2020, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-07-romantic-partner-random-stranger.html

This is similar to the horoscope joke where a sneaky professor distributes a customized personality profile to each student based on their birthdays (which he looked up and printed out in advance of this class), and then asks the students to score the profiles based on their accuracy. But then it turns out that he passed out the same profile to everyone, and it was written in a way that was  ambiguous enough to apply to everyone (and also flattering enough to disarm your bullshit detector),  so everyone scores the profile really high, like, "wow, this totally describes me perfectly!"

It's called the Barnum effect, and it was named after the circus director, by a psychologist, to describe the "pseudo-successful" effects of certain psychological tests.

Here's some examples, called Barnum statements ,and taken from Bertram Forer, the guy who made this famous. Maybe you can start your own horoscope column, or use them on your next date:

• You have a great need for other people to like and admire you.
• You have a tendency to be critical of yourself.
• You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage.
• While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them.
• Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you.
• Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside.
• At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing.
• You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations.
• You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others' statements without satisfactory proof.
• You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others.
• At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved.
• Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic.
• Security is one of your major goals in life.

-From Bertram Forer

Human brain replays new memories at 20 times the speed during waking rest

Jun 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-human-brain-replays-memories-rest.html

The fact that we can see "neural replays" is nuts, no?

Also note that this 20x replay speed happens as an essential part of learning, and takes place particularly during breaks from learning. 

via National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke: Cell Reports, Buch et al.: "Consolidation of human skill linked to waking hippocampo-neocortical replay" DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2021.109193

A redundant modular network supports proper brain communication

Jul 2021, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-redundant-modular-network-proper-brain.html

The truth about how memory works keeps getting more and more complicated: "Li and his colleagues were able to see that each hemisphere of the brain has a separate representation of a memory."

And because this is the phrase I'm looking for every day as I read these news briefs: "What they found was unexpected." (see these two other recent examples, one where they found a bacteria that eats metal, and which was accidentally left lying around during the first wave lockdown, and this other one where they found out that electromagnetic waves cure cancer and diabetes because one scientist borrowed another scientist's mice, and he was working on EMF exposure, and she was working on blood sugar.)

via Baylor College of Medicine:  Guang Chen et al, Modularity and robustness of frontal cortical networks, Cell (2021). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.05.026

Image credit: Holocene - Paul Griffitts Fractal Forums - 2017

The Hidden Network

Study finds surprising source of social influence

Jul 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-07-source-social.html

Spreading ideas and spreading new ideas are two different things. I thought we knew this as far back as Granovetter's Weak Ties (1973). The people at the edge of the network are the ones who spread the novel information across the network, not the ones at the center of their social circles. Not trying to deflate the work of these researchers, just saying.

As prominent and revered as social influencers seem to be, in fact, they are unlikely to change a person's behavior by example—and might actually be detrimental to the cause.

[In other words, they are NOT influential? Interesting.]

"Dozens of algorithms that are currently used by enterprises seeking to spread new ideas are based on the fallacy that everything spreads virally," says Centola. "But this study shows that the ability for information to pass through a social network depends on what type of information it is."

So, if you want to spread gossip — easily digestible, uncontroversial bits of information — go ahead and tap an influencer. But if you want to transmit new ways of thinking that challenge an existing set of beliefs, seek out hidden locations in the periphery and plant the seed there.

via University of Pennsylvania: Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-24704-6

In contrast to influencers, artists are known for being on the fringe of their networks, hence responsible for introducing novel information. This is also unfortunately the reason why so many artists get the socially awkward or anti-social label, and why so many need to rely on the beneficence of a Gertrude Stein or an agent or manager.

Image credit: Nanojars - Gellert Mezei - 2021

Memetic Supremacy

From genes to memes - Algorithm may help scientists demystify complex networks

Jul 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-07-genes-memes-algorithm-scientists-demystify.html

This is it.

I might be just now understanding that the reason we can't "do" memetics yet is because of computational power. Too many variables to model.

Keep in mind that fractals, one of the most ubiquitous phenomena there is, wasn't described mathematically until the 1980's, because that's when computers caught up to it. They needed to be able to run the same, simple algorithm hundreds of thousands of times in less than a lifetime in order to see any results, and this needed to wait for faster computers.

This time, the advancement comes in the form of Boolean networks. These networks aren't just about having lots of on/off switches, but about --networking-- all those switches. That's the hard part. Similar to fractals, which starts from a simple equation (Zn+1 = Zn2 + C), THIS is just a collection of nodes either on or off. Sounds simple, but it's what happens when it gets scaled-up to gives us the complexity of the Twittersphere, for example. A few nodes can generate millions of states.

And before we go any further, it should be noted that quantum computing will flip this entire paradigm upside down, and what today is impossible to even imagine will tomorrow be beamed to your brain via quantum cloud servers in outerspace faster than you can ask for it. 

Until then, the news here is that these networks are now being analyzed by these two methods:

1. Parity - making a mirror image of the network where all ON nodes are switched to OFF to identify critical subnetworks, and 

2. Time Reversal - to identify which network configurations precede which outcomes. 

Currently, they're working on networks of 16,000 genes, which is a lot more than we've ever done before. And currently, this work is to learn more about cancer cells, but soon enough we'll be modeling social uprisings and second-order psychological operations. 

via Pennsylvania State University, Broad Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Semmelweis University, and Center for Complex Network Research: "Parity and time reversal elucidate both decision-making in empirical models and attractor scaling in critical Boolean networks" Science Advances (2021). https://advances.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abf8124

Post Script:

A new model enables the recreation of the family tree of complex networks

Jun 2021, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-enables-recreation-family-tree-complex.html

This new study analyzes the time evolution of the citation network in scientific journals and the international trade network over a 100-year period. According to M. Ángeles Serrano, ICREA researcher at UBICS, "What we observe in these real networks is that both grow in a self-similar way, that is, their connectivity properties remain invariable over time, so that the network structure is always the same, while the number of nodes increases."

-University of Barcelona: Muhua Zheng et al, Scaling up real networks by geometric branching growth, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2021). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2018994118

Also, don't forget this one, which aged well, very, very well:

Cyber Swarming, Memetic Warfare and viral Insurgency: How Domestic Militants Organize on Memes to Incite Violent Insurrection and Terror Against Government and Law Enforcement; A Contagion and Ideology Report. Alex Goldberg from The Network Contagion Research Institute, Joel Finkelstein from The Network Contagion Research Institute and The James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Rutgers Miller Center for Community Protection and Resilience. Feb 7 2020. [pdf link]

^Published February 7, 2020, you know, almost a year before January 6, 2021.

Cryptographic Carbon Markets

Using carbon is key to decarbonizing economy

Aug 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-expert-carbon-key-decarbonizing-economy.html

Instead of burning the hydrocarbons for energy, split them into carbon nanotubes for a materials revolution, and hydrogen for a hydrogen power revolution. 

Graphene and Hydrogen factories for mining electronic money, if you don't think it's going to happen you're not trying hard enough.

(Granted, this project, at Rice University, is related to Shell, the oil company, who would really like to see a future where hydrocarbons are still really important. Then again, if carbon-based nanotubes could replace metals, which use a ton of energy to mine and process, that could be a benefit in itself?)

Post Script:

The Bitcoin saga continues to deliver:

Researchers found a seasonal movement of mining between Chinese provinces in response, it was suggested, to the availability of hydro-electric power.

Mining moved from the coal-burning northern province of Xinjiang in the dry season, to the hydro-abundant southern province of Sichuan in the rainy season.

-Cambridge data shows Bitcoin mining on the move. Jul 2021, BBC News. 

China's ban on cryptocurrency mining has forced bitcoin entrepreneurs to flee overseas. Many are heading to Texas, which is quickly becoming the next global cryptocurrency capital.

-Why China's bitcoin miners are moving to Texas. Sep 2021, BBC News.

"Bitcoin refugees" in the "Great Mining Migration" are looking for more relaxed digital currency policy, a stable regulatory environment, diverse sources of capital, and cheap electricity. (How about a reliable power grid though? Seriously?)

I hope people are taking notes, because the crypto saga is a playbook for the way things are going to be. Bitcoin is doing to the future of energy production and computation what the pandemic did to all things "remote" -- the work-from-home revolution would take another 10 years without the pandemic. 

With or without the climate apocalypse to speed things up, not only will renewable energy production decentralize and redistribute into a splintered scattering of nodes, but those nodes move with the weather.