#cognitive neuroscience

[stemgirlchic]

[thebardostate]

Is the Brain a Driver or a Steering Wheel?

This three part series summarizes what science knows, or thinks it knows, about consciousness. In Part 1 What Does Quantum Physics Imply About Consciousness? we looked at why several giants in quantum physics - Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Von Neumann and others - believed consciousness is fundamental to reality. In Part 2 Where Does Consciousness Come From? we learned the "dirty little secret" of neuroscience: it still hasn't got a clue how electrical activity in the brain results in consciousness.

In this concluding part of the series we will look at how a person can have a vivid conscious experience even when their brain is highly dysfunctional. These medically documented oddities challenge the materialist view that the brain produces consciousness.

Before proceeding, let's be clear what what is meant by "consciousness". For brevity, we'll keep things simple. One way of looking at consciousness is from the perspective of an outside observer (e.g., "conscious organisms use their senses to notice differences in their environment and act on their goals.") This outside-looking-in view is called behavioral consciousness (aka psychological consciousness). The other way of looking at it is the familiar first-person perspective of what it feels like to exist; this inside-looking-out view is called phenomenal consciousness (Barušs, 2023). This series is only discussing phenomenal consciousness.

Ready? Let’s go!

Source: Caltech Brain Imaging Center

A Hole in the Head

Epilepsy is a terrible disease in which electrical storms in the brain trigger seizures. For some people these seizures are so prolonged and frequent that drastic action is needed to save their lives. One such procedure is called a hemispherectomy, the removal or disconnection of half the brain. Above is an MRI image of a child who has undergone the procedure.

You might think that such radical surgery would profoundly alter the memory, personality, and cognitive abilities of the patient.

You would be wrong. One child who underwent the procedure at age 5 went on to attend college and graduate school, demonstrating above average intelligence and language abilities despite removal of the left hemisphere (the zone of the brain typically identified with language.) A study of 58 children from 1968 to 1996 found no significant long-term effects on memory, personality or humor, and minimal changes in cognitive function after hemispherectomy.

You might think that, at best, only a child could successfully undergo this procedure. Surely such surgery would kill an adult?

You would be wrong again. Consider the case of Ahad Israfil, an adult who suffered an accidental gunshot to the head and successfully underwent the procedure to remove his right cerebral hemisphere. Amazingly, after the five hour operation he tried to speak and went on to regain a large measure of functionality - and even earn a degree - although he did require use of a wheelchair afterwards.

Another radical epilepsy procedure, a corpus collosotomy, leaves the hemispheres intact but severs the connections between them. For decades it was believed that these split-brain patients developed divided consciousness, but more recent research disputes this notion. Researchers found that, despite physically blocking all neuronal communication between the two hemispheres, the brain somehow still maintains a single unified consciousness. How it manages this feat remains a complete mystery. Recent research on how psychedelic drugs affect the brain hints that the brain might have methods other than biochemical agents for internal communication, although as yet we haven't an inkling as to what those might be.

So what's the smallest scrape of brain you need to live? Consider the case of a 44-year-old white collar worker, married with two children and with an IQ of 75. Two weeks after noticing some mild weakness in one leg the man went to see his doctor. The doc ordered a routine MRI scan of the man's cranium, and this is what it showed.

Source: The Lancet

What you are seeing here is a giant empty cavity where most of the patient's brain should be. Fully three quarters of his brain volume is missing, most likely due to a bout of hydrocephalus he experienced when he was six months old.

Artist: Tom Wright

Last Words

Many unusual phenomena have been observed as life draws to an end. We're going to look at two deathbed anomalies that have neurological implications.

The first is terminal lucidity, sometimes called paradoxical lucidity. First studied in 2009, terminal lucidity refers to the spontaneous return of lucid communication in patients who were no longer thought to be medically capable of normal verbal communication due to irreversible neurological deterioration (e.g., Alzheimers, meningitis, Parkinson's, strokes.) Here are three examples:

A 78-year-old woman, left severely disabled and unable to speak by a stroke, spoke coherently for the first time in two years by asking her daughter and caregiver to take her home. She died later that evening.

A 92-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s disease hadn’t recognized her family for years, but the day before her death, she had a pleasantly bright conversation with them, recalling everyone’s name. She was even aware of her own age and where she’d been living all this time.

A young man suffering from AIDS-related dementia and blinded by the disease who regained both his lucidity and apparently his eyesight as well to say farewell to his boyfriend and caregiver the day before his death.

Terminal lucidity has been reported for centuries. A historical review found 83 case reports spanning the past 250 years. It was much more commonly reported in the 19th Century (as a sign that death was near, not as a phenomenon in its own right) before the materialist bias in the medical profession caused a chilling effect during the 20th Century. Only during the past 15 years has any systematic effort been made to study this medical anomaly. As a data point on its possible prevalence a survey of 45 Canadian palliative caregivers found that 33% of them had witnessed at least one case of terminal lucidity within the past year. Other surveys found have that the rate of prevalence is higher if measured over a longer time window than one year, suggesting that, while uncommon, terminal lucidity isn't particularly rare.

Terminal lucidity is difficult to study, in part because of ethical challenges in obtaining consent from neurocompromised individuals, and in part because its recent identification as a research topic presents delineation problems. However, the promise of identifying new neurological pathways in the brains of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients has gotten a lot of attention. In 2018 the US National Institute on Aging (NIA) announced two funding opportunites to advance this nascent science.

Due to the newness of this topic there will continue be challenges with the data for some time to come. However, its impact on eyewitnesses is indisputably profound.

Artist: Tom Wright

Near Death Experiences

The second deathbed anomaly we will take a look at are Near-Death Experiences (NDEs.) These are extraordinary and deeply personal psychological experiences that typically (but not always) occur during life-threatening emergencies such as cardiac arrest, falls, automobile accidents, or other traumatic events; they are also occasionally reported during general anesthesia. Much of the research in this area has focused on cardiac arrest cases because these patients are unconscious and have little to no EEG brain wave activity, making it difficult to account for how the brain could sustain the electrical activity needed to perceive and remember the NDE. This makes NDEs an important edge case for consciousness science.

NDEs are surprisingly common. A 2011 study published by the New York Academy of Sciences estimated that over 9 million people in the United States have experienced an NDE. Multiple studies have found that around 17% of cardiac arrest survivors report an NDE.

There is a remarkable consistency across NDE cases, with experiencers typically reporting one or more of the following:

The sensation of floating above their bodies watching resuscitation efforts, sometimes able to recall details of medical procedures and ER/hallway conversations they should not have been aware of;

Heightened sensations, including cases of blind and deaf people who see or hear;

Extremely rapid mental processing;

The perception of passing through something like a tunnel;

A hyper-vivid life review, described by many experiencers as "more real than real";

Transcendent visions of an afterlife;

Encounters with deceased loved ones, sometimes including people the experiencer didn’t know were dead; and

Encounters with spiritual entities, sometimes in contradiction to their personal belief systems.

Of particular interest is a type of NDE called a veridical NDE. These are NDEs in which the experiencer describes independently verifiable events occurring during the period when they had minimal or no brain activity and should not have been perceived, let alone remembered, if the brain were the source of phenomenal consciousness. These represent about 48% of all NDE accounts (Greyson 2010). Here are a few first-hand NDE reports.

A 62-year-old aircraft mechanic during a cardiac arrest (from Sabom 1982, pp. 35, 37)

A 23-year-old crash-rescue firefighter in the USAF caught by a powerful explosion from a crashed B-52 (from Greyson 2021, pg. 27-29)

An 18-year-old boy describes what it was like to nearly drown (from the IANDS website)

There are thousands more first person NDE accounts published by the International Association for Near-Death Studies and at the NDE Research Foundation. The reason so many NDE accounts exist is because the experience is so profound that survivors often feel compelled to write as a coping method. Multiple studies have found that NDEs are more often than not life-changing events.

A full discussion of NDEs is beyond the scope of this post. For a good general introduction, I highly recommend After: What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond by Bruce Greyson, MD (2021).

The Materialist Response

Materialists have offered up a number of psychological and physiological models for NDEs, but none of them fits all the data. These include:

People's overactive imaginations. Sabom (1982) was a skeptical cardiologist who set out to prove this hypothesis by asking cardiac arrest survivors who did not experience NDEs to imagine how the resuscitation process worked, then comparing those accounts with the veridical NDE accounts. He found that the veridical NDE accounts were highly accurate (0% errors), whereas 87% of the imagined resuscitation procedures contained at least one major error. Sabom became convinced that NDEs are real. His findings were replicated by Holden and Joesten (1990) and Sartori (2008) who reviewed veridical NDE accounts in hospital settings (n = 93) and found them to be 92% completely accurate, 6% partially accurate, and 1% completely inaccurate.

NDEs are just hallucinations or seizures. The problem here is that hallucinations and seizures are phenomena with well-defined clinical features that do not match those of NDEs. Hallucinations are not accurate descriptions of verifiable events, but veridical NDEs are. Also, it would be extraordinary to say the least that so many people would be hallucinating in similar ways.

NDEs are the result of electrical activity in the dying brain. The EEGs of experiencers in cardiac arrest show that no well-defined electrical activity was occurring that could have supported the formation or retention of memories during the NDE. These people were unconscious and should not have remembered anything.

NDEs are the product of dream-like or REM activity. Problem: many NDEs occur under general anesthesia, which suppresses dreams and REM activity. So this explanation cannot be correct.

NDEs result from decreased oxygen levels in the brain. Two problems here: 1) The medical effects of oxygen deprivation are well known, and they do not match the clinical presentation of NDEs. 2) The oxygen levels of people in NDEs (e.g., during general anesthesia) has been shown to be the same or greater than people who didn’t experience NDEs.

NDEs are the side effects of medications or chemicals produced in the brain (e.g. ketamine or DMT). The problem here is that people who are given medications in hospital settings tend to report fewer NDEs, not more; and drugs like ketamine have known effects that are not observed in NDEs. The leading advocate for the ketamine model conceded after years of research that ketamine does not produce NDEs (Greyson 2021, pg. 110).

Summing Up

In coming to the end of this series, let's sum up what we discussed.

Consciousness might be wired into the physical universe at fundamental level, as an integral part of quantum mechanics. Certainly several leading figures in physics thought so - Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Von Neumann, and more recently Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose and Henry Stapp.

Materialist propaganda notwithstanding, neuroscience is no closer to identifying Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs) than it was when it started. The source of consciousness remains one of the greatest mysteries in science.

Meanwhile, medical evidence continues to pile up that there is something deeply amiss with the materialist belief that consciousness is produced by the brain. In a sense, the challenge that NDEs and Terminal Lucidity pose to consciousness science is analogous to the challenge that Dark Matter poses to physics, in that they suggest that the mind-brain identity model of classic materialist psychology may need to be rethought to adequately explain these phenomena.

Ever since the Greeks, science has sought to explain nature entirely in physical terms, without invoking theism. It has been spectacularly successful - particularly in the physical sciences - but at the cost of excluding consciousness along with the gods (Nagel, 2012). What I have tried to do in this series is to show that a very credible argument can be made that materialism has the arrow of causality backwards: the brain is not the driver of consciousness, it's the steering wheel.

I don't think we are yet ready to say what consciousness is. Much more research is needed. I'm not making the case for panpsychism, for instance - but I do think consciousness researchers need to throw off the assumption drag of materialism before they're going to make any real progress.

It will be up to you, the scientists of tomorrow, to make those discoveries. That's why I'm posting this to Tumblr rather than an academic journal; young people need to hear what's being discovered, and the opportunities that these discoveries represent for up and coming scientists.

Never has Planck's Principle been more apt: science advances one funeral at a time.

Good luck.

For Further Reading

Barušs, Imants & Mossbridge, Julia (2017). Transcendent Mind: Rethinking the Science of Consciousness. American Psychological Association, Washington DC.

Barušs, Imants (2023). Death as an Altered State of Consciousness: A Scientific Approach. American Psychological Association, Washington DC.

Batthyány, Alexander (2023). Threshold: Terminal Lucidity and the Border of Life and Death. St. Martin's Essentials, New York.

Becker, Carl B. (1993). Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death. State University of New York Press, Albany NY.

Greyson, Bruce (2021). After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond. St. Martin's Essentials, New York.

Kelly, Edward F.; Kelly, Emily Williams; Crabtree, Adam; Gauld, Alan; Grosso, Michael; & Greyson, Bruce (2007). Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. Rowman & Littlefield, New York.

Moody, Raymond (1975). Life After Life. Bantam/Mockingbird, Covington GA.

Moreira-Almeida, Alexander; de Abreu Costa, Marianna; & Coelho, Humberto S. (2022). Science of Life After Death. Springer Briefs in Psychology, Cham Switzerland.

Penfield, Wilder (1975). Mystery of the Mind: A Critical Study of Consciousness and the Human Brain. Princeton Legacy Library, Princeton NJ.

Sabom, Michael (1982). Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation. Harper and Row Publishers, New York.

van Lommel, Pim (2010). Consciousness Beyond Life: The Science of the Near-Death Experience. HarperCollins, New York.

[binaural-histolog]

Cognitive Construction and Hypnosis

Cognitive neuroscience has some ideas that I think are potentially very useful when thinking about hypnosis.

In particular, cognitive neuroscience starts with the idea of the operation of the brain based on hierarchical predictive processing. This theory inverts the theory that brains directly process the raw input coming from our environment continously. Instead, the brain keeps a model of what it has already experienced and what it predicts, and sends the expectation "down" to the parts of the system that deals with raw input. The expectation is compared with the actual result, and error neurons react if the two signals differ.

When there is no error signal coming back, we don't just assume it's real, we perceive it as real. In these situations, it usually never occurs to us to question our perceptions. We're usually only aware of the constructed nature of perception when we discover that other people don't perceive the same things that we do., such as seeing a blue dress or a white dress or hearing yanny or laurel.

Evidence for predictive processing is strongest when it comes to physical perceptions, but the theory has been expanded to interoception and the theory of constructed emotion.

In every waking moment, your brain uses past experience, organized as concepts, to guide your actions and give your sensations meaning. When the concepts involved are emotion concepts, your brain constructs instances of emotion.

The theory of constructed emotion uses the affect system as a physical interoceptive component. The affect system consists of a valence, arousal, and motivational intensity. Valance in this context means "good" or "bad", arousal is the activation of sympathetic nervous system, and the motivation intensity is the impulse to act on the stimulus. The brain takes the input from the affect system (the raw vibes) and constructs it as an emotion to the rest of the brain. Emotions are how the brain labels and conceptualizes the raw input. Different cultures have different categorizations, and can conceptualize the same affect as different emotions.

Construction

But hang on a second. Everything we perceive about our environment and ourselves is categorized as concepts based on past experience. We have to, because the brain has no direct line to the raw physical world -- it only deals with concepts.

Assume that we take construction to be a basic operational principle of the brain. The brain resolves ambiguity and uncertainty by conceptualizing an internal model, and then uses that model to construct instances. These instances are also "real" in that they themselves can be conceptualized as part of an internal model. The brain constructs perception out of a categorized model at every level and assumes that this is reality unless an error signal is propagated.

The idea of construction is intuitively connected to our experience of learning. As it builds up experience, it starts categorizing and organizing concepts at higher and higher levels. Conscious attention and control is defined in building up concepts and tearing down faulty concepts, while the underlying models that produced those concepts are unconsciously provided.

Take the example of learning how to read. We move from perceiving individual letters and translating them to phonemes to sound out words, to identifying words and finally to immediately processing entire sentences directly. Reading is so ingrained and immediate that we do not have the ability to not read, leading to the Stroop effect. It can even persist in the face of jumbled up words. We don't perceive our experience of words as constructed, even though we understand logically that construction must be happening. In our minds, words are real.

All communication and the concepts used in communication are constructed. There's nothing special about emotions. It's just as valid to talk about a theory of constructed perception, or a theory of constructed body-image. In every case, we construct a perceived reality from underlying ambiguous input.

Constructed Perception

The idea of constructed perception is the hardest pill to swallow, because we look around and we can see the world around us. But even from 1897, it was known that the human eye is incapable of producing a high quality image directly. More investigation reveals that the retina has a blind spot, the eye routinely moves in irregular patterns called saccades, and various portions of the visual cortex handle object detection and persistence. We don't see a tree, we see the idea of a tree. We don't see blue or red, we see the idea of blue or red, even if the actual color is different.

A few people can directly change colors and sounds that they hear at will, without any kind of hypnosis at all, a phenomenon called phenomenological control.

Even for the majority without excellent phenomenological control, it only takes a nudge or two on the uncertainty of perception to change the way that they see things. You can take a lightbulb and change the color very slightly and convince people that their perception is changing in response to hypnotic suggestion. This will cause them to be more responsive to other suggestions in general, even after telling them how it worked, as the brain has already accepted that it can control perceptions. In the same way, what you perceive as your own body can also be nudged. For example, the rubber hand illusion uses a mirror and tactile input to confuse body sense into experiencing a rubber hand as part of the body.

Constructed Narrative

In the same way that perceptions are constructed from underlying models, memory and narrative are also constructed from models informed by data, rather than from data directly.

It's long been known that memory is unreliable and can be easily influenced. Memories are almost always accessed as part of internal narrative that puts together a story of what happened from raw flashes. The narrative itself is the internal model of what happened. Stories can be collaboratively constructed by many people, or the underlying events can be questioned, as in the case of gaslighting.

Because narrative is an internal model describing past events, it also applies to the self. Narratively speaking, we perceive ourselves to be a particular kind of person based off our own memories of our thoughts and actions. Our thoughts and actions are based on an idea of what we imagine we are like.

Uncertainty

There are several applications for hypnosis that come out of construction.

The first application for hypnosis is that the brain, under normal circumstances, dislikes uncertainty and ambiguity and will resolve it if possible. This means it's possible to get better at controlling perception by focusing on things at the edges of perception.

By questioning past perception and history and providing different context, you can create uncertainty of thought. Given uncertainty of thought, you can reframe and shift thinking in different directions.

Physiological Reactions

Hypnosis in some situations can produce actual psychological reactions.

Similar to the way that the brain perceives its environment, the brain also senses its own internal state through interoception and maintains an internal model of the body. The interoception and imagination loop in hypnotic phenomena (2019) provides a starting point for viewing hypnotic phenomena through interoception.

The brain takes note of differences between its internal state and its anticipated internal state, and resolves the difference through allostasis as a control feedback loop. Crucially, allostasis is a predictive homeostasis — it allows the body to proactively prepare for events before they happen and react accordingly.

This potentially closes the loop on how the brain affects the body through hypnosis. Allostasis as control mechanism very neatly explains hypnotic phenomena that don’t fit into environment-based nonvolitional responses, like wart removal. (I am extrapolating here. As far as I know, there are no papers directly linking hypnotic phenomena with allostasis.)

Wants and Needs

One of the models that people have is wants and needs. A good deal of cognitive neuroscience goes into describing an active inference model that describes behavior dedicated to satisfying wants and needs. Simply put, if you need food and water in the near future, you'll immediately engage in behavior that will get you that food and water.

But wants and needs are constructions. They're ideas that come out of a model based on past experiences and general perception. It's therefore possible to shift that perception and update the model. By creating a need, you can drive people to fulfill that need.

This is, of course, what sales and marketing do.

Narrative and Story

Because the sense of self and self perception is constructed from memory of past experiences, it's possible to change self-perception. This can be done by adding uncertainty into the loop, and reframing past experiences.

Another way to change self-perception is to take people through an experience that makes a good story -- building up a sense of tension and anticipation, progressing towards a goal, and then releasing it in a climax that produces a paradigm shifting change or revelation of self.

This is, of course, what therapists do.

Dissociation

Finally, there's a thread I haven't completely pulled on yet, which is dissociation.

The state of hypnosis is characterized by a focus on following hypnotic suggestions, frequently accompanied by dissociation. Dissociation is interesting because it is described as a detachment from reality, and an inability to put together events into a cognitive whole. Dissociation is also associated with amnesia, forgetting self or identity, and a sense that the world or the self is unreal.

This is a processing problem. Without the ability to put events together into narrative, memory is never constructed. Without the ability to integrate thoughts and self-identity together into action, the model of self is inaccessible. In short, dissociation is a state in which the brain is not engaged in construction.

I don't fully understand the implications, but I think that to make any sustained change, you need dissociation. I am not aware of any cognitive neuroscience that goes into dissociation in detail, but I'm just beginning to look.

[vtk13]

the existence of a transmembrane implies the existence of a lesser known, possibly homophobic, cismembrane. do with that information what you will.

[academicelephant]

H.M (the guy who underwent a surgery to get his medial temporal lobes removed in order to alleviate his severe epilepsy but ended up losing his ability to remember things that happened after the surgery) was able to count passing cars of certain color and when not distracted, could continue doing this with no problems. The reason is that his short-term memory was intact and as long as he kept the task active in his mind, he could remember it. However, when his attention got directed somewhere else, he forgot he ever counted any cars because the memory of doing so never got to his long-term memory. I think this is very interesting because it goes to show that short-term memory isn't necessarily short and in theory "[the information in] it can -- be maintained indefinitely"

Source: Postle, B.R. Essentials of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2015. p. 363

[caffeinatedrascal]

Working on my cognitive neuroscience final rn and learning about emotional regulation and how burnout is a real thing that cognitively happens to your brain. You only have so many neural resources that can be expended to handle decision-making and executive function and this frontal activity can be taken up by other things like stress and emotion, maxing out your prefrontal cortex's ability to deal with shit. Ever wonder why you do worse work while you're stressed/can't seem to handle a day's work on a tough morning like you normally can? You literally, biologically, don't have the brain power to do so. "Just working through it" isn't a valid way of dealing with stress, it just produces worse work quality. This is yet another reason why taking time to decompress and healthily deal with stress going on in your life before you work is important!!!

[jcmarchi]

Dr. Zohar Bronfman, Co-founder & CEO of Pecan AI – Interview Series

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/dr-zohar-bronfman-co-founder-ceo-of-pecan-ai-interview-series/

Dr. Zohar Bronfman, Co-founder & CEO of Pecan AI – Interview Series

Dr. Zohar Bronfman is thge Co-founder & CEO of Pecan AI. With deep expertise in computational psychology and data science, Zohar applied his inherent entrepreneurial spirit to Co-Found Pecan, right out of graduate school. Zohar holds two PhDs from Tel Aviv University – one in computational cognitive neuroscience and another in the history and philosophy of science and technology. He also holds a BA in economics from the Open University of Israel.

Founded in 2018, Pecan AI is a predictive analytics platform that leverages its pioneering Predictive GenAI to remove barriers to AI adoption, making predictive modeling accessible to all data and business teams. Guided by generative AI, companies can obtain precise predictions across various business domains without the need for specialized personnel. Predictive GenAI enables rapid model definition and training, while automated processes accelerate AI implementation. With Pecan’s fusion of predictive and generative AI, realizing the business impact of AI is now far faster and easier.

What was the journey like in founding Pecan AI and what are some of the key milestones achieved along the way?

Starting Pecan AI was quite the rollercoaster. It all kicked off when my co-founder and I joined an international data science competition. We created a data-preparation automation that turned into Pecan’s prototype, but we missed the deadline and lost. Instead of moving on, we decided to turn our prototype into something impactful. Just two months after finishing our doctorates in 2018, we rented a small room at Tel Aviv University and started hustling. With limited business experience, we pitched our idea to venture capitalists. Thankfully, Haim Sadger and Aya Peterburg from S Capital saw potential and invested $4 million, giving us the boost we needed.

One major milestone was raising $66 million in a Series C round led by Insight Partners, with backing from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and others. This funding allowed us to expand globally and speed up our development efforts.

How does your background in computational cognitive neuroscience influence your approach to developing AI solutions?

My background in computational cognitive neuroscience, along with my PhD in history and philosophy of science, plays a big role in how I develop AI solutions. These fields help me understand both the technical and philosophical aspects of technology. This dual perspective is incredibly valuable in today’s rapidly changing tech landscape. It allows me to create AI products that are not just technically advanced but also ethically sound and user-friendly.

Can you explain the concept of Predictive GenAI and how it integrates generative AI with predictive machine learning?

Sure thing. Predictive GenAI is all about merging Generative AI with Predictive Machine Learning. Generative AI lets users interact with data through natural language, making it easy to ask questions and guide the AI. However, its predictive abilities are limited. That’s where Predictive Machine Learning comes in, as it processes data to make accurate future predictions. By combining these two technologies, Predictive GenAI allows even those with little data science experience to build predictive models and use them seamlessly, like chatting with ChatGPT.

How does Predictive GenAI simplify the process of creating and deploying predictive models for businesses?

Predictive GenAI simplifies things with features like Predictive Chat and Predictive Notebook. Predictive Chat acts like an AI sidekick, guiding users through the modeling process using natural language. It formulates predictive questions based on the user’s business concerns and generates a Predictive Notebook with ready-made SQL queries and sample data. This means users don’t need to start from scratch or have deep technical knowledge to get accurate predictions.

Could you elaborate on the case study involving the CAA Club Group and how Pecan AI optimized their roadside assistance services?

Absolutely. The CAA Club Group used to spend a week manually forecasting roadside assistance, which was time-consuming and limited. After implementing Pecan AI, their data science team developed over 30 models to generate short-term demand forecasts twice a week. These forecasts predict call volumes and service types hourly, ensuring efficient staffing and quick responses, especially during harsh winter conditions. Pecan’s platform also allows continuous improvement of these models, enhancing service efficiency.

How did Credit Pros benefit from using Pecan AI for client churn prediction and what specific challenges did it solve for them?

The Credit Pros faced significant challenges with client churn prediction, which was a complex and time-consuming process. Implementing Pecan AI reduced the model development time from three months to just weeks, enabling proactive retention strategies. This streamlined process allowed TCP to accurately predict client churn and devise effective strategies to retain clients, ultimately increasing their revenue.

How do the Predictive Chat and Predictive Notebook tools enhance user experience and make predictive analytics accessible to non-technical users?

Predictive Chat uses GenAI to create custom notebooks based on the user’s business questions and data. Users can interact with the chat in natural language, answering questions and following instructions, which simplifies the model creation process. The Predictive Notebook includes all the necessary code, allowing users to view queries, create custom tables, and understand the training dataset’s logic. This approach makes predictive analytics accessible to non-technical users by streamlining data preparation and model creation.

In what ways do you see Predictive GenAI transforming various industries and business functions?

Predictive GenAI empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions with unparalleled accuracy and efficiency. In manufacturing and logistics, it optimizes operations by forecasting demand and streamlining supply chains. In customer-centric industries, it enhances satisfaction and loyalty through targeted marketing and tailored recommendations. Predictive GenAI also fuels innovation by predicting market trends, guiding product development, and speeding up time-to-market. Its applications extend to healthcare for disease prediction and personalized treatment plans, and to sustainability efforts by optimizing resource usage and reducing environmental impact.

How does Pecan AI ensure the accuracy and reliability of its predictive models?

We ensure accuracy and reliability through rigorous testing and ongoing validation. Pecan AI uses separate training and test datasets to evaluate model performance, similar to grading a school test. Key metrics like accuracy, precision, and recall are used to validate models during development and in production. We also promote transparency through explainable predictions, helping users understand the factors influencing each prediction and fostering confidence in AI-driven insights.

How do you envision the role of Predictive GenAI evolving in the next few years?

Looking ahead, the future of AI is not just about predicting events but also prescribing actions based on those predictions. Predictive GenAI aims to automate decision-making processes and optimize business operations. However, it’s crucial to understand the associated risks and ensure the responsible use of AI. As the technology evolves, it will play a critical role in enhancing operational efficiency, fostering innovation, and driving strategic decision-making across various industries.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Pecan AI.

[roysexton]

“All the World’s YOUR Stage” on Expert Webcast with guest Brenda Pontiff… “Yes … and – how business development and stand-up comedy are two sides of the same coin"

“Playing comedy is hell. The necessity to have an audience love you is perhaps more overwhelming than in any other form of entertainment. With singing, dancing, acting you don’t know until it’s over if you’ve had acceptance or rejection. The comic knows sooner. The audience laughs or it doesn’t.” – Imogene Coca VIEW EPISODE HERE. One might describe marketing and business development similarly.…

[primedeathreship]

It's so funny that if you hit your head from the front you can like, for instance, accidently acquire sociopathy.

Other times you can become mathematic genius.

That's such a hit or miss with your luck

[kiranoad]

I am a cognitive neuroscience researcher at the University of York. My research focuses on how we recognise people in naturalistic conditions.

I am currently running a fun experiment to address abilities in people with developmental prosopagnosia (face blindness, which around 1 in 50 people have) under naturalistic conditions (watching TV!). We have previously used TV watching to investigate prosopagnosia (using Game of Thrones) and found really interesting results; we are hopeful that using naturalistic experiments will be really useful for investigating prosopagnosia in real world situations.

I am now looking for participants with face blindness to take part this new TV watching study. It involves watching 20 minutes of a TV show, and can be completed entirely online.

If you think you might have developmental prosopagnosia (18+), I would be delighted if you might consider taking part! Please contact me at kira.noad@york.ac.uk if you are interested in participating in the study

[gravitascivics]

NATURE’S WORK

The last posting of this blog left the reader with the concern about how the natural development of the mind affects young people.  It did this after introducing the field of study that looks at adolescence from the physical side of brain development.  The posting relied, along with this one, on an article by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore.[1] 

She writes:  “Given the fact that we know that social brain regions continue to develop, both in terms of structure and function, during adolescence, we were interested in how social cognitive behavior changes in adolescence.”[2] The first revelations found the consequence of this development was with young people. 

That is, when confronted with difficult problems or tasks, adolescents were disposed to seek the help of others – not a trait observed in younger children.  This finding was contrary to what had been taken to be the case.  The belief was that children sought help.  Such a finding, to the contrary, motivated study into related concerns such as risk taking and how peers influence young people in their decision-making.

          Another area of interest is how genetic makeups influence brain development during those teen years.  This research stretches into maladies such as schizophrenia mentioned in the last posting.  Also, studies of excessive paranoia have been conducted.  In those efforts, such imaging tools as fMRIs have been useful.  More specifically, ways to measure blood flow have been relied upon because the telling fact is that neurons, to be active, need more energy and that is provided by blood.  Or stated succinctly, when commenting on brain activity, what one is talking about is blood flowing to and in the brain.

          Blakemore writes:

I think the area of adolescent brain development is one of the areas in cognitive neuroscience where actually brain imaging has completely revolutionized what we know. … We just didn’t know until 10 or 15 [today 20 or 25] years ago that the brain undergoes such dramatic development and even reorganization during the period of adolescence starting at puberty and continuing right throughout adolescence. … [I]t has revolutionized how we understand teenagers.[3]

And one very far-reaching finding is that no evidence – contrary to previous common belief – exists that the brain is fixed in a person’s early childhood.  This was considered doctrine, but due to imaging studies, it is now considered totally wrong.  Today, it is believed that significant change takes place throughout adolescent years and continues into a person’s 20s and 30s. 

And this change doesn’t end there.  The brain’s plasticity – that’s its baseline state of the brain – continues to change.  And as such, that fact affects intervention and educational efforts directed to help teenagers.  But there is one challenging fact related to this promising development.

Unfortunately, such analysis calls for the use of scanning techniques and they are expensive and long-lasting protocols.  These treatments, to be effective, are large-scale studies that one can consider to be longitudinal in that they last a number of years.  Blakemore suggests not longitudinal studies but cross-sectional ones in which comparisons among different teenagers, situated with different adults, can be conducted.

Blakemore opines:

It would be ideal if you could scan a very large number of teenagers every couple of years as they go into adulthood.  The icing on the cake would be to scan a sufficient number of individuals so that you track people who, for example, develop schizophrenia, and go back and look at their brain imaging data from when they were a teenager, and look at how it differs from teenagers who don’t develop schizophrenia. … [They] really need to be doing it [i.e., this type of analysis] for 20 years.[4]

And with that bit of insight, Blakemore ends with a hopeful observation.  This type of research is new – as of the publishing of her article ten years ago – and promises to provide meaningful insights into various fields of behavior and development, such as psychiatric disorder and psychological disorder, where the lack of knowledge is significant.

[1] Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, “The Adolescent Brain” in Thinking:  The New Science of Decision-Making, Problem-Solving, and Prediction, edited by John Brockman (New York, NY:  Harper Perennial, 2013), 115-131.

[2] Ibid., 121.

[3] Ibid., 128.

[4] Ibid., 130-131.

[thebardostate]

The Myth of Dreamless Sleep

Consciousness never "switches off" because it isn't generated by the brain. Its sensory inputs can be switched off - during sleep or general anesthesia, for instance - but your consciousness is still there. For example, a small but consistent number of patients report out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) or near-death experiences (NDEs) while under general anesthesia.

[meghanester]

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[selfawarepatterns]

Integrated information theory as pseudoscience?

It’s been an interesting week in consciousness studies. It started with Steve Fleming doing a blog post, a follow up to one he’d done earlier expressing his concerns about how the results of the adversarial collaboration between global neuronal workspace (GNW) and integrated information theory (IIT) were portrayed in the science media. GNW sees consciousness as brain wide information sharing. IIT…

[academicelephant]

Dolphins can sleep with half of its brain being awake. This is necessary so that it can surface to breathe and not drown in its sleep. While humans can't do that, some of our neurons (i.e. brain cells) can sleep while others are still awake. When enough high number of neurons are asleep at the same time, the whole brain goes to sleep

[macademia-nut]

btw this will be the worst piece of writing you have read [but better than low-grade fanfiction]. (in that I refuse to follow a lot of conventions... this is the point of the work)