The Surprising Relativism of the Brain’s GPS

The Surprising Relativism of the Brain’s GPS

Adithya Rajagopalan

Physics grappled with the question of whether space is absolute or relative for centuries, before deciding in favor of relativity. But, it is only in recent years that the brain sciences have begun to discuss a parallel set of questions. For many years now, absolute space has ruled neuroscience. In the visual system, for example, it has long been assumed that there are two channels of information flow.4 The first is the “what” channel, carrying information about the identity of objects that an animal sees. The second is the “where” channel, containing information about the absolute position of these objects. It was believed that the “what” channel contained no positional information at all. However, recent work has shown that while no information about the absolute position of an object is present in this channel, there is relative position information.5,6 This relative positional information is likely to be very important for object recognition.

Findings like this have provided a foothold for the idea that relative information can be important to the brain. But it has been the recent marriage of neuroscience with the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence that have really strengthened this perspective. Work at this interface has shown that a brain that uses an absolute, invariant model of the world to model and negotiate changing environments requires more computational resources than one that uses relative information. Understanding when and where our brains use relative and absolute information could provide insights into the working, flexibility, and speed of its subsystems and into our own behaviors. The hippocampus, in particular, could be one of the first waypoints in this debate.

The Surprising Relativism of the Brain’s GPS

Adithya Rajagopalan

This is very interesting, about how in detail the neurological structure of the brain brings together the conscious perception of the 3-d physical world, by processing data ultimately from primarily the eyes. 

This research brings to mind a strong cognitive dissonance that appears to be associated with this area of neuroscience. That cognitive dissonance occurs when when this research is considered in conjunction with all the strong empirical evidence that what appears to be "sight" perception of the world (and beyond) continues during out-of-body veridical NDEs, often when the brain is severely compromised as with cardiac arrest. In these experiences the human consciousness doesn't seem to be using the physical brain. Also there are the "sight" perceptions in psi phenomena such as clairvoyance (as in remote viewing). None of these paranormal phenomena can be generated by some sort of elaborate neural processing.

How to resolve the cognitive dissonance?

The Surprising Relativism of the Brain’s GPS

Adithya Rajagopalan

As always - big-time thanks for your finds.  I find the data supports the model where the route can be modeled in terms of its capability to inform a future action.  A route is an affordance - to a mobile organism - and its mutual information transfer is only modestly representational, but is generated by the real-world advantage it contains.

We have known for almost a hundred years that space is relative.  How could it be that neurology has just discovered this? (I'm kinda with nb on this, only its not just psi but how living things understand any affordance).

 In papers published this year, Nachum Ulanovsky from the Weismann Institute in Israel and Shigeyoshi Fujisawa at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Saitama, Japan trained animals to follow a given pathway by observing training runs performed by other animals of the same species (Ulanovsky used bats and Fujisawa used rats). When the animals followed the prescribed route, place cells in their hippocampus fired, as expected. What was unexpected was that a subset of these same place cells also fired while the animals were observing the training runs. The researchers termed these neurons social place cells.