Comments on: Cortical Songs Album Release 21st July 2008

By: Miss Mussel

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 16:02:26 +0000

@RBM It's both. The album was based on a scientific idea, namely how parts of your brain works. I'm still a bit foggy on how it all works together but I did like parts of the resultant music. A review of the album is here, should that be of interest to you.

By: RBM studios

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 07:13:50 +0000

@all
Is this a music thread or some scientific thread. really i couldn’t understand anything guys.

By: chris

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:20:40 +0000

Lane,
The radio antennae/amplifier analogy suggests input coming into the brain from the environment, which needs to be somehow ‘restored’. There is something to this, but it’s a lot more than mere amplification. To a large extent we have to construct an interpretation by filling in the gaps, using the knowledge we have already gleaned about the world. This knowledge is in my view embodied in the web of compositional relations between synfire chains, only a small fraction of which are directly coupled to the environment.
On the other hand, the process I have described can quite happily go on internally without incorporating any information-carrying impulses coming in from outside, as when we reflect and dream.

By: Lane Savant

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 04:32:06 +0000

Chris,
Sort of like a radio multiplies and amplifies a radio impulse from an antenna perhaps?

By: chris

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 06:09:49 +0000

Dear Miss Mussel,
As I did my PhD thesis on synfire chains I am well placed to answer any enquiries you may have. Let me just say that synfire chains are really cool, in my unbiased opinion. They are *hypothetical* small groups of neurons in the brain; the neurons in each chain are organised in a linear manner by the synaptic connections joining them together (but the neurons in a chain can be almost arbitrarily positioned across the brain volume). A chain is activated by a brief wave-like pulse of electrical energy travelling along its length. During mental processes, many such chains which are “adjacently composed” (a bit like the picture on the album cover) are envisaged to be simultaneously activated, with the waves on neighbouring chains becoming “synchronised” to form much larger waves that make up distinct thoughts. Such structures of interlinked chains may underlie the richly interconnected and holistic nature of the mind, where each thought contains the germs of all the many other thoughts to which it is related, organised according to degree of relatedness in a halo like manner around its core identity. I could rave on much more about this….

By: Miss Mussel

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 20:04:31 +0000

Oh dear! All I meant was that I first heard a of the story from you and then went and did some digging to find out the rest of it. Not at all that you didn’t read it or anything.

I was wondering about the i/y situation. Consider it fixed!

By: patty

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:26:37 +0000

I’m not sure if I had the tip of the iceberg because I’m cold or because I’m a skimmer.

Or both. ;-)

Or maybe it’s that my particular brain is missing something. Outer? Inner? I dunno.

But yeah. I need to learn to read more of what I link to, don’tcha think?

And no big deal, but it’s Patty with a “y” as in “Why, why, why?” ;-)