Tuesday, August 13, 2019
This is hopelessly STUPID.
This piece of INFINITELY STUPID SHIT was actually published in an actual "scientific" journal.
It's billed as a "major discovery". It's just an obvious fact turned into an obviously reverse causation.
These IDIOTS claim to have found an explanation for Weber's Law, the FACT that most neural inputs are logarithmic. There are a few exceptions in the area of pain and pressure, but log holds true for every aspect of sight and sound.
They ran an experiment where rats were conditioned to point toward the louder of two sounds.
"Our experiments confirmed that the animals' behaviour matched Weber's Law", says Pardo-Vazquez. "Their ability to tell which of the two sounds was louder only depended on the ratio between the sounds' intensities. If the rat had to compare the intensities of two sounds that were played softly, its accuracy was just as good as with a pair of sounds that were played loudly, as long as both pairs had the same intensity ratio." Then, the team started to analyze in detail how long the rats took to make their decisions, a step that turned out to be critical. "Typically, studies of Weber's law focussed on the accuracy of the discrimination, which is what Weber himself described", Pardo-Vazquez explains. "Surprisingly, the time taken to decide has received little attention." The team realized decision times and the loudness of the pair of sounds were linked - the louder the sounds, the shorter the decision time. In fact, they showed that the nature of this link was unique and mathematically precise, making the decision times observed, for instance, in a discrimination between two quiet sounds, exactly proportional to the decision times measured when the subject discriminated between two loud sounds -- as long as their relative intensities were constant.The explanation is not mysterious. A louder sound triggers more neurons in the cochlea and in the upper levels of the auditory system. When more neurons are involved, there are more sub-decisions being made, so the sub-decisions accumulate faster toward the major orienting decision. Localizing is based on much more than loudness. With a sudden sound, time of arrival is part of the calculation. Phase differences are also part of the calculation. All of these calculations are easier when the sound is louder. The signal-to-noise ratio is higher, so there are less confounding factors. This has nothing to do with the log-ness of the comparison, and certainly doesn't explain the log-ness of the comparison. Log-ness is intrinsic in every neuron and in every process. ¶ 1:31 AM
