opentheory | I think all neuroscientists, all philosophers, all
psychologists, and all psychiatrists should basically drop whatever
they’re doing and learn Selen Atasoy’s “connectome-specific harmonic
wave” (CSHW) framework. It’s going to be the backbone of how we
understand the brain and mind in the future, and it’s basically where
predictive coding was in 2011, or where blockchain was in 2009. Which is
to say, it’s destined for great things and this is a really good time to get into it.
I described CSHW in my last post as:
Selen Atasoy’s Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves (CSHW) is a new method for interpreting neuroimaging which (unlike conventional approaches) may plausibly measure things directly relevant to phenomenology. Essentially, it’s a method for combining fMRI/DTI/MRI to calculate a brain’s intrinsic ‘eigenvalues’, or the neural frequencies which naturally resonate in a given brain, as well as the way the brain is currently distributing energy (periodic neural activity) between these eigenvalues.
This post is going to talk a little more about how CSHW
works, why it’s so powerful, and what sorts of things we could use it
for.
CSHW: the basics
All periodic systems have natural modes— frequencies they
‘like’ to resonate at. A tuning fork is a very simple example of this:
regardless of how it’s hit, most of the vibration energy quickly
collapses to one frequency- the natural resonant frequency of the fork.
All musical instruments work on this principle; when you
change the fingering on a trumpet or flute, you’re changing the natural
resonances of the instrument.
CSHW’s big insight is that brains have these natural resonances too,
although they differ slightly from brain to brain. And instead of some
external musician choosing which notes (natural resonances) to play, the
brain sort of ‘tunes itself,’ based on internal dynamics, external
stimuli, and context.
The beauty of CSHW is that it’s a quantitative model, not
just loose metaphor: neural activation and inhibition travel as an
oscillating wave with a characteristic wave propagation pattern, which
we can reasonably estimate, and the substrate in which they propagate is
the the brain’s connectome (map of neural connections), which we can
also reasonably estimate.
