Hi Abby, to be honest the parallels between free-energy-minimizing systems and dissonance-minimizing systems is a novel idea we’re playing with (or at least I believe it’s novel—my colleague Andrés coined it to my knowledge) and I’m not at full liberty to share all the details before we publish it. I think it’s reasonable to doubt this intuition, and we’ll hopefully be assembling more support for it soon.
To the larger question of neural synchrony and STV, a good collection of our argument and some available evidence would be our talk to Robin Carhart-Harris’ lab:
(I realize an hour-long presentation is a big ‘ask’; don’t feel like you need to watch it, but I think this shares what we can share publicly at this time)
>I agree neuroimaging is extremely messy and discouraging, but you’re the one posting about successfully building an fmri analysis pipeline to run this specific analysis to support your theory. I am very annoyed that your response to my multiple requests for any empirical data to support your theory is you basically saying “science is hard”, as opposed to “no experiment, dataset, or analysis is perfect, but here is some empirical evidence that is at least consistent with my theory.”
One of my takeaways from our research is that neuroimaging tooling is in fairly bad shape overall. I’m frankly surprised we had to reimplement an fMRI analysis pipeline in order to start really digging into this question, and I wonder how typical our experience here is.
One of the other takeaways from our work is that it’s really hard to find data that’s suitable for fundamental research into valence; we just got some MDMA fMRI+DTI data that appears very high quality, so we may have more to report soon. I’m happy to talk about what sorts of data are, vs are not, suitable for our research and why; my hands are a bit tied with provisional data at this point (sorry about that, wish I had more to share)
Hi Abby, to be honest the parallels between free-energy-minimizing systems and dissonance-minimizing systems is a novel idea we’re playing with (or at least I believe it’s novel—my colleague Andrés coined it to my knowledge) and I’m not at full liberty to share all the details before we publish it. I think it’s reasonable to doubt this intuition, and we’ll hopefully be assembling more support for it soon.
To the larger question of neural synchrony and STV, a good collection of our argument and some available evidence would be our talk to Robin Carhart-Harris’ lab:
(I realize an hour-long presentation is a big ‘ask’; don’t feel like you need to watch it, but I think this shares what we can share publicly at this time)
>I agree neuroimaging is extremely messy and discouraging, but you’re the one posting about successfully building an fmri analysis pipeline to run this specific analysis to support your theory. I am very annoyed that your response to my multiple requests for any empirical data to support your theory is you basically saying “science is hard”, as opposed to “no experiment, dataset, or analysis is perfect, but here is some empirical evidence that is at least consistent with my theory.”
One of my takeaways from our research is that neuroimaging tooling is in fairly bad shape overall. I’m frankly surprised we had to reimplement an fMRI analysis pipeline in order to start really digging into this question, and I wonder how typical our experience here is.
One of the other takeaways from our work is that it’s really hard to find data that’s suitable for fundamental research into valence; we just got some MDMA fMRI+DTI data that appears very high quality, so we may have more to report soon. I’m happy to talk about what sorts of data are, vs are not, suitable for our research and why; my hands are a bit tied with provisional data at this point (sorry about that, wish I had more to share)