The most promising part seems to be this phenomenological (in the second sense) model of propagation parameters in the brain, and how we might be able to scan people, notice that their parameters were weird, and prescribe them the right medicine just based on that. This is exactly the sort of thing you could hope to do with a good phenomenological model of gross (as in at the large scale) brain activity.
There are a couple reasons I think the deeper explanatory power is lacking. First, we understand the early visual cortex fairly well, and thinking of it in terms of harmonics doen’t help much, nor would it provide the detailed causal explanation we can give of the visual cortex. Second, because of brain stimulation experiments and injury case studies we have a pretty good idea that a lot of function in the brain is quite localized, which is what you’d expect from the visual cortex-esque neural computation picture, but not what you’d expect from this harmonic computation picture.
As for consonant waves meaning happy emotions, or interpersonal bonding entraining your brains’ waves: no. This is to mix up the representer with the represented. You don’t need to use orange ink to describe an orange, and no part of your brain needs to have an aesthetically pleasing MRI signature for you to be thinking about aesthetically pleasing things.
I do think that lower-frequency harmonics will be both better defined, and more useful for hanging functional or computational stories on. (Agree that low-harmonics-as-operators-on-bayesian-priors could be a very generative frame. I’m a little skeptical of the current stories being told of functional localization; some of the localization could indeed be spatial, but some could be temporal (information tacitly encoded into harmonics). I think the proof is in the pudding in terms of what each hypothesis can let us do. Probably no one-size-fits-all.
I’m glad that you made this post and am happy to hear about CSHW, but I don’t agree with it.
In short, it’s not phenomenology, it’s phenomenology!
The most promising part seems to be this phenomenological (in the second sense) model of propagation parameters in the brain, and how we might be able to scan people, notice that their parameters were weird, and prescribe them the right medicine just based on that. This is exactly the sort of thing you could hope to do with a good phenomenological model of gross (as in at the large scale) brain activity.
There are a couple reasons I think the deeper explanatory power is lacking. First, we understand the early visual cortex fairly well, and thinking of it in terms of harmonics doen’t help much, nor would it provide the detailed causal explanation we can give of the visual cortex. Second, because of brain stimulation experiments and injury case studies we have a pretty good idea that a lot of function in the brain is quite localized, which is what you’d expect from the visual cortex-esque neural computation picture, but not what you’d expect from this harmonic computation picture.
As for consonant waves meaning happy emotions, or interpersonal bonding entraining your brains’ waves: no. This is to mix up the representer with the represented. You don’t need to use orange ink to describe an orange, and no part of your brain needs to have an aesthetically pleasing MRI signature for you to be thinking about aesthetically pleasing things.
I do think that lower-frequency harmonics will be both better defined, and more useful for hanging functional or computational stories on. (Agree that low-harmonics-as-operators-on-bayesian-priors could be a very generative frame. I’m a little skeptical of the current stories being told of functional localization; some of the localization could indeed be spatial, but some could be temporal (information tacitly encoded into harmonics). I think the proof is in the pudding in terms of what each hypothesis can let us do. Probably no one-size-fits-all.