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Science of Chess: What happens in the brain when we see the best move?

How can external electrodes get to have the resolutions that might have anything to do with the connextionist view of internal representations. What is being mesured might be well coordinated signals of some secondary responses to the actual probably more fleeting and distributed and averaged when the field perturbations would reach the humongous probes (I am a tiny synapse looking from inside toward the scalp (and yes there might be some light through skin and bone, but no need to get nitpicking this is an images, I have my license to stage what I need to make point, or I take it, so back to it, a tiny synapse, or even a little party of them still tiny, looking with awe at the big probe: is that a weather balloon.....).
@dboing said in #2:
> How can external electrodes get to have the resolutions that might have anything to do with the connextionist view of internal representations. What is being mesured might be well coordinated signals of some secondary responses to the actual probably more fleeting and distributed and averaged when the field perturbations would reach the humongous probes (I am a tiny synapse looking from inside toward the scalp (and yes there might be some light through skin and bone, but no need to get nitpicking this is an images, I have my license to stage what I need to make point, or I take it, so back to it, a tiny synapse, or even a little party of them still tiny, looking with awe at the big probe: is that a weather balloon.....).

I may not understand the question completely, but scalp-based EEG and ERP only measure the activity of large populations of cells. We can't reason about individual synapses or single neurons from this kind of data, but that's alright. It just means that the conclusions we draw from the data also will concern neural processes at that coarser scale.
@NDpatzer said in #3:
> d
yes that was my point. So that it might be the euphoria of recognition more than the tiny cogs of deliberation or intuition or both circonvoluting in mind'eye the foresight problem. It might detect micro-eureka secondary processes of the affect, or like they use to say the pleasure circuit which seemed to also be the motivation one. One big circuit ruling them all. kdding..
I might have been saying that this was indeed what you just said. And that you seem to have mentioned early one, the scope of questions to be had. They are still part of the cognitive experience. The affect or the eureka thing. Is it feels like it has to be emotional... and maybe emotions are more states of mind than decisions or logical "events". What is the duration of a foresighted move or position huposthesis, and how fast is intuition going to assess its desirablility before we even have time to comjpute the opponent possible moves.. etc.. We have to start somethwere. And our self satistfacion might be the most measurable. Am I wrong. I only read teh first paargraph or 2. but I have alway wonder about EEG range of questions.

maybe my hypothesis going into this is wrong. often is it. but that helps me hunt trhough the reading. or my reading clutch will slip. Analogies tonight, to alleviate my inabliltiy to express my thougths otherwise..

You got it right my question.
For me, the "mate in 2" puzzle looks like mate in 1. Re7 ... what am I missing?
@Sybotes said in #5:
> For me, the "mate in 2" puzzle looks like mate in 1. Re7 ... what am I missing?

I don't think you're missing anything - Re7 sure looks like it does the trick. The author describes all the puzzles as "mate-in-two" in the article and presents this as an example, so I guess this is an oversight. Good catch! I've edited the caption to point this out for other readers.
> In the context of chess research, fMRI studies have been used to identify a network of brain areas that contribute to playing chess, including regions in the occipital, parietal, and frontal lobes that are known to support visual perception, spatial cognition, and decision-making, respectively.

That "respectively" was informative to me, if that applies to the ordered lists:
1) occipital, parietal and frontal lobes***
2) visual sensory perception, spatial cognition, and decision-making

For that last one, it might be voluntary gating of "distributed decision pondering" (my words.... ). What is a decision?

*** lobe: what is a lobe exactly, is that like a separate slab that has a volume and boundaries that allow notions inside and outside, to some degree. that there are denser within connecitivy directions than between the lobes? (well topology versus quantity, I guess.. ) do lobe project onto one another. Or are we using surface silcius (plural) to infer regions we call lobe.
What kind of electrical influence might there be between matter that is facing each other through a lobe boundary.
I know it is possible that my questions make no sense once someone "knows". But I do not know.
> While neurons produce electrical signals that last for miliiseconds, the flow of oxygenated blood to those cells takes ~6-12 seconds to rise and fall.

Thanks, I was wondering about this time resolution of the method. It seems that there is a cost to time and position "accuracy", between fMRI and EEG. Inferring synaptic activity (not just neurons, although they do integrate and fire, at their interneuron localisation grain, the bottom finer grain being still the synaptic treillis. And then the timing finer grain might be in term of firing frequency range (controlled by membrane refractory properties).

I do like the contrast story that help structure what we might have learned from the past episodes of this series. I will keep this chunk reading pace. As there are many things that trigger thoughts (some older that always lingered, and some new ones).

I do think that the community in need of some updating in psychology of cognition, and not just about how experet think, but the whole organizatino of how any player think or evolve. It is not like we know more about any chess thinking that is not expert thinking. It might be that the empirical hope of starting there is that the signals might be more differentiated?

Anyhow. I am glad to see your posts. Even if now I do not have much time for them. There are there for my returning to them.
Yeah EEGs rarely yield any results (i used to install them on old people's heads)

Shouldn't be too long before AI is decoding Musk's brain spikes

fMRI is actually really good for all of this - that's where you want to look
@jamskahler said in #9:
> Yeah EEGs rarely yield any results (i used to install them on old people's heads)
>
> Shouldn't be too long before AI is decoding Musk's brain spikes
>
> fMRI is actually really good for all of this - that's where you want to look

Hey @jamskahler, curious to hear more about your work with EEG. Was this in a research setting, a medical setting, or something else? I agree that fMRI is useful too, but its poor temporal resolution makes it difficult to use it for something like this where we expect a short, time-locked response to an event. If you haven't already, you might like the previous couple of posts in the series describing some fMRI research, though - different set of questions than this, but hopefully interesting. Thanks for reading!