what complexity science says ...

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 11:41 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: 'Boozer Daly' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] what complexity science says ...

They do frequency-lowering with dedicated FFT hardware, it sounds like. That sounds more like brain issue than cochlea issue?

-----Original Message-----

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of [hidden email]

Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 8:51 AM

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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] what complexity science says ...

Right exactly. But the hearing aid is BEFORE the cochlea. So if hearing aids are crap, it must be because they do something to the sound that the cochea cannot adjust to. So, in Mike's absence, land with the help of Frank's diagram, let's take this step by step. The sound enters the external ear and knocks on the tympanic membrane. The membrane, in turn operates the tiny bones of the stapes, which in turn compress the inner

membrane. So in what way is a digitized, analysed sound ill suited to what

happens next.

Nick Thompson

-----Original Message-----

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 8:39 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] what complexity science says ...

If I remember correctly, this wasn't Mike's argument. It was *not* a question of sampling rate nor one of range. Instead, I believe, it had to do with architecture, the Spatio-temporal relationship that the neurons at the cochlea have to one another, and the training our nervous system undergoes when we are young to make sense of this data.

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Marcus G. Daniels

Re: what complexity science says ...

I am assuming that there are parts of the spectrum a patient’s cochlea is sensitive to, and others that it is not sensitive to.

I’m claiming that if the hearing profile for the patient is precise, and a hearing aid does some mapping from the original spectrum to a different one, e.g. using frequencies that aren’t in the original signal, that there may still be the problem that the patient cannot adapt to the remapping, even though there is technically no information loss.

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of [hidden email]
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 10:22 AM
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Subject: Re: [FRIAM] what complexity science says ...

I slandered Frank and unslandered SteveG. The diagram is from the latter.

I stipulate that it’s easier to ask questions than to answer them, but, just on the face of it, don’t you agree that what we were taught in graduate school is nuts?

Nick Thompson

They do frequency-lowering with dedicated FFT hardware, it sounds like. That sounds more like brain issue than cochlea issue?

-----Original Message-----

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of [hidden email]

Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 8:51 AM

To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>

Cc: 'Boozer Daly' <[hidden email]>

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] what complexity science says ...

membrane. So in what way is a digitized, analysed sound ill suited to what

happens next.

Nick Thompson

-----Original Message-----

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of jon zingale

Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 8:39 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] what complexity science says ...

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Stephen Guerin-5

Re: what complexity science says ...

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 11:22 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the diagram is non-sense, right? It depicts amplitude but claims to provide frequency or wave length data. But both of the latter require differential “representation”, right. Moreover, the depiction of the cochlea as flat and “unrolled” is one of those “assume-a-spherical-cow” things. Cows aren’t spherical and cochlea aren’t flat AND they ARE cooped up in a bony spiral. How does that distort the wave as it sloshes around the spiral, constantly turning right? And what about back waves arising from the pulsing of the lower window?

Yes, it was flattened out. Here's more of the spiral look with the lower frequencies picked up further into the apex:

One model is that the stereocilia "hair cells" are of different lengths along the basilar membrane and resonate to different frequencies in the pressure wave.

Nick initially wrote:

As usual I overstated the case. But the cochlea IS a piece of meat, not a gang of oscillators.

My initial response was to counter that "This meat does have oscillators"

the hair cells along the basal membrane are the oscillators (think spring model) that transduces the frequency of the linear momentum to electrical.

(As an aside, I would guess the opposite direction where the transduction goes from electrical signal to oscillating hair movement is probably the dual in something like the cilia of a paramecium if the calcium gradient is reversed.)

thompnickson2

Re: what complexity science says ...

That’s nifty Stephen,

So we potentially have at least two sorts of motion that the haircells can detect: motion of the fluid in the channel and motion of the cochlea itself. How do the cells tell the difference. And why a spiral. Could somebody write an abm of a pressure wave churning down a spiral. For some reason this is ll reminding me of standing on the observation platform in Carmel where the sea otters come to play and watching the kelp wave in the surf. Except with the cochea, the rocks on which the kelp is attached are also moving with the surf and the surf is in a spiral channel, constantly being deflected to the right. .

Nick Thompson

https://www.whatsinside.info/bose-wave-radio-3/bose-wave-radio-iii-opened-waveguide-design/

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Monday, February 8, 2021 4:16 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Cc: Boozer Daly <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] what complexity science says ...

On Mon, Feb 8, 2021 at 11:22 AM <[hidden email]> wrote:

Clearly the diagram is non-sense, right? It depicts amplitude but claims to provide frequency or wave length data. But both of the latter require differential “representation”, right. Moreover, the depiction of the cochlea as flat and “unrolled” is one of those “assume-a-spherical-cow” things. Cows aren’t spherical and cochlea aren’t flat AND they ARE cooped up in a bony spiral. How does that distort the wave as it sloshes around the spiral, constantly turning right? And what about back waves arising from the pulsing of the lower window?

Yes, it was flattened out. Here's more of the spiral look with the lower frequencies picked up further into the apex:

One model is that the stereocilia "hair cells" are of different lengths along the basilar membrane and resonate to different frequencies in the pressure wave.

Nick initially wrote:

As usual I overstated the case. But the cochlea IS a piece of meat, not a gang of oscillators.

jon zingale

Re: what complexity science says ...

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Along the lines of Marcus' comments, I feel that there is quite a bit to say about couplings: device to the cochlea, cochlea to mind. At each stage, problems of impedance matching exist, purely acoustic matchings as-well-as matchings to accumulated weights in networks.

Addressing the first impedance problem is not too far removed from the audiophile problem of designing a home theater. How can one create a system (source, room, receiver, location in the room) where place (here) is replaced by the feeling of a concert hall, of being there. Our ears are not anechoic chambers, they have very poor acoustic isolation, and I very much empathize with those that find themselves confined to live in headphones. It must be very disorienting indeed. Much of what we hear (and thus learned to calibrate with) is influenced by the effect of sound on the body, the temporal bone, sound through soft membranes, etc... The hearing aid is likely not accounting for these differences in phase, those come to the cochlea via an other means. There is the problem of the speaker size, that a small speaker is limited in its capacity to push bass. Even when I walk, with noise-canceling headphones, there is the mixed information of receiving bass through my body (trains, trucks, and ambient hum) versus the bass provided by the music I am listening to. I suspect the body trained to calibrate this *additional* information in ways that a hearing aid (in its form today) simply cannot meet.

As to the second impedance problem, if something general can be said of neurological learning, what are the preferred modes of interpretation that neurology tends to? For instance, in the limit wavelets and Fourier transforms[λ] ought to be the same (I suspect), but both in practice (in implementation) are very different and there might require a more careful analysis of the biology itself before the question is settled. There are questions of affordances, questions of computational trade-offs, capacities to work with what is given. A few years ago, Nick sent me a paper on locality-sensitive-hashing where researchers attempted to derive useful hashing algorithms given the limited resources available to the olfactory system of fruit flies. I suspect that any fruitful determination of function (Fourier transform, wavelet, something else entirely...) must involve an investigation of human capacity, of affordance.

[λ] I don't know much about wavelets, and while I know some about Fourier transforms there is much I very much do not know. In this accessible lecture by Terrence Tao, he presents the work of Yves Meyer on Wavelets and provides some insight into how this technique can be very different in content than the technique of Fourier.

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David Eric Smith

Re: what complexity science says ...

In reply to this post by thompnickson2

On Feb 8, 2021, at 10:31 PM, <[hidden email]> <[hidden email]> wrote:

That’s nifty Stephen,

So we potentially have at least two sorts of motion that the haircells can detect: motion of the fluid in the channel and motion of the cochlea itself.

Motion of fluid relative to whatever reference surface anchors the hair cells? I only see one relative motion available.

How do the cells tell the difference. And why a spiral.

Eric

jon zingale

Re: what complexity science says ...

To continue my howling in the wilderness, what the *intrepid follower of
links* would find from the lecture on Meyer's[φ] wavelets is that wavelet
transforms offer up much better fidelity than Fourier's, with fewer
artifacts, better data compression, and from fewer resources. Why wouldn't
nature prefer it? Again, perhaps because nature found yet a more suitable
transform than either.

FWIW, waveguides offer up a third instance of impedance matching, that of
characteristic impedance.

[φ] The first part of the lecture is also interesting to the *lover of
complexity* as Meyer was the first to realize that quasi-crystals, and
aperiodic tilings more generally, can be manifest as projections of
higher-dimensional periodic structures. Tao, in passing, mentions how the
Fourier spectrum, OTOH, obscures the details of aperiodic structures this
way, as they do not look different than the periodic case. OTO this detail
provided insight into the connection between these higher dimensional
periodics and their lower dimension aperiodic representations.

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thompnickson2

Re: what complexity science says ...

In reply to this post by David Eric Smith

Steve,

The cochlea is a small piece of meat, unlike the boney snail it is enclosed in. It is moved by the relative densities of the fluid on both sides including back waves, arising from the motions of the lower window, and also motions carried to it via direct boney conduction from the outside world. I am still wondering about the fluid dynamics of spirals. I imagine that most of the deceleration is happening at bone side, rather than in the middle and that the reflect wave from the walls of the spiral keeps meeting the direct wave from the upper window. When you add the fact that the diameter of the channel is increasing and that there is some reflection back from the lower window, there must be some important transformations of the signal that would make tonotopic representation seem unlikely.

Nick Thompson