This is very similar to last week with that mind reading startup thing. Please read the paper before commenting.

This is a tool to help researchers in figuring out what different parts of the brain are actually for with less experimenter bias contamination of “well we think maybe it’s about this so let’s show it video of x to see”.

The essence runs on having someone sit in a scanner for a couple hours watching all sorts of things, and then feeding that to a model that will then build its own representation of said data and try different things on it until it’s found what makes a certain part sing in the model.

The purpose is a generalized understanding of brain function, more or less the same way we’ve been doing it all these years. Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.

What is a "purpose"? Something people wish something would only be used for, right? How does it relate to, what influence does it have on what something will end up being used for?

>Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.

It also helps companies like Moonbug Entertainment (Candle Media) understand how to build better Distractatrons.

    It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down.

    “It’s not mega-interesting, what’s on the Distractatron,” said Maurice Wheeler, who runs the research group. “But if they aren’t fully focused, they might go, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ and kind of drift over. We can see what they’re looking at and the exact moment when they got distracted.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/06/17/cocomelon-chil...

What a world.