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Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter; a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place. |
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3/17/2005
Filling in the Blanks, from George Zachar
I earlier posted part of a news story on how the human mind can automatically "fill in the blanks" when confronted with a familiar pattern - annoying when you can't get a tune out of your head, and potentially fatal when "reading" a time series chart.
The original Nature article on this illuminates the process further, noting that "linguistic features" play a role.
So once we internalize phrases like "head and shoulders", etc., we become more likely to "see" the related pattern.
Not surprising, to be sure, but noteworthy that the neurological mechanisms involved are now being identified.
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We note also that the extent of neural activity in the primary auditory cortex was determined by the linguistic features of the imagined experience. When semantic knowledge (that is, lyrics) could be used to generate the missing information, reconstruction terminated in auditory association areas. When this meaning-based route to reconstruction was unavailable (as in instrumentals), activity extended to lower-level regions of the auditory cortex, most notably the primary auditory cortex (Fig. 1b, d).
These findings parallel those in the domain of visual imagery. For example, visual imagery elicited when considering names of objects (known as figural imagery) does not rely on the primary visual cortex6, 7. As these 'low-resolution' images do not demand fine-grained perceptual processing, activity in visual-association areas is sufficient to reconstruct the relevant representation. By contrast, when semantic information is absent or irrelevant (known as depictive imagery), a 'high-resolution' perceptual image is needed to reconstruct a representation, hence activity extends into the primary visual cortex8. Our results provide evidence that auditory imagery obeys the same basic neural principles.
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Article is behind a subscription wall.
Nature 434, 158 (10 March 2005); doi:10.1038/434158a
George Zachar is principal of Greensward Capital, a money management and trading firm in New York. He focuses on U.S. and European debt futures and options thereon. "I try to integrate market directional and volatility trades, with "living to fight another day" my central guiding philosophy," Zachar says. "When I was a child, I remember watching a cheesy spy movie, where one spook says to his opposite number, "The object of the game is to stay in the game."