Warning: Memetic Hazard
February 8, 2015 1:59 PM   Subscribe

 
comp.basilisk FAQ
posted by Artw at 2:09 PM on February 8, 2015 [29 favorites]


This just in: mildly handsome British man uses popular American tourist trap as backdrop in attempt to overpromote well-known neurological hack into something from SCP.
posted by Halloween Jack at 2:30 PM on February 8, 2015 [5 favorites]


Humans have used mechanical analogies for the operation of the brain practically since we've had modern science. In my opinion, one of the main flaws of this concept is that the brain is perfectly -- or at least very nearly perfectly -- deterministic.

I feel that the McCollough effect betrays the poor analogical thinking displayed in the basilisk FAQ, and concepts of the basilisk. The McCullough effect does a very impressive job of "breaking" a part of the brain -- at least for a short term. Those exposed for longer and/or those whose susceptibility is higher will see the effect in their vision for a longer time.

The human brain is, to my best understanding, a lot of parts that do specific jobs, and for the most part work in tandem enough for us to feel like it's one single thread of consciousness. But what we're really doing is interpreting the will of various "constituencies" in the brain and (whether free will is involved or not) simplifying the output of something that resembles a consensus process into that singular train of experience or thought.

Forgive the ramble, but my point is this: Trying to crash a brain is like trying to crash a room full of people sitting on a committee. With the McCullough effect, you're causing some sort of bias/mild injury/damage to an individual constituent of the brain -- the visual cortex -- but there's no indication that there is, or even can be, a single input (that isn't innately injurious) that shuts the whole brain (or whole committee) down.
posted by chimaera at 2:31 PM on February 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


I am classified as "Keter" on my friend's phone when I message him.
posted by quin at 2:33 PM on February 8, 2015 [25 favorites]


my brain was broken after googling what "mango worms" were, and the effect of those images has lasted far longer than 3 months.
posted by Auden at 2:37 PM on February 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Trying to crash a brain is like trying to crash a room full of people sitting on a committee.

Increasingly likely as you add Ph.D.'s?
posted by Metafilter Username at 2:44 PM on February 8, 2015 [21 favorites]


At first, I thought it was a trick to see how many times I would reload a YouTube video that wouldn't play.
posted by double block and bleed at 2:56 PM on February 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


my brain was broken after googling what "mango worms" were

Ah, fuck.
posted by nevercalm at 3:00 PM on February 8, 2015 [13 favorites]


enjoy, nevercalm. That effect happens not at the ocular level, but deep inside your brain. It actually changes your brain for up to three months! (or forever)
posted by Auden at 3:09 PM on February 8, 2015


Ah, Tom Scott...his linguistics videos channel is fantastic too!
posted by iamkimiam at 3:11 PM on February 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


Yes, the mangoworms information didn't change my vision, but rather my whole sense of touch. It seems my skin is a little looser fitting now, and there's something filling the gap. Thanks, guys! That's some whole new perceptual trickery there.
posted by ambrosen at 3:23 PM on February 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


I'VE BEEN INCEPTED
posted by neuromodulator at 3:36 PM on February 8, 2015


It's the visual version of the brown note.
posted by Foosnark at 3:50 PM on February 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


... in some cases after prolonged exposure to the grids, the effect can last up to three and a half months.

Nope
posted by infinitewindow at 3:56 PM on February 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


This just in: mildly handsome British man uses popular American tourist trap as backdrop in attempt to overpromote well-known neurological hack into something from SCP.

Even in the social media world there have been plenty of meme-tastic videos over the years that go through how your conscious experience of the world is a construction of your mind, and ZOMG, it's all a bit plastic too. This is (generously) one step above being astonished by magnets doing their thing.
posted by MillMan at 4:03 PM on February 8, 2015 [1 favorite]




I started to type "mango worms" into google (couldn't help myself) but then it autocompleted to "mango worms in humans" and I decided maybe I could help myself after all.
posted by geegollygosh at 4:31 PM on February 8, 2015 [44 favorites]


the visual version of the brown note

The fart color?
posted by yoink at 5:28 PM on February 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


Total headline fail. The brain is in fact wonderfully, amazingly flexible, and this is a great demonstration of how un-breakable the brain really is.
posted by Dashy at 5:50 PM on February 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


How amazing! I've never heard of this.

But I think I can see what must be be going on and how and why it happens.

I think it's a software solution to a hardware problem that can arise within the eye itself.

The key seems to me to be that these grids look like highly magnified diffraction gratings, and when you look through an appropriately spaced diffraction grating at a white light source you'll see the various colors of the spectrum as you turn the plane of the grating with respect to your eye. And by adding the complementary color at the cortical level to your perception of a color seen through a diffraction grating, your visual system is causing you to see any object seen through such a grating at much closer to its true color than would a direct perception of the actual color of the light coming from the object, passing through a diffraction and falling on your retina.

But why would your eye need a system to compensate for the effects of diffraction gratings?

I think the answer is in the very peculiar way the eye is innervated.

Because the nerve connections to the rod and cone cells don't attach to those cells from the back of the retina, they attach from the front -- and before light can reach the receptors of the rods and cones, it has to pass through all the elaborate apparatus of cabling and connection first.

But we don't see all that, of course, because it's mainly transparent, certainly, but there must also be processing programs to suppress and edit out its effects on light, and I would argue that one of them has to be a program to add complementary color to reduce color biases added by inadvertent diffraction gratings right in front of the retina.

The wikipedia article on the effect gives strong support to this view, in my opinion, by noting that the effect is localized to the particular region of the retina that gave rise to it in the first place:
The effect is specific to the region of the retina that is exposed to the induction stimuli. This has been shown by inducing opposite effects in adjacent regions of the retina (i.e., from one region of the retina verticals appear pink and horizontals appear greenish; from an adjacent region of the retina, verticals appear greenish and horizontals appear pink). Nevertheless, if a small region of the retina is exposed to the induction stimuli, and the test contours run through this region, the effect spreads along those test contours. Of course, if the induced area is in the fovea (central vision) and the eyes are allowed to move, then the effect will appear everywhere in the visual scene visited by the fovea.
At the retinal level, an image produced when the eye looks at a large colored grid printed on paper is indistinguishable from the image produced when light passes through an accidental microscopic diffraction grating positioned just in front of the retina, and the cortex applies the same corrections to both.
posted by jamjam at 6:08 PM on February 8, 2015 [8 favorites]


Tom Scott's voice is amazing. He's a kid (to me anyway), and yet he has the voice of a elderly dignified BBC science reporter. He could report about just about anything (and he does) and we can't help but just get entranced. If BBC doesn't hire him they are crazy. Maybe they are just waiting for him to look less like a kid.
posted by eye of newt at 6:13 PM on February 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


Or possibly they're still sore about this bit of silliness. He's a very natural host/presenter, though, and the whole Citation Needed series of videos (Tom and three of his friends do a Wikipedia-based panel show sitting around a kitchen table) deserves to be better-known. One of my favorite things to put on when I need something silly but informative.
posted by wanderingmind at 6:19 PM on February 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


I want to create a room where one walls is painted in Vanta black,a color so black light simply disapears into it, so you would think you are looking into a void. The room will be accoustically dead in the same direction as the black wall. So that you will see and hear nothing when you stare at this void. We will then tell visitors that there is something to see and hear, but only if they listen carefully. I think people will fall into torpor as their brain stops having anything to react to.
posted by humanfont at 6:23 PM on February 8, 2015 [3 favorites]


I want to create a room where one walls is painted in Vanta black

You should paint two of the other walls with the McCullough effect grids, and the fourth with mango worms
posted by oulipian at 6:37 PM on February 8, 2015 [29 favorites]


I read some of the "scientific" sources. Bravo. Nice hoax. Well done.
posted by charlie don't surf at 6:45 PM on February 8, 2015


The effects of mango worms last for only months but the eggs continue to hatch up until death of the host.
posted by benzenedream at 6:47 PM on February 8, 2015


I read some of the "scientific" sources. Bravo. Nice hoax. Well done.

I'm genuinely curious as to what you found; when I dug around I found this on pubmed which indicates that under some very specific circumstances the effect can last over 2,040 hours.
posted by quin at 7:01 PM on February 8, 2015


I think it's a software solution to a hardware problem that can arise within the eye itself.

I was staring up close to a RGB+Yellow TV (Sharp) the other day and took some pictures of the tiny 4-part pixels for out of curiosity of how they would show up (not that interesting).

Reading your comment and an intriguing comment on the YouTube video (no really) got me thinking that maybe this exploits the underlying pattern buffering data structures used in the visual cortex and reveals artifacts of our 3D-pixel mapping systems. Then, I try to relate that back to what you're saying and I can see how they overlap. At some level your visual cortex has some orderly way of laying out "pixels" and organizing them into reasonably efficient patches of data. It has limited resolution and at the lowest level has to make decisions as to how to categorize an incoming photon or number of photos and store them within the memory array (whether immediately visible or for pre/post-processing use). It has to decide what color to store the information as, and is to some extent calibrated to process incoming photons as accurately as possible, but can be re-calibrated or "offset."

Something something something
posted by aydeejones at 7:46 PM on February 8, 2015


(and obviously the empirical "I know what I saw" rods and cones and such can be overruled by software algorithms something something)
posted by aydeejones at 7:47 PM on February 8, 2015


I'm genuinely curious as to what you found; when I dug around I found this on pubmed..

That is only an abstract of a journal from 1975 which unsurprisingly is not available online. There is a circlejerk of abstracts that refer to that paper, none of them have full texts online, except for one full paper I found.

Like other forms of adaptation contingent on rare stimuli, the McCollough effect is peculiarly long lasting with storage of the aftereffect documented to last days (Jones & Holding, 1975) and informally reported to last weeks and months.

Emphasis added. [citation needed]

The Jones & Holding paper has an exceptionally high authority since it is the #1 footnote on the Wikipedia article on the McCollough effect, outranking McCollough's original papers. The introduction of the Wikipedia article says:

in some cases after prolonged exposure to the grids, the effect can last up to three and a half months.[1]

Footnote 1 links to the Jones & Holding paper. No, it does not say that. The abstract clearly states that the effect "better than half strength" after 2040 hours, which is 85 days.

Wikipedia can be an extremely poor source of scientific information.
posted by charlie don't surf at 7:49 PM on February 8, 2015 [2 favorites]




I am classified as "Keter" on my friend's phone when I message him.


pffffff you're Euclid at worst but I am pretty sure REDACTED can contain you.
posted by louche mustachio at 8:41 PM on February 8, 2015 [5 favorites]


Congratulations, you just lost the game (Extreme Mango Worms version)
posted by blue_beetle at 9:35 PM on February 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


Znatb jbez whvpr
posted by fallingbadgers at 10:07 PM on February 8, 2015


0rison: In The War Against the Rull, A.E. van Vogt imagined an alien weapon, "nerve lines," visual patterns that induced hypnotic commands.

I've often thought that the most plausible real-world long-range stunning weapon would be a targeted strobe using a frequency that could reliably induce seizures in healthy people.
posted by Mitrovarr at 11:14 PM on February 8, 2015


In The War Against the Rull, A.E. van Vogt imagined an alien weapon, "nerve lines," visual patterns that induced hypnotic commands.

Australian sc ifi writer George Turner envisioned genetically engineered geniuses in his novel "Brain Child" deemed so dangerous they were quarantined. One was an artist so skilled she was able to implant potent hypnotic manipulations into her paintings.

(... George Turner isn't familiar to many science fiction fans, and died back in 1997. He wrote some insightful and harrowing works concerning the near future outcomes for humanity of technological automation, global warming, and genetic augmentation (among other things)).
posted by Auden at 1:03 AM on February 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


'Images that break your brain' is kind of a definition of visual art - except that some of those images extend or enhance your brain.

Looking for an image that will break down my brain, clean and oil the parts and reassemble it, this time according to the manual.
posted by Segundus at 1:06 AM on February 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


Orison, ironically the 'Prevention of Visual Stress and Migraine With Precision Spectral Filters' line spacing makes for a fairly stripey appearance.
posted by asok at 1:45 AM on February 9, 2015


Previouslier (self-post-link from over ten years ago, half of the links now broken)

From the Wikipedia article, the Anti-McCollough effect discovered in 2008 is something quite special: it is similar but the illusion does not change colour and unlike the classic ME, it does transfer from one eye to another. So what we seem to have is a similar mechanism occurring much deeper in the visual cortex.
posted by ikalliom at 3:47 AM on February 9, 2015


Mango worms. Ya'll are evil.
posted by Cocodrillo at 3:55 AM on February 9, 2015


The key seems to me to be that these grids look like highly magnified diffraction gratings, and when you look through an appropriately spaced diffraction grating at a white light source you'll see the various colors of the spectrum as you turn the plane of the grating with respect to your eye. And by adding the complementary color at the cortical level to your perception of a color seen through a diffraction grating, your visual system is causing you to see any object seen through such a grating at much closer to its true color than would a direct perception of the actual color of the light coming from the object, passing through a diffraction and falling on your retina.

I would be extremely surprised if the explanation had anything to do with diffraction gratings. I very much doubt that evolution tuned us to have this response except as a really-weird corner-case byproduct of the mechanisms required for our more productive responses to much more common stimuli.

The interesting thing about McCollough is that it lasts a long time. If this lasted 30 seconds, it would be yet another demonstration of neural adaptation. Since it's not that... what is it?
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 4:01 AM on February 9, 2015


I'd say it's some kind of recalibration system which combines spatial frequency and colour. It is thrown off by the artificially strong stimulus and takes a long time to recover from that.

The classic effect transfers between eyes in children (ages 6 to 9 in this study) so it can't be a local algorithm. Apparently binocular vision takes a long time to develop. Kids really do not see the world the same way as adults do.
posted by ikalliom at 5:14 AM on February 9, 2015


I noticed this effect when staring at the slats in my wardrobe door when i was 13 or so. It looked like flames flickering behind the door. I pointed it out to my dad and asked if he could see it. He'd recently confiscated my Sandman comics for their satanic influence. I think I got extra prayed-for that night.
posted by gnuhavenpier at 5:27 AM on February 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


comp.basilisk FAQ

I think one of the better science fiction works on mind-hacking is Delany's Babel-17, which suggests that attempts to program the brain can be analyzed and reverse-hacked by a self-reflective person. Since we routinely deconstruct and reconstruct language and art, weaponizing them is going to have limited effectiveness. It also provides a nice flip to the usual science fiction narrative of the analytical scientist saving galactic civilization (a process that's usually more sciency than science), by making the protagonist a poet instead and treating introspection as essential to unraveling the problem.

But even if you drink the kool aid of memetic theory, I don't think that the McCullough effect would qualify as a meme.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 6:21 AM on February 9, 2015 [2 favorites]


All I could think of was a pre-horror-film corporate powerpoint about Vampire Domestication, from Peter Watts.
posted by LD Feral at 6:21 AM on February 9, 2015 [3 favorites]


fnord
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:06 AM on February 9, 2015


The classic effect transfers between eyes in children (ages 6 to 9 in this study) so it can't be a local algorithm.

The abstract says it doesn't transfer:
In experiment 2, a second group of children viewed the adaptation patterns with only 1 eye, the other eye being occluded. The McCollough effect was present when the adapted eye viewed the test pattern, but, as in adults, no interocular transfer was found.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:11 AM on February 9, 2015


Came here to have my brain broken. Left disappointed.
posted by DZ-015 at 8:17 AM on February 9, 2015


Artw: "comp.basilisk FAQ"

Yeah, FPP is missing the Langford tag.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:14 AM on February 9, 2015


The abstract says it doesn't transfer

You're correct. I blame it on drinking too much coffee. Scholarpedia has a summary article curated by McCollough herself.
posted by ikalliom at 10:02 AM on February 9, 2015 [1 favorite]


Congratulations, you just lost the game (Extreme Mango Worms version)


I have lost so. many. things.






Now I have lost my lunch as well.
posted by louche mustachio at 11:06 AM on February 12, 2015


I would be extremely surprised if the explanation had anything to do with diffraction gratings.

You may well be right.

There is another possibility with a family resemblance to diffraction that I considered but rejected because, I realize now in retrospect, I was neglecting an important property of the nerve fibers light must pass through to reach the rods and cones of the retina -- and that property is that those nerve fibers are conductors.

And when light passes through a very fine array of parallel linear conductors, a condition which plausible arrangements of nerve fibers in front of the photoreceptors could occasionally meet (and which is the basic mechanism of Polaroid), that light becomes polarized.

Polarized light can show different colors than the incident light that gave rise to it depending on the polarization of that incident light, and when that color effect occurs with white incident light, the light polarized 90 degrees from the direction of the polarized colored light will show complementary colors, simply because the two polarized components must add up to the original white incident light.

Which brings us back to the McCollough effect; induced by an image of two gratings perpendicular to each other and with a background of complementary colors -- red and green in the case of the original report of the effect.

So the McCollough effect could be, and I now think is most likely to be, the result of a compensation added to the perception of light to correct for color distortions from polarization caused by the ultrastructure of retinal nerves.

Among others, there's a particularly odd property of the McCollough effect mentioned in the Wikipedia article which I think is accounted for very neatly if we see the effect as a compensation for errors introduced by polarization:
It depends on retinal orientation (tilting the head to the side by 45 degrees makes the colors in the above example disappear; tilting the head by 90 degrees makes the colors reappear such that the gravitationally vertical grating now looks green) . . .
posted by jamjam at 12:58 PM on March 6, 2015


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