A Piece Of Dough Can Learn Just Like Animals And Humans

haidut

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Remarkable study, showing that there may not be that much difference between what is in our heads and that cold rock lying by the road. The learning occurred through change of structure within the matter and required proper timing - i.e. both of these phenomena are required for learning in living creatures as well.
Eerily similar to the almost forgotten work of J.C. Bose at the beginning of the 20th century, which Peat wrote about in one of his articles.

Scientists See Signs of Learning in a Ball of Dough | RealClearScience

"...Humans can learn. Animals can learn. Plants can learn. So why can't a ball of dough learn, too? A new study published in PLoS ONE suggests that it can. Inspired by a now obscure 1955 paper showing that iron bars could be conditioned to respond to electromagnetic fields, researchers Nicolas Rouleau, Lukasz Karbowski, and Michael Persinger of Laurentian University sought to see if they could train an electroconductive material to respond to pulsed light from an LED by pairing the light with electric shocks. "Electroconductive material" is a fancy term for what the researchers described as "effectively a dough." Composed of 237 cubic centimeters (cc) of water, 355 cc of flour, 133 cc of lemon juice, 59 cc of table salt, 15 cc of vegetable oil, and 2cc of food coloring, the substance could easily be repurposed as a pie crust if you toss in a little sugar."

"...After training, and following a one or five-minute delay, they exposed the conditioned dough to a flash of the LED and observed its spectral power density. When the dough was presented with the LED light, it produced electrical activity to when it was shocked. Untrained dough did not show the response.
"Only when the dough had a history of being shocked when presented with the light did it express electrical activity with a spectral profile which overlapped with the shock profile," Rouleau explained via email.
"The fact that the 'conditioned' group displayed a power spectral density that was most similar to the power spectral density elicited by electric current only is consistent with learning
," he and his authors write.
Interestingly, the dough successfully "learned" the response when the flash and shock were paired within 130ms of each other. Any longer, and the response went unlearned. This mirrors what researchers observe with animals, Rouleau says. When stimuli are not paired closely enough in time, animals won't learn the desired behavior. Examining the dough under a microscope, the researchers saw physical evidence of how the dough was able to "learn." Dough exposed to both the shock and the light had a distinct structure compared to dough that went unexposed, was exposed the light only, was exposed to the shock only, or was crushed and recycled following the trials. "The histology data are what convinced us. We observed greater complexity... in the 'conditioned' samples," Rouleau told RCS. "In summary, the data indicate that a conditioned response can be encoded into a simple material, that the conditioned response is associated with structural modifications within the substrate," the researchers conclude. The results indicate that learning may be a far more fundamental process than previously thought.
 

FredSonoma

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schultz

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I always found the J.C. Bose stuff that Ray talked about very interesting.

Another time Ray was talking about studying ants, and one researcher concluded that ants are stupid, but Ray said something like "He thought ants were stupid but maybe he was just studying them in stupid ways." (paraphrased) I always thought of this when thinking about the J.C. Bose stuff. Humans think they know everything. We probably just don't have the knowledge to study a lot of things properly yet.
 

Lilac

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:shock: Hey, Ray says the nature of the universe might be biological! If you look at Similar Threads (below), "Thoughts on sourdough bread" comes up. Maybe it should be "Thoughts from sourdough bread."
 

milk_lover

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I always found the J.C. Bose stuff that Ray talked about very interesting.

Another time Ray was talking about studying ants, and one researcher concluded that ants are stupid, but Ray said something like "He thought ants were stupid but maybe he was just studying them in stupid ways." (paraphrased) I always thought of this when thinking about the J.C. Bose stuff. Humans think they know everything. We probably just don't have the knowledge to study a lot of things properly yet.
Ants are very smart. They are even mentioned in our holy book, Quran.

"Until, when they came upon the valley of the ants, an ant said, 'O ants, enter your dwellings that you not be crushed by Solomon and his soldiers while they perceive not.'"

I have a kitchen table that filled with aunts eating stuff (suddenly they came in huge numbers) and they are addicted to white sugar, coconut oil, OJ, guava, and milk! What the hell, the same food that I eat. I think they might have high metabolism.


 

Constatine

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Wow. A very detailed mechanism of action needs to be explored here. This research might change the way we perceive our environment. Though I wonder to what extent a material may be conditioned to.
 

Gl;itch.e

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I have a kitchen table that filled with aunts eating stuff (suddenly they came in huge numbers) and they are addicted to white sugar, coconut oil, OJ, guava, and milk! What the hell, the same food that I eat. I think they might have high metabolism.
LOL!!! all my Aunts are overweight and definitely don't have a high metabolism! :):
 

lexis

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Ants are very smart. They are even mentioned in our holy book, Quran.

"Until, when they came upon the valley of the ants, an ant said, 'O ants, enter your dwellings that you not be crushed by Solomon and his soldiers while they perceive not.'"

I have a kitchen table that filled with aunts eating stuff (suddenly they came in huge numbers) and they are addicted to white sugar, coconut oil, OJ, guava, and milk! What the hell, the same food that I eat. I think they might have high metabolism.

The trees and stones send greetings to Prophet Mohamed(saw) of Islam.
Also,Quran mentions that stones have feelings of awe

Then your hearts became hardened after that, being like stones or even harder. For indeed, there are stones from which rivers burst forth, and there are some of them that split open and water comes out, and there are some of them that fall down for fear of Allah . And Allah is not unaware of what you do.
 

Drareg

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Great research now succumbing to religious notions and projections within this thread.

The stones and ants existed before the quaran FYI.

There is a deep seated desperation amongst all religions worldwide to bring everything under their umbrella of believes for fear of a new believe system will take over, research like this,quantum physics (the label they use to cover what underlies reality) and more is starting to show the religions for what they are,manipulation of the truth underlying reality for humans to gain power over other humans.
 

Makrosky

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Remember that classical conditioning is not just "Learning", it's a very specific kind of automatic/reflexive learning. I'm not sure the title of the topic is legit. I would have titled it "A Piece Of Dough can be classically conditioned like some Animals and Humans". That would be more accurate ?

Interesting stuff anyway...!!! I don't know what to do out of it but... Interesting :):
 

milk_lover

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The stones and ants existed before the quaran FYI.
well yeah because the two verses were talking about past events :)

Drareg, it's not a shame if someone has spiritual beliefs. We like them and meditation to God makes me happy. I don't wanna really force or advertise for my religion especially at this bad time for muslims; I would look defensive which I really don't want.

I love that verse and I was fascinated by the ant story so why not just share my intuition especially that it was related to the subject discussed. Ant intelligence was mentioned by schultz and the post mentioned something about animals intelligence.

You believe whatever you want to believe, so let me believe what I want to believe. I think you are still angry about my negative thoughts of gays in the media in the other thread, which is understandable.

This is huge OT so I apologize.
 

Makrosky

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I have a kitchen table that filled with aunts eating stuff (suddenly they came in huge numbers) and they are addicted to white sugar, coconut oil, OJ, guava, and milk! What the hell, the same food that I eat. I think they might have high metabolism.
Maybe it's the only foods you have? :):
 
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haidut

haidut

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Remember that classical conditioning is not just "Learning", it's a very specific kind of automatic/reflexive learning. I'm not sure the title of the topic is legit. I would have titled it "A Piece Of Dough can be classically conditioned like some Animals and Humans". That would be more accurate ?

Interesting stuff anyway...!!! I don't know what to do out of it but... Interesting :)

The study itself called it "learning" and that is why I titles the topic that way. If you look at the quotes, the researchers themselves call it "learning". I guess it comes down to definitions but since we don't know what theirs are I am just using their words for now.
 

Makrosky

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The study itself called it "learning" and that is why I titles the topic that way. If you look at the quotes, the researchers themselves call it "learning". I guess it comes down to definitions but since we don't know what theirs are I am just using their words for now.

Yeah, it's kind of a word game. Depend on how you look at it. But it is just not scientifically precise, I can tell you. If you look at the original paper, note how they titled it "Experimental Evidence of Classical Conditioning and Microscopic Engrams in an Electroconductive Material". See ? They are being precise here. See also how careful they are on the conclusions, last paragraph :
In summary, the data indicate that a conditioned response can be encoded into a simple material, that the conditioned response is associated with structural modifications within the substrate, and that the structural features can be ablated by mechanical applications. Additionally, we have provided evidence which suggests that time constants intrinsic to the material might mediate the temporal window associated with the acquisition of the response as displayed by the material. The results indicate that non-neuronal materials could be used to model normal and abnormal electrical neural processes.

Not a big deal anyway. Who cares. We are not the PLoS One editors. To be honest, I'm bored right now and didn't know what to add to the discussion and just thought I'll add more precision.

Very strange paper anyway.... Don't know what to think about it, really. They say the composition of the dough resembles a brain :
The aim of the current study was to induce a conditioned response in an electroconductive material whose properties exhibited the major chemical characteristics of brain tissue without the inclusion of cell bodies or any biological, modular nodes.
That's too materialistic for me...
 
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