alt Hacker News... and shouldn't this backfire hard?
All the signals that are missed by the (f)MRI are never "mirrored" in the digital twin even though on screen it will look like it. Bam, Experimenter Bias in the machine and I don't know how to phrase it but ... does this method/experiment leave any wiggle room for Falsifiability?
Even if the Hawthorne Effect does not apply to humans, it most certainly translates onto the brain and sensory (post)-processing-- live and remembered (vs in-memory, stored), real, virtual or imagined.
... I just realized how vastly different peripherals are when real, remembered, virtual or imagined sensory input is (post-)processed ...
It feels more like the machine will reproduce a superficial pattern. And at least some signal streams echoing in the brain on input from the digital twin won't emerge because the digital twin has only part of the data. And that's a premise for an unnoticeable rewiring of what once used to fire together, ... given a hell of a lot of exposure, of course, ... or not ... let's see
EDIT n: the paper says pretty much all that in like ... science, bitch!
Epic stuff.
yeah. This is one of those things where they used previously collected data, built a model that has validity on modeling validity between simulation and actual brain (encoding model for digital twin), then built a new model using the encoding model that tries to reliably activate particular brain regions. The next obvious step is to validate this back to the original person, but they will need to collect new data, and so likely, will need to get research funding. One step at a time.
The digital twin types of models will become more and more useful, but I don't think we will be at the point where all research will be done entirely within these models.
They can be fun to play with btw: https://www.thevirtualbrain.org/tvb/zwei/ and they don't require a beast of a machine to run.