Well…if you present stories, for sure we gonna make chapters out of it. Or beats, even.
I wonder what the results would have been if people were showed documentary footage with no narration ? But my suspicion is that just like we sometimes see human faces in places they clearly don’t belong, structuring information in a story format (beginning, middle, end with rises and falls in between) is an intrinsic part of how we process.
Maybe it’s not so much that we like stories, but that we see stories everywhere and the more information takes this digest form, the more we feel at ease ?
You're absolutely right—this topic is fascinating but complex, which might explain why people are engaging with the idea but struggling with the takeaway. One way to think about the paper is that it extends the chunking model, which is essential not only for UX design but also for understanding how people perceive and organize the world around them.
How This Extends the Chunking Model
1) Dynamic, Real-Time Chunking:
Traditional chunking models focus on discrete, often static information (like remembering a phone number or words). This study shows how the brain applies a similar principle to continuous, dynamic experiences—segmenting life into "mental chapters" as events unfold.
2)Neural Foundations:
By identifying the specific brain areas (hippocampus and prefrontal cortex) responsible for marking event boundaries, it adds a biological layer to the chunking model. It’s not just a cognitive strategy—it’s a neural process tied to memory formation and retrieval.
3) Application to UX Design:
In UX, understanding event boundaries can inform how we design user journeys. For example, breaking a process (like signing up for a service) into clear steps with defined "boundaries" helps users perceive the flow and remember their progress.
Similarly, designing interfaces to reflect natural event segmentation (e.g., transitions between scenes in a video or steps in an onboarding flow) aligns with how people mentally organize experiences.
4) Understanding and Communication:
Beyond UX, this model shows why clear, structured narratives are critical for teaching, storytelling, or even summarizing a paper. Without clear boundaries, information gets lost in the noise.
Potential Hypotheses for Altered States:
It also hints at why psychedelics, which might blur these event boundaries, lead to a sense of timelessness or interconnectedness. This could extend into therapeutic applications or understanding atypical cognition.
Why This Matters for Understanding Things
When we fail to structure information with clear boundaries, it becomes harder to process or remember—perhaps like your experience skimming the article. This study offers a roadmap for how we can improve communication and design to better align with our brain's natural segmentation processes.
Really interesting is that current LLMs don’t explicitly use chunking for storage; they rely on distributed representations across parameters. However, their self-attention mechanisms and sequence processing mimic chunking during runtime, creating dynamic "chunks" of context.
I’m at my limit, wondering if future models incorporating explicit chunking for better memory, scalability, and efficiency could truly take them to the next level.
So what I got (but I don't really know what I am talking about)
When thinking about a story (or a sequence of events) we can parse it in different ways.
We may think about the changes in time/location:
-------
1 he went to the store
2. then went to gas station
3. then went home
4. the next day he woke up.
---------
Or you could think of the emotional changes:
---------
1. he was concerned about being unemployed.
2. then at the gas station he got a call saying he got the job and he starts tomorrow.
3. He is nervous about his first day of work.
------
With fmri we can detect these context shifts.
The thing the paper adds is that by prompting the user to pay attention to 'emotions' or 'location' it affects where these segmentation changes occur in the fmri results.
I wonder if this is the same for people who haven't grown up with linear media (books with chapters, shows with episodes/chapters, albums with songs etc)
I always think of the WEIRD people nuance when reading about these kinds of findings. Is the study cohort
This reminds me of the emerging description of conscious function from Daniel Bor's book The Ravenous Brain. In this interpretation the mind is constantly trying to interpret sensory data as intent driven actions from differentiated actors. This makes available critical information about threats and possible targets and so on.
Well…if you present stories, for sure we gonna make chapters out of it. Or beats, even.
I wonder what the results would have been if people were showed documentary footage with no narration ? But my suspicion is that just like we sometimes see human faces in places they clearly don’t belong, structuring information in a story format (beginning, middle, end with rises and falls in between) is an intrinsic part of how we process.
Maybe it’s not so much that we like stories, but that we see stories everywhere and the more information takes this digest form, the more we feel at ease ?
So many upvotes but very few comments.
My feeling is that people are interested in the topic per se but struggle with the takeaway from this paper.
I have tried to read the article and also skimmed the original paper, but could not summarize any of it if you asked me now.
You're absolutely right—this topic is fascinating but complex, which might explain why people are engaging with the idea but struggling with the takeaway. One way to think about the paper is that it extends the chunking model, which is essential not only for UX design but also for understanding how people perceive and organize the world around them.
How This Extends the Chunking Model
1) Dynamic, Real-Time Chunking: Traditional chunking models focus on discrete, often static information (like remembering a phone number or words). This study shows how the brain applies a similar principle to continuous, dynamic experiences—segmenting life into "mental chapters" as events unfold.
2)Neural Foundations: By identifying the specific brain areas (hippocampus and prefrontal cortex) responsible for marking event boundaries, it adds a biological layer to the chunking model. It’s not just a cognitive strategy—it’s a neural process tied to memory formation and retrieval.
3) Application to UX Design: In UX, understanding event boundaries can inform how we design user journeys. For example, breaking a process (like signing up for a service) into clear steps with defined "boundaries" helps users perceive the flow and remember their progress. Similarly, designing interfaces to reflect natural event segmentation (e.g., transitions between scenes in a video or steps in an onboarding flow) aligns with how people mentally organize experiences.
4) Understanding and Communication:
Beyond UX, this model shows why clear, structured narratives are critical for teaching, storytelling, or even summarizing a paper. Without clear boundaries, information gets lost in the noise. Potential Hypotheses for Altered States:
It also hints at why psychedelics, which might blur these event boundaries, lead to a sense of timelessness or interconnectedness. This could extend into therapeutic applications or understanding atypical cognition.
Why This Matters for Understanding Things When we fail to structure information with clear boundaries, it becomes harder to process or remember—perhaps like your experience skimming the article. This study offers a roadmap for how we can improve communication and design to better align with our brain's natural segmentation processes.
Really interesting is that current LLMs don’t explicitly use chunking for storage; they rely on distributed representations across parameters. However, their self-attention mechanisms and sequence processing mimic chunking during runtime, creating dynamic "chunks" of context.
I’m at my limit, wondering if future models incorporating explicit chunking for better memory, scalability, and efficiency could truly take them to the next level.
So what I got (but I don't really know what I am talking about)
When thinking about a story (or a sequence of events) we can parse it in different ways.
We may think about the changes in time/location:
-------
1 he went to the store
2. then went to gas station
3. then went home
4. the next day he woke up.
---------
Or you could think of the emotional changes:
---------
1. he was concerned about being unemployed.
2. then at the gas station he got a call saying he got the job and he starts tomorrow.
3. He is nervous about his first day of work.
------
With fmri we can detect these context shifts.
The thing the paper adds is that by prompting the user to pay attention to 'emotions' or 'location' it affects where these segmentation changes occur in the fmri results.
I wonder if this is the same for people who haven't grown up with linear media (books with chapters, shows with episodes/chapters, albums with songs etc)
I always think of the WEIRD people nuance when reading about these kinds of findings. Is the study cohort
- Western
- Educated
- Independent
- Rich
- Democratic
?
As most of the readers are also WEIRD, the results would still be relevant even if the scope was limited to that.
original study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42421683
Please fix the title.
This reminds me of the emerging description of conscious function from Daniel Bor's book The Ravenous Brain. In this interpretation the mind is constantly trying to interpret sensory data as intent driven actions from differentiated actors. This makes available critical information about threats and possible targets and so on.
Interesting.
Reminds me of the book "The Mind is Flat" by Nick Charter who says that the mind is constantly improvising.
[dead]
And now, AI LLMs have a way to prioritise what's important and organise their memory (context window) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42411409