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Comment by drzzhan | Hacker News Reader

What is it noise-to-signal ratio? Sorry I don't know much about the field but that sounds like something can shutdown ideas like "we can put eeg into transformer and it will work". So may I ask what reference papers that I need to know on this?

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Not from that field, but "reading" the brain means electromagnetism. In real life, EM interference is everywhere from lights, electric devices, cellphone towers... EVERYWHERE. Parent meant brain waves are weak to detect compared to all surrounding interference, except when a lab faraday cage blocks outside interference then the brain becomes "loud" enough to be read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal-to-noise_ratio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

I don't think electronic interference is the problem. Cellphone towers and electronics operate at GHz and MHz, which are different frequencies than brainwaves. Interference seems to typically be labeled by a "Signal to Interference" ratio rather than signal to noise. From my understanding, noise is still inherently present even in a faraday cage, through things like thermal noise and amplifier noise, which is why the poster mentioned you still have to perform signal processing over very long intervals to remove noise.

Signal to noise ratio is a very basic thing; you can Google it.

They weren't asking what SNR is, but what the typical SNR for eegs in realworld circumstances is.

Even if they were, count them among the lucky 10000 [1] and explaining is nicer. Soon with ai generated spam it feels like searching for anything is going to be worse than useless.

1: https://xkcd.com/1053/

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