Updated: 2023-10-31 20:38:39
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Updated: 2023-10-30 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , October 30, 2023 MindBlog's first talk therapy session with a bot . I go to https : pi.ai talk , nbsp and . Hey there , great to meet you . I’m Pi , your personal . AI My goal is to be useful , friendly and fun . Ask me for advice , for answers , or let’s talk about whatever’s on your . mind How's your day going I'm good , a bit tentative about my first attempt to start up a conversation with a cut and paste machine Lol Touche . But don’t be fooled by my apparent ease with language there's a lot of hard-to-fathom technology behind my ability to converse with you in an effortless ,
Updated: 2023-10-27 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Friday , October 27, 2023 Our Baysean Brain and the Placebo Effect I'm passing on a few clips that give the take home message from a recent NYTimes piece by Haravard Medical School's Ted Kaptchuk , who directs the Harvard-wide program in placebo studies . placebos can work even when patients know they are getting a placebo . In 2010 my colleagues and I published a provocative study showing that patients with irritable bowel syndrome who were treated with what we call open-label placebos as in , we gave them dummy pills and told them so reported more symptom relief compared with patients who didn’t
Updated: 2023-10-25 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , October 25, 2023 A Materialist's Credo This post passes on a recent effort to put down some basic ideas in as few words as I can manage . A Materialist’s Credo In the beginning was the cosmos , fundamentally as incomprehensible to our human brains as quantum chemistry is to a dog’s . brain What our human brains can understand is that our ultimate emergence from countless generations of less complex organisms can be largely explained by a simple mechanism that tests the reproductive fitness of varying replicants . Systems that try to predict the future and dictate whether to go for it or
Updated: 2023-10-23 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , October 23, 2023 Architectural experience influences the processing of others’ body expressions An open source article by Presti et al Significance The motor system has been recognized as a fundamental neural machinery for spatial and social cognition , making the study of the interplay between architecture and social behavior worthwhile . Here , we tested how a virtual architectural experience alters the subsequent processing of body expressions , showing that the motor system participates at two distinct stages : the earliest influenced by the dynamic architectural experience and the latter
Updated: 2023-10-20 05:00:00
I want to point to an open source "Core Concepts" article in PNAS by David Adam that presents "the views of some psychiatrists who argue that the same bit of biology—genetics gone awry or some misplaced brain circuitry—could underlie the vast majority of humanity’s mental health problems. Studies have shown, for example, that many of the same genes seem to drive increased risk for autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), bipolar disorder, major depression, and schizophrenia. They call this as-yet-unidentified common cause the “psychopathology factor,” or “p-factor” for short."
Updated: 2023-10-18 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , October 18, 2023 Mental problems from early life adversity passed down three generations . Early life adversity can result in emotional and behavioral problems throughout adulthood in both humans and mice . Battaglia et al . show than in mice this effect can persist through three generations . Exposure to the drug amiloride throughout the three generations can reverse this persistence of anxiety and pain sensitivity by inhidibint the increased activity of membrane ion channels that are its apparent cause . Here is their abstract : Early-life adversities are associated with altered
Updated: 2023-10-16 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , October 16, 2023 Using AI to find retinal biomarkers for patient sex that opthalmologists can be trained to see . Delavari et . al do a demonstration of using AI to find aspects of human retina images that identify whether they are male or female retinas , a distinction that had not previously been accomplished by clinical opthalmologists . Here is their abstract : We present a structured approach to combine explainability of artificial intelligence AI with the scientific method for scientific discovery . We demonstrate the utility of this approach in a proof-of-concept study where we
Updated: 2023-10-14 17:14:59
The BRAIN Initiative published 21 papers across 3 journals pushing forwards the understanding of human neuroanatomy. A few of the papers were focused primarily on primate neuroanatomy. Here I will focus on the contributions to an understanding of human adult neuroanatomy. Science The main page of the special issue in Science is here There is […]
Updated: 2023-10-14 17:00:25
The Brodmann Areas are a system for describing neuroanatomical structures first developed by Dr Korbinian Brodmann. This provides a useful framework when discussing neuroanatomical subjects. The Brodmann Areas have been covered previously on the blog. With the help of Chat GPT, i’ve organised the links below. Chat GPT did the repetitive work of converting the […]
Updated: 2023-10-12 09:06:51
Ababei et al have published an interesting review of renin-angiotensin modulators in Alzheimer’s Type Dementia. The referenced paper is a highly technical article geared towards healthcare professionals and scientists. In summary, they review a broad range of renin-angiotensin modulators from the perspective of influencing cognitive decline both in human and animal studies. The evidence is […]
Updated: 2023-10-11 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , October 11, 2023 Unification of physics and biology by Assembly Theory An international collaboration of researchers in an open source article in Nature Magazine has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in nature . Here is their abstract : nbsp Scientists have grappled with reconciling biological evolution with the immutable laws of the Universe defined by physics . These laws underpin life’s origin , evolution and the development of human culture and technology , yet they
Updated: 2023-10-09 22:24:50
The World Mental Health Federation’s World Mental Health Day 2023 is on October 10th and the official website can be found here. The theme is ‘Mental health is a universal right’. Reading from the campaign booklet the key points are: ‘1. The right to be protected from known harms to mental health; a universal right […]
Updated: 2023-10-09 13:40:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , October 09, 2023 What your brain is doing after the light turns green . Gandhi and collaboratores show that if you step out to cross the street without looking right or left the neural activity in the brain is different than if you look from side to side first to be sure no cars are coming . Population level analysis of movement-related transient activity patterns in a population of superior colliculus neurons change in the two different contexts , and this difference is not readily identifiable in single-unit recordings . nbsp Here is their technical : abstract Sensorimotor transformation
Updated: 2023-10-04 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , October 04, 2023 Anthropic Claude's version of my writing on the Mind This post describes the first of my personal encounters with AI that has left me completely in awe of its capabilities . Since 1993 I have been placing the label mind at the beginning of paragraphs in my personal journal that I think are relevant to understanding our minds . Here I pass on the results of asking Anthropic’s Claude GPT engine to process 56 pages of paragraphs with this mind label written so far in 2023. Chat GPT-4 was unwilling to process more than 9 pages at a time The first paragraph of the 56 pages of
Updated: 2023-09-29 05:00:00
: , Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Friday , September 29, 2023 AI , a boon for science and a disaster for creatives The Sept . 16 issue of the Economist has two excellent articles : How artificial intelligence can revolutionise science and How scientists are using artificial intelligence I pass on here some edited clips from the first of these articles . I also want to point to much less benign commentary on how AI is moving toward threatening the livelihoods of creators of music , art , and literature : The Internet Is About to Get Much . Worse Could AI turbocharge scientific progress and lead to a golden age of discovery Some
Updated: 2023-09-27 21:41:06
I’ve been exploring the use of generative AI for images which has taken me on a journey. With my primary interest being psychiatry and the images being secondary I have limited my approach. Firstly there are the more practical applications. Secondly there is the relationship with the theoretical underpinnings. I am writing about this second […]
Updated: 2023-09-27 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , September 27, 2023 Memory for stimulus sequences unique to humans Continuing the never-ending quest to find fundamental human abilities or behaviors lacking in other animals many , like the mirror recognition test , have failed Lind et al . find that bonobo chimpanzees fail to remember the order of two stimuli even after 2,000 trials . I pass on their abstract below . They suggest the ability to remember sequences may be an ability that sets humans apart from other animals . Hmmmmm , maybe the bonobos just don't think the task is important They should try the test on ravens and crows that
Updated: 2023-09-25 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , September 25, 2023 Emergent analogical reasoning in large language models Things are moving very fast in AI development . From Webb et al The recent advent of large language models has reinvigorated debate over whether human cognitive capacities might emerge in such generic models given sufficient training data . Of particular interest is the ability of these models to reason about novel problems zero-shot , without any direct training . In human cognition , this capacity is closely tied to an ability to reason by analogy . Here we performed a direct comparison between human reasoners and a
Updated: 2023-09-20 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , September 20, 2023 Chemistry that regulates whether we stay with what we're doing or try something new Sidorenko et . al demonstrate that stimulating the brain's cholinergic and noradrenergic systems enhances optimal foraging behaviors in humans . Their significance statement and abstract : Significance Deciding when to say stop” to the ongoing course of action is paramount for preserving mental health , ensuring the well-being of oneself and others , and managing resources in a sustainable fashion . And yet , cross-species studies converge in their portrayal of real-world decision-makers
Updated: 2023-09-18 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , September 18, 2023 Does situational awareness in AI's large language models mean consciousness The answer to that question would be no , for a number of reasons I won't go into , but Berglund et . al provide an interesting nudge in the direction of sentiece like behavior in some large language models by showing an example of situational awareness . They provide a link to their code Here is their abstract : We aim to better understand the emergence of situational awareness' in large language models LLMs A model is situationally aware if it's aware that it's a model and can recognize whether
Updated: 2023-09-15 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Friday , September 15, 2023 What we seek to save when we seek to save the world Yet anoather fascinating set of ideas from Venkatesh Rao that I want to save for myself by doing a MindBlog post of some clips from the piece . threats that provoke savior responses are generally more legible than the worlds that the saviors seek to save , or the mechanisms of destruction . I made up a 2x2 to classify the notions of worlds-to-save that people seem to have . The two axes are biological scope and temporal scope . Biolocial scope is the we' the range of livings beings included as subjects in the definition of
Updated: 2023-09-13 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , September 13, 2023 Constructing Self and World There is a strong similarity between the predictive processing brain model that has been the subject of numerous Mind Blog Posts , and the operations that ChatGPT and other generative pre-trained transformer algorithms are performing , with the priors’ of the predictive processing model being equivalent to the pre-trained’ weightings of the generative transformer algorithms . The open and empty awareness of the non-dual perspective corresponds to the generator’ component of the AI algorithms . It is what can begin to allow reification
Updated: 2023-09-11 14:08:00
find this mosaic view most engaging. I suspect Blogger (owned by Google) is using its algorithms to cherrypick the most interesting or popular posts.
Updated: 2023-09-08 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Friday , September 08, 2023 Open access articles on consciousness Thomas Metzinger and others I am overwhelmed by how much good stuff comes flooding into my email inbox , even after I have deleted 90 of it unopened . A newsletter from the Journal of Consciousness Studies points to Imprint Academic's open access articles As am example I pass on the abstract of a Metzinger article that is right down my alley . It can be downloaded as a PDF file . nbsp Thomas Metzinger M-Autonomy Abstract : What we traditionally call conscious thought’ actually is a subpersonal process , and only rarely a form of mental
Updated: 2023-09-06 05:00:00
: . Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Wednesday , September 06, 2023 Mapping the physical properties of odorant molecules to their perceptual characteristics . I pass on parts of the editor's summary and the abstract of a foundational piece of work by Lee et . al that produces a map linking odorant molecular structures to their perceptual experience , analogous to the known maps for vision and hearing that relate physical properties such as frequency and wavelength to perceptual properties such as pitch and color . I also pass on the first few slightly edited paragraphs of the paper that set context . Motivated readers can obtain a PDF
Updated: 2023-09-04 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Monday , September 04, 2023 Inhalation boosts perceptual awareness and decision speed From Ludovic Molle et al . open source Significance Breathing is a ubiquitous biological rhythm in animal life . However , little is known about its effect on consciousness and decision-making . Here , we measured the respiratory rhythm of humans performing a near-threshold discrimination experiment . We show that inhalation , compared with exhalation , improves perceptual awareness and accelerates decision-making while leaving accuracy unaffected . Summary The emergence of consciousness is one of biology’s biggest
Updated: 2023-09-01 05:00:00
: Deric's MindBlog This blog reports new ideas and work on mind , brain , behavior , psychology , and politics as well as random curious stuff . Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column . Friday , September 01, 2023 The fragility of artists’ reputations from 1795 to 2020 Zhang et . al do an interesting study using natural language processing to measure reputation over time : Significance This study uses machine-learning techniques and a historical corpus to examine the evolution of artists’ reputations over time . Contrary to popular wisdom , we find that most artists’ reputations peak just before their death , and then start to decline . This decline is strongest for artists who were most popular during their lifetime . We show that artists’ reduced visibility and changes in the
