• Admissions Requirements for Psychology Schools

    Updated: 2023-11-30 22:39:11
    : About Bookstore Contact Podcasts Home About Bookstore Contact Us Podcasts EN Explore 431 Tip Sites Search 120,491 Tips Accounting Degree Accounting Jobs Accounting Software Acting ADD-ADHD Adoption Adventure Travel Affiliate Marketing Air Force Air Quality ALS Alzheimers Anger Management Antiaging Antique Appliance Repair Army Arthritis Art Supplies As Seen On TV Asthma Auction Autism Auto Accessories Auto Loans Auto Parts Auto Transport Baby Baby Gifts Baby Shower Babysitter Baby Travel Bachelor Degree Bachelorette Party Backpain Balance Bankruptcy Barbecue Baseball Basketball Beach Beadwork Bedding Bicycle Bingo Binoculars Birth Control Birthday Blogging Boat Body Jewelry Book Bra Breast Cancer Breastfeeding Bridal Beauty Business Degree Business Intelligence Business Management

  • Meta-Learned Models of Cognition

    Updated: 2023-11-29 15:06:00
    : 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 , November 29, 2023 Meta-Learned Models of Cognition I pass on the text of a recent email from Behavioral and Brain Sciences inviting commentary on an article by Binz et al . nbsp I am beginning to plow through the interesting text and figures and will mention that motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the article from . me Target Article : Meta-Learned Models of Cognition Authors : Marcel Binz , Ishita Dasgupta , Akshay K . Jagadish , Matthew Botvinick , Jane X . Wang , and Eric Schulz Deadline for Commentary Proposals : Wednesday , December 20, 2023 Abstract : Psychologists and

  • The feasibility of artificial consciousness through the lens of neuroscience

    Updated: 2023-11-27 20:23:00
    : 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 , November 27, 2023 The feasibility of artificial consciousness through the lens of neuroscience Some interesting perspectives from Aru , Larkum , and Shine in Trends in Neurosciences . Motivated readers can obtain a copy of the article's text from me . Highlights Large language models LLMs can produce text that leaves the impression that one may be interacting with a conscious agent . Present-day LLMs are text-centric , whereas the phenomenological umwelt of living organisms is multifaceted and integrated . Many theories of the neural basis of consciousness assign a central role to

  • AI is infusing our daily lives. Is it an existential threat?

    Updated: 2023-11-19 15:17:00
    : . 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 . Sunday , November 19, 2023 AI is infusing our daily lives . Is it an existential threat As AI is being subtly melded into our daily lives by the Google , Apple , and Microsoft clouds there is continuing debate over whether it is or Isn’t an existential threat . This debate has been brought to a head by the sudden and unexpected firing of Open AI’s chief executive Sam Altman and has starkly exposed the philosophical rift in the AI community between those who are more or less concerned about the potential risks of its untrammeled development . How many , if any , guardrails should be in place I have

  • Personalized chatbots and wearable AI devices for melding AI with our everyday lives

    Updated: 2023-11-10 18:19:00
    : 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 , November 10, 2023 Personalized chatbots and wearable AI devices for melding AI with our everyday lives Personalized GPTs are here , but apparently not yet at the level of consumers like myself who don't want to do coding . I've been looking into making my own personal chatbot whose training data is 50 MB of my personal journal of about 20,000 pages . I would then like to query and chat with the resulting chatbot about events in my life since 1980. If anyone reading this has some advice , let me know Below are some URLs to my morning's reading : These links are to articles from Kevin Roose ,

  • Self-Organization: Nature's Intelligent Design

    Updated: 2023-11-08 06:00:00
    : : 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 , November 08, 2023 Self-Organization : Nature's Intelligent Design I was to pass on this link to a talk by Clint Sprott , who initiated the Chaos and Complexity Discssion group that I was an active member of before leaving Madison WI . I remain on their email listserve . The slides for the talk can be downloaded here Talk description : Clint Sprott , Professor Emeritus , Department of Physics , UW-Madison , explains that although we believe that complex patterns must have a complex cause , patterns may spontaneously arise . This self-organization which occurs in nature can be described

  • Visual event segmentation alters higher-level thought.

    Updated: 2023-11-06 06:00:00
    : . 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 , November 06, 2023 Visual event segmentation alters higher-level thought . An interesting piece of work from Ongchoco et . al Significance Numbers can be unexpectedly powerful . Suppose you must provide the last two digits of your social security number SSN after which you are asked how much you are willing to pay for a bottle of wine . Though your SSN digits are irrelevant to your valuation judgment , they nonetheless influence numerical estimates , such that lower SSN digits lead to lower valuations and higher SSN digits , to higher valuations . Such anchoring” effects are extremely

  • How our genes support our illusory selves - the "Baldwin effect"

    Updated: 2023-11-03 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 , November 03, 2023 How our genes support our illusory selves the Baldwin effect I have been thinking about giving more explanation of a paragraph from my Oct . 25 post , A Materialist's Credo Modern neuroscience has proved that our experienced perceptions of sensing and acting are these predictions . They are fantasies , or illusions , as is our sense of having a self with agency that experiences value , purpose , and meaning . Everything we do and experience is in the service of reducing surprises by fulling these fantasies . An array of neuroendocrine mechanisms have evolved to support this

  • MindBlog's first talk therapy session with a bot.

    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 ,

  • Our Baysean Brain and the Placebo Effect

    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

  • A Materialist's Credo

    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

  • Architectural experience influences the processing of others’ body expressions

    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

  • Does a "P-factor" underlie core attributes of mental health maladies?

    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."

  • Mental problems from early life adversity passed down three generations.

    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

  • Using AI to find retinal biomarkers for patient sex that opthalmologists can be trained to see.

    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

  • Unification of physics and biology by "Assembly Theory"

    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

  • What your brain is doing after the light turns green.

    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

  • Anthropic Claude's version of my writing on the Mind

    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

  • AI, a boon for science and a disaster for creatives

    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

  • Memory for stimulus sequences unique to humans?

    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

  • Emergent analogical reasoning in large language models

    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

Current Feed Items | Previous Months Items

Oct 2023 | Sep 2023 | Aug 2023 | Jul 2023 | Jun 2023 | May 2023