• Admissions Requirements for Psychology Schools

    Updated: 2024-08-31 22:34:25
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  • The delusions of transhumanists and life span extenders

    Updated: 2024-08-30 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 . Friday , August 30, 2024 The delusions of transhumanists and life span extenders One futurist story line is that we all will be seamlessly integrated with AI and the cloud , and bioengineered to live forever . This simplistic fantasy does not take into account the pervasive and fundamental relationships and fluxes between all living things . The cellular mass of individual humans , after all , is mainly composed of their diverse microbiotas bacteria , fungi , protists that influence how all organ systems interact with environmental input . nbsp Humans dominate the planet because their brains first

  • Regulating our subjective well being - our brain's axes of arousal, valence, and agency

    Updated: 2024-08-28 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 , August 28, 2024 Regulating our subjective well being our brain's axes of arousal , valence , and agency I've now read several times through a daunting review article by Feldman et al . nbsp in the July issue of Trends in Cognitive Science titled The Neurobiology of Interoception and . Affect motivated readers can obtain a copy of the whole article from me The bottom line is that the subjective feelings of what is going on inside our bodies that taken together form our sense of well being rise from a an array of cortical and visceral neuroendocrine systems that are much more complex

  • The brain simulates actions and their consequences during REM sleep

    Updated: 2024-08-26 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 , August 26, 2024 The brain simulates actions and their consequences during REM sleep During REM sleep our brains make up and work though simulated scenarios , while putting our bodies into paralysis so we don't thrash about dangerously . Senzai and Scanziani show what in going on in mouse brains . Here is the first paragraph abstract of their open source : text Vivid dreams mostly occur during a phase of sleep called REM1–5. During REM sleep , the brain’s internal representation of direction keeps shifting like that of an awake animal moving through its environment6–8. What causes these shifts

  • An epilogue

    Updated: 2024-08-23 19:02:00
    : 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 , August 23, 2024 An epilogue I want to pass on a clip from the epilogue of Jim Holt's 2012 book Why Does the World Exist An Existential Detective Story in which he describes his attending a small ninetieth birthday celebration for Claude Lévi-Strauss 1908-2009 the famous French anthropologist and ethnologist The master made the following brief : comments Montaigne , 8221 he begins , said that aging diminishes us each day in a way that , when death finally arrives , it takes away only a quarter or half the man . But Montaigne only lived to be fifty-nine , so he could have no idea of the extreme

  • Human distinctiveness and Artificial Intelligence

    Updated: 2024-08-14 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 , August 14, 2024 Human distinctiveness and Artificial Intelligence I pass on some random thoughts occasioned by the previous post . What is distinctive about humans There are millions of humans , there can be only a few LLMs , given the enormous amounts of material and energy required to make them . Many humans are required to generate and mirror shared illusions about value,purpose , and meaning that bind together and distinguish different cultures . For GPT engines to obtain such a capability would require that they be embodied , self sufficient , energy efficient , replicable , and

  • Selections from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS.org)

    Updated: 2024-08-09 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 , August 09, 2024 Selections from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences PNAS.org Below are URLs of journal articles I find interesting and think might be of interest to some MindBlog readers . nbsp Most are open source . Email me if you hit a paywall and would like me to send you a PDF of the complete article . The health risk of social disadvantage is transplantable into a new host . https : www.pnas.org doi 10.1073 pnas.2404108121 relevant to transferring immune-reconstituting cells from a healthy donor to a cancer patient recipient . Can names shape facial appearances https :

  • Psilocybin desynchronizes our brains during ego dissolution

    Updated: 2024-08-05 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 , August 05, 2024 Psilocybin desynchronizes our brains during ego dissolution From Siegel et al open source A single dose of psilocybin , a psychedelic that acutely causes distortions of space–time perception and ego dissolution , produces rapid and persistent therapeutic effects in human clinical trials 1 2 3 4 In animal models , psilocybin induces neuroplasticity in cortex and hippocampus 5 6 7 8 It remains unclear how human brain network changes relate to subjective and lasting effects of psychedelics . Here we tracked individual-specific brain changes with longitudinal precision functional

  • The Ooze is Growing

    Updated: 2024-08-02 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 , August 02, 2024 The Ooze is Growing In case you haven't seen enough pessimistic predictions about the next 10-20 years , I pass on the following clips from a recent installment of my email subscription to Venkatesh Rao's breaking Smart news letter : nbsp world affairs are effectively on autopilot now , running on what in the control engineering world are called bang-bang laws . Bang-bang laws drive a control mechanism from one extreme to another discontinuously , like steering a car with only hard right hard left limit steers , and regulating speed only with hard braking and floored

  • How we got to where we are

    Updated: 2024-07-31 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 , July 31, 2024 How we got to where we are 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 scram from the chemotaxis of bacteria to the predictive processing of our humans brains have proved to be more likely to

  • Positive effects of aging on cognition and emotion regulation

    Updated: 2024-07-29 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 . Monday , July 29, 2024 Positive effects of aging on cognition and emotion regulation After I returned to Austin Texas in late 2017 to live in the family house of my childhood I started a discussion group The Austin Rainbow Forum that meets on the first Sunday of every month at 2 p.m . nbsp to discuss a contemporary topic or idea , with background reading usually provided before each meeting . On this coming Sunday , August 4, our topic is Positive Aspects of Aging . I thought I would share with MindBlog readers the background material I recently sent out to the : group Here is an article that

  • Nuances of non-dual awareness - progress after "waking up" ?

    Updated: 2024-07-26 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 , July 26, 2024 Nuances of non-dual awareness progress after waking up I want to share clips from a recent exchange at the Waking Up Community that I found very useful . nbsp Sam , who is mentioned several times , is Sam Harris , whose WAKING UP App offers theory , lessons , and exercises on non-dual awareness . nbsp From a questioner's post I accept , understand and find great peace in the fact that the self is an . illusion Once non-dual awareness is accepted , is there nothing else to find” or not Is there an advanced course for those for whom non-dual awareness is now an accepted reality

  • A human machine writes...

    Updated: 2024-07-24 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 , July 24, 2024 A human machine writes . I think the spookily impersonal paragraph I pass on below composed while getting back to sleep after a 2 a.m . pee-wake is the way things work . Dry and mundane mechanical processes underlie the rich experienced emotions and feelings that make us human . nbsp Machinery here , pushing down keys of another machine , generating words , just like a human does . Much simpler than pretending to be one . Just nerves , muscles , and energy fluxes in and out . Curatorial rather than inspirational . Cooperating with other similar machines to make larger

  • The blanding and flattening of our culture

    Updated: 2024-07-22 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 , July 22, 2024 The blanding and flattening of our culture Since I returned to live in my family home in Austin Texas in 2017 I have been sad to see the continuing disappearance of kinky Keep Austin Weird coffee shops , book stores , bars , and restaurants that have catered to the remnants of the slacker and hippie cultures of the 60s and 79s , as well as online Tech Bros . nbsp Instead we now have the monoculture of countless Starbucks and other chains pointed to by internet platforms that curate our options by pointing us to a bland uniformity of vendors whose shops and products are identical

  • MindBlog does a survey of futurists and recommends a few.

    Updated: 2024-07-19 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 , July 19, 2024 MindBlog does a survey of futurists and recommends a few . In the wild and wooly world of thinking about futures for the earth , its living forms , and humanity there exists a tier of well know public intellectuals . I prompted 5 different GPT engines Google Gemini , ChatGPT 4o , Anthropic Claude , Perplexity , Microsoft Copilot to Please act as an author who has chosen a list of the 10 most influential futurists public intellectuals who speculate about the future of humanity . Write a brief essay describing each of them and and their basic messages The names selected by more

  • An essay on Geopolitics and Globalization

    Updated: 2024-07-17 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 , July 17, 2024 An essay on Geopolitics and Globalization I want to pass on one complete section , indicating titles of the others , of a larger essay addressing tribalism versus global . consciousness Untimely Meditations Philosophy goes against the grain of political immediacy to insist on inconvenient . truths Nathan Gardels , Noema Magazine Editor-in-Chief The Condition of Planetarity The Politics of Planetary Realism Conceptual demolition of the outmoded paradigm of nation-state realism , however , does not erase its still firmly rooted expression in present practice . Building the

  • What about some positive news for a change?

    Updated: 2024-07-15 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 . Monday , July 15, 2024 What about some positive news for a change Doomsaying can become a self-fulfilling prophesy , as David Brooks points out I want to point to Fix The News a website curated by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-Rose , that points out positive stories , and offers to send occasional emails Which I enjoy receiving that list some of its content . nbsp Another positive and totally woke effort at making a more positive future is described in the document New voices for a better society I would also point to previous MindBlog posts on the positive views of Steven Pinker Nicholas Christakis

  • A Journey: Avoiding Ultra-processed Foods

    Updated: 2024-07-13 19:12:45
    Ultra-processed foods are in the news. If you haven’t heard about this yet, ultra-processed foods have ingredients that aren’t usually found by themselves in kitchens, like high fructose corn syrup or emulsifiers. Among the things that are usually classified as ultra-processed are sodas, packaged snacks (chips, cookies, crackers, etc.), packaged […]

  • From nematodes to humans a common brain network motif intertwines hierarchy and modularity.

    Updated: 2024-07-10 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 , July 10, 2024 From nematodes to humans a common brain network motif intertwines hierarchy and modularity . Pathak et . al abstract below suggest the evolved pattern they describe may apply to information processing networks in general , in particular to those of evolving AI . implementations Significance Nervous systems are often schematically represented in terms of hierarchically arranged layers with stimuli in the input” layer sequentially transformed through successive layers , eventually giving rise to response in the output” layer . Empirical investigations of hierarchy in specific

  • Our well being influences our mitochondrial biology.

    Updated: 2024-07-08 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 . Monday , July 08, 2024 Our well being influences our mitochondrial biology . I pass on the abstract from Trumoff et al open source below . The bottom line is that our experienced well being correlates with with higher levels of energy transformation machinery in our mitochondria . Significance Psychosocial experiences predict health trajectories , but the underlying mechanism remains unclear . We report that positive psychosocial experiences are linked to greater abundance of the mitochondrial energy transformation machinery , whereas negative experiences are linked to lower abundance . Overall ,

  • ChatGPT as a "lab rat" for understanding how our brains process language.

    Updated: 2024-07-05 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 , July 05, 2024 ChatGPT as a lab rat for understanding how our brains process language . I've now read twice through a fascinating PNAS piece by Mitchell Waldrop Open source , with useful references and urge MindBlog readers to havve a look . Our brains , as well as all of the GPT Generative Pretrained Transforer engines are prediction machines . The following slilghtly edited extract gives context . computer simulations of language are working in ways that are strikingly similar to the left-hemisphere language regions of our brains , using the same computational principles . The reasons for

  • Cumulative human culture began ~600,000 years ago, during the Middle Pleistocene

    Updated: 2024-07-03 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 . Wednesday , July 03, 2024 Cumulative human culture began 600,000 years ago , during the Middle Pleistocene An interesting study by Paige and Perreault Significance Our species , Homo sapiens , occupies a uniquely diverse set of ecological habitats . Humans expanded into tropical forests and arctic tundra through cumulative culture . Cumulative culture is the accumulation of modifications , innovations , and improvements over generations through social learning . Generations of variant accumulations allow humans to use technologies and know-how well beyond what a single naive individual could invent

  • There are no more human elites of any sort...

    Updated: 2024-07-01 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 . Monday , July 01, 2024 There are no more human elites of any sort . I want to pass on the conclusion of a great essay by Venkatesh Rao giving the meanings of several acronyms in parentheses . You should read the entire . piece Let me cut to the conclusion : There are no more human elites of any sort . In the sense of natural rulers that is . There are certainly all sorts of privileged and entitled types who want the benefits of being elites , but no humans up to the task of actually being . elite It is only our anthropocentric conceits that lead us to conclude that a complex system like

  • Diet Update: One Year Post Jenny Craig

    Updated: 2024-06-28 22:25:19
    I’m embarrassed to see the one year gap between my last post and now. I’m making a concerted effort to be more diligent going forward. My last post was occasioned by the closing of the bricks and mortar Jenny Craig centers, including the one I had visited for 17 years. […]

  • How AI will transform the physical world.

    Updated: 2024-06-28 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 , June 28, 2024 How AI will transform the physical world . I pass on the text of wild-eyed speculations by futurist Ray Kurzweil recently sent to The Economist who since 1990 has been writing on how soon The Singularity” machine intelligence exceeding human intelligence will arrive and transform our physical world in energy , manufacturing and medicine . nbsp I have too many reservation about realistic details of his fantasizing to even begin to list them , but the article is a fun : read By the time children born today are in kindergarten , artificial intelligence AI will probably have

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