• Tokens of sanity

    Updated: 2025-01-31 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 . Friday , January 31, 2025 Tokens of sanity I repeat my September 29, 2024 Tokens of sanity post with a few edits : nbsp Being the calm space in which nothing can hurry A animal body that can dissociate itself from the word cloud and emotional reactivities of self and other . selves A courteous guest in its own body and when with others , owning its own experience and letting others own . theirs Favoring reflectivity over reactivity , caressing novelty Clinging to nothing , the current self being a passing fantasy Letting each moment be what it is , not what it should be A blip in the flow of cosmic

  • Everything we experience comes from inside

    Updated: 2025-01-29 06:00:00
    I pass on this cryptic paragraph from my personal journal:Everything we experience is coming from inside us - our illusion of having a self, our sense of agency. This includes attributing causal agency to others, as in 'they are making me do this,’ This 'error' allows individuals in a kinship group or tribe who share the same error to form an imaginary 'we' hive mind supporting unified action. The higher metacognitive stance is to participate when necessary in the group illusion while maintaining clarity on the fact that the actual agency is within oneself. 

  • Regions of our brains making multiple predictions of others' actions.

    Updated: 2025-01-27 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 , January 27, 2025 Regions of our brains making multiple predictions of others' actions . I want to point to an excellent review and summary by Lin and Wittmann in Trends in Neurosciences of work by Ma et al . in . J.Neurosci both are open source texts that deal with the role of evolutionarily younger primate cortical brain regions such as posterior cingulate cortex and medial preforntal cortex in social belief inference . Such combined modeling and imaging studies are revealing in greater and greater detail the anatomical correlates of social cognition strategies . nbsp Here is the

  • How much does language shape our thinking?

    Updated: 2025-01-24 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 . Friday , January 24, 2025 How much does language shape our thinking I want to pass on this link to Manvir Singh's article in The New Yorker which has the title of this post . nbsp I enjoyed reading the article . nbsp Also , I've been comparing the responses of LLMs Chat GPT 4o , Perplexity , Anthropic , Gemini to the very simple prompt : nbsp Please summarize the following essay with the title : I'm frequently finding the Perplexity response most useful . It provides a list of steps it is following and HTML links to the sources it is using . nbsp I estimate it would take me at least 30 min to prepare

  • The birth of aspirational multiethnic populism

    Updated: 2025-01-22 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 , January 22, 2025 The birth of aspirational multiethnic populism I have pulled some clips from an excellent substack piece by Yascha Mounk to cement and archive his main points for myself and also pass on to MindBlog readers . nbsp He points out that Trump won a more convincing victory in 2024 than 2016 by doing what academics are supposed to be expert in : recognizing that the popular understanding of some concept—in this case , populism—is actually constituted by two elements which are logically separable . In his more recent incarnation , Trump has held on to his disdain for longstanding

  • Essential Reads: Mirtazapine (Remeron) and Pregnancy

    Updated: 2025-01-20 11:00:28
    : Skip to content Search About Mission Statement Staff Our Publications Location Support Our Program Join Our Team Contact Us Specialty Areas PMS PMDD Fertility Mental Health Psychiatric Disorders During Pregnancy Postpartum Psychiatric Disorders Breastfeeding Medications Menopausal Symptoms Blog Clinical Program Research Program Educational Program Resources For Patients For Providers Resources in the Boston Community Emergency Services Contact Contact Us Support Our Program Search Results for phrase results_count of results_count_total Displaying results_count results of results_count_total Generic filters Exact matches only Search in title Search in content Search in excerpt Essential Reads : Mirtazapine Remeron and Pregnancy Previous Essential Reads : Mirtazapine Remeron and Pregnancy

  • Poof! I'm 15-20 years younger...

    Updated: 2025-01-20 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 , January 20, 2025 Poof I'm 15-20 years younger . A Wall Street Journal article recently pointed me to two websites using AI to estimate one's biological age . So . I took a selfie of my 82 year old face with my iPhone to get novoslabs.com's and facialage.com's estimates that I am 63 and 67 years old , respectively Now , two weeks later , I have asked my stable of bots GPT 4o , Perplexity , etc for other vendors providing the same service and found four more sites to try . Here are the reactions of all six sites to a further selfie I just took with my : iPhone https : novoslabs.com faceage

  • The Neurobiology of Aging

    Updated: 2025-01-17 06:00:00
    I want to point to the Jan. 8 issue of the journal "Neuron" which is largely devoted to the neuroscience of aging. A number of its review articles are open source. The writing is mostly gibble-gabble, but many useful references can be extracted, particularly on interactions between the immune and nervous systems relevant to aging. 

  • The origin of color categories

    Updated: 2025-01-15 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 , January 15, 2025 The origin of color categories Garside et . al make observations suggesting that cognitive mechanisms such as language are required for the expression of consensus color . categories Significance A hallmark of intelligence is the use of concepts . Are people innately equipped with concepts Prior research has addressed the question using color , because color is experienced categorically : color categories reflect concepts of color . This study tested for color categories in macaque monkeys , a species with the same visual-encoding systems as humans . If color categories

  • Breathing during sleep orchestrates hippocampal nested sleep oscillations underlying memory consolidation

    Updated: 2025-01-10 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 . Friday , January 10, 2025 Breathing during sleep orchestrates hippocampal nested sleep oscillations underlying memory consolidation A fascinating correlation is found by Sheriff et al Their : abstract Nested sleep oscillations , emerging from asynchronous states in coordinated bursts , are critical for memory consolidation . Whether these bursts emerge intrinsically or from an underlying rhythm is unknown . Here , we show a previously undescribed respiratory-driven oscillation in the human hippocampus that couples with cardinal sleep oscillations . Further , breathing promotes nesting of ripples in

  • Predictive coding for social perception

    Updated: 2025-01-08 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 , January 08, 2025 Predictive coding for social perception Rittershofer et . al introduce a special issue of Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews titled Neurobiology of Social Interactions Across . Species Here is the first part of that : introduction Perception cannot rely solely on bottom-up processes , whereby patterns of receptor stimulation are passed up the hierarchy to generate a corresponding awareness . Such bottom-up processes would always generate experiences that are out-of-date and saturated by noise . Predictive processes are thought to play a key role in overcoming these

  • Romantic Relationships Matter More to Men than to Women

    Updated: 2025-01-06 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 , January 06, 2025 Romantic Relationships Matter More to Men than to Women I pass on the abstract of an interesting manuscript that has been accepted by Behavioral and Brain Science , by Wahring et al . Women are often viewed as more romantic than men , and romantic relationships are assumed to be more central to the lives of women than to those of men . Despite the prevalence of these beliefs , some recent research paints a different picture . Using principles and insights based on the interdisciplinary literature on mixed-gender relationships , we advance a set of four propositions relevant

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