Wednesday, August 20, 2025

A brain-computer interface that reads inner thoughts.

Inampudi does a description of work by Kunz et al., who isolated signals from a brain implant so people with movement disorders could voice thoughts without trying to speak. Here are the highlights and summary of the work: 

Highlights

•Attempted, inner, and perceived speech have a shared representation in motor cortex
•An inner-speech BCI decodes general sentences with improved user experience
•Aspects of private inner speech can be decoded during cognitive tasks like counting
•High-fidelity solutions can prevent a speech BCI from decoding private inner speech

Summary

Speech brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) show promise in restoring communication to people with paralysis but have also prompted discussions regarding their potential to decode private inner speech. Separately, inner speech may be a way to bypass the current approach of requiring speech BCI users to physically attempt speech, which is fatiguing and can slow communication. Using multi-unit recordings from four participants, we found that inner speech is robustly represented in the motor cortex and that imagined sentences can be decoded in real time. The representation of inner speech was highly correlated with attempted speech, though we also identified a neural “motor-intent” dimension that differentiates the two. We investigated the possibility of decoding private inner speech and found that some aspects of free-form inner speech could be decoded during sequence recall and counting tasks. Finally, we demonstrate high-fidelity strategies that prevent speech BCIs from unintentionally decoding private inner speech.

 

Monday, August 18, 2025

Polarization may be inherent in social media

Science news reports on a fascinating recent study suggesting that just the basic functions of social media—posting, reposting, and following—inevitably produce polarization. Here is the abstract of the article from Larooij and Törnberg: 

Social media platforms have been widely linked to societal harms, including rising polarization and the erosion of constructive debate. Can these problems be mitigated through prosocial interventions? We address this question using a novel method - generative social simulation - that embeds Large Language Models within Agent-Based Models to create socially rich synthetic platforms. We create a minimal platform where agents can post, repost, and follow others. We find that the resulting following-networks reproduce three well-documented dysfunctions: (1) partisan echo chambers; (2) concentrated influence among a small elite; and (3) the amplification of polarized voices - creating a 'social media prism' that distorts political discourse. We test six proposed interventions, from chronological feeds to bridging algorithms, finding only modest improvements - and in some cases, worsened outcomes. These results suggest that core dysfunctions may be rooted in the feedback between reactive engagement and network growth, raising the possibility that meaningful reform will require rethinking the foundational dynamics of platform architecture.  

Friday, August 15, 2025

Points on having a self and free will.

 

podcast by Sam Harris done several years ago summarizies his ideas on the question of whether we have free will and motivates me to do a further summary here…

There is a broad consensus among many disciplines that our experience of having a self or “I” is an illusion (see for example my lecture “The I-Illusion” and subsequent web lectures).  This self illusion is what has the experience of ‘free will,’ of being free to make choices. Having a self is other side of the coin of having free will.

Here is my one paragraph paraphrase of points that Sam Harris’ makes in his ‘Waking Up’ App, and book of that title, as well as his recent podcast:

We all are concatenations of previous causes with the most recent proximal cause rising from this subconscious mist.  What we take to be our 'self' or 'I' is actually the archive of our past actions and experiences, stored in long term declarative and procedural memory systems from which thoughts and actions of the present instant  seem to rise from nowhere - 'we' don't 'choose' them, they just seem to appear.  Having morality doesn't require free will, it is accomplished by having a historical coltlective record of what actions do or don't work out well, with respect to holding society together and passing on our genes. Thinking that 2 + 2 = 5 or killing other humans have bad consequences.  It is from this history of actions and expectations in our brain that the moral choices of the moment arise, again as if from nowhere.

Still, most of us, even if granting the above, can’t imagine losing our feeling of having a self, it seems too useful, we couldn’t get along without it.  This problem is addressed at the end of my “I-Illusion” talk with text based on points Wegner makes at the end of his classic 2002 book “The Illusion of Conscious Will” : 

…..the important point is that we have the experience of having free will, and it must be there for something, even if it is not an adequate theory of behavior causation....perhaps we have conscious will because it helps us to appreciate and remember what we are doing, the experience of will marks our actions for us, its embodied quality our actions from those of other agents in our environment.

We have evolved emotions of anger, sadness, fear, happiness related to survival. We can think of the emotion of agency, or conscious will, as the same sort of evolved emotion, obviously a useful capability in sorting out our physical and social world. 

The authorship emotion, an emotion that authenticates the action's owner as the self, is something we would miss if it were gone... it would not be very satisfying to go through life causing things, making discoveries, helping people, whatever.. if we had no personal recognition of those achievements.

And, this view doesn't really need to conflict with notions of responsibility and morality, because what people intend and consciously will is a basis for how the moral rightness or wrongness of an act judged. This is why mental competence is an issue in criminal trials.

So, just as in theater, art, used car sales ...and in the scientific analysis of conscious will..how things seem is more important than what they are. It seems to us that we have selves, have conscious will, have minds, are agents. While it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion, it is incorrect to call the illusion a trivial one, its invention has an obvious evolutionary rationale (along with long list of cognitive biases we seem to be hardwired with). Illusions piled on top of apparent mental causation are the building blocks of human psychology, social life, and our dominance as a species on this planet.

(The above is a slightly edited version of MindBlog's 3/22/21 post that contains some additional links)


Wednesday, August 13, 2025

The number of fake scientific journal articles is doubling every year and a half.

I am so saddened by the demonstration by Richardson et al.(open source) of the disintegration of the safeguards against scienfic fraud that prevailed during my 30 years (1963-1996) of doing laboratory science.  Here is the description of their article, "The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly.

Significance

Numerous recent scientific and journalistic investigations demonstrate that systematic scientific fraud is a growing threat to the scientific enterprise. In large measure this has been attributed to organizations known as research paper mills. We uncover footprints of activities connected to scientific fraud that extend beyond the production of fake papers to brokerage roles in a widespread network of editors and authors who cooperate to achieve the publication of scientific papers that escape traditional peer-review standards. Our analysis reveals insights into how such organizations are structured and how they operate.

Abstract

Science is characterized by collaboration and cooperation, but also by uncertainty, competition, and inequality. While there has always been some concern that these pressures may compel some to defect from the scientific research ethos—i.e., fail to make genuine contributions to the production of knowledge or to the training of an expert workforce—the focus has largely been on the actions of lone individuals. Recently, however, reports of coordinated scientific fraud activities have increased. Some suggest that the ease of communication provided by the internet and open-access publishing have created the conditions for the emergence of entities—paper mills (i.e., sellers of mass-produced low quality and fabricated research), brokers (i.e., conduits between producers and publishers of fraudulent research), predatory journals, who do not conduct any quality controls on submissions—that facilitate systematic scientific fraud. Here, we demonstrate through case studies that i) individuals have cooperated to publish papers that were eventually retracted in a number of journals, ii) brokers have enabled publication in targeted journals at scale, and iii), within a field of science, not all subfields are equally targeted for scientific fraud. Our results reveal some of the strategies that enable the entities promoting scientific fraud to evade interventions. Our final analysis suggests that this ability to evade interventions is enabling the number of fraudulent publications to grow at a rate far outpacing that of legitimate science.

 

Monday, August 11, 2025

A 25 year study of what distingiushes 'Super-Agers'

The results of a long term study by a group at Northwestern University are described by Weintraub et al. (open source). Here is the abstract:  

During late life, “average” does not mean “intact.” For example, cross-sectional data from a common word list learning test show that average delayed word recall raw score at age 80 (5/15) is approximately half that at age 56 to 66 (9/15). Cognitive and neurobiological dissolution is therefore implicitly incorporated into concepts of the aging brain. This position is being challenged through investigations on “superaging,” a term that was coined at the Northwestern Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) to define persons ≥ 80 years with delayed word recall raw scores at least equal to those of individuals 20 to 30 years younger. During the first 25 years of this program we established that superagers constitute not only a neuropsychological but also a neurobiological phenotype distinctive from cognitively average age peers. With respect to brain structure, superagers have cortical volumes no different than neurotypical adults 20 to 30 years younger in contrast to neurotypical peers who do show such age-related shrinkage; they also have a region in the cingulate gyrus that is thicker than younger neurotypical adults. With respect to cellular biology, superagers have fewer Alzheimer's disease–type changes in the brain, greater size of entorhinal neurons, fewer inflammatory microglia in white matter, better preserved cholinergic innervation, and a greater density of evolutionarily progressive von Economo neurons. In the future, deeper characterization of the superaging phenotype may lead to interventions that enhance resistance and resilience to involutional changes considered part of average (i.e., “normal”) brain aging. This line of work is helping to revise common misperceptions about the cognitive potential of senescence and has inspired investigations throughout the United States and abroad.

Highlights

  • “Normal cognitive aging” is a term that spans a broad spectrum from average for age to well beyond.
  • “Superaging” at the Northwestern University Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (ADRC) refers to a unique cognitive and biological phenotype.
  • Post mortem findings support resilience and resistance to neuropathologic changes of aging.

 

 

Friday, August 08, 2025

Face (e)motion and the third visual pathway.

Important and ground breaking work from Yan et al. on our social brain pathways. For an excellent summary of this work, with useful graphics, see the commentary by Puce.: 

Significance

We present evidence for a third “social” brain pathway dedicated to processing dynamic social signals—specifically facial expressions—for behavioral emotion categorization. Using generative technology, we isolated facial movements (action units, AUs) while controlling static face identity features. Participants viewed and categorized these emotion-specific facial models while we tracked their brain activity using MEG. Results revealed a functional pathway from the occipital cortex to MT, bank of the STS, and STG that selectively represents, communicates, and integrates dynamic AUs, filtering out static identity features. By precisely controlling stimulus features, our method provides a transparent “glass box” view of neural mechanisms. This reproducible approach establishes a foundation in computational social neuroscience, linking stimuli, brain processing, and social perception behaviors.

Abstract

Emerging theories in cognitive neuroscience propose a third brain pathway dedicated to processing biological motion, alongside the established ventral and dorsal pathways. However, its role in computing dynamic social signals for behavior remains uncharted. Here, participants (N = 10) actively categorized dynamic facial expressions synthesized by a generative model and displayed on different face identities—as “happy,” “surprise,” “fear,” “anger,” “disgust,” “sad”—while we recorded their MEG responses. Using representational interaction measures that link facial features with MEG activity and categorization behavior, we identified within each participant a functional social pathway extending from the occipital cortex to the superior temporal gyrus. This pathway selectively represents, communicates, and integrates facial movements that are essential for the behavioral categorization of emotion, while task-irrelevant identity features are filtered out in the occipital cortex. Our findings uncover how the third pathway selectively computes complex dynamic social signals for emotion categorization in individual participants, offering computational insights into the dynamics of neural activity.

 

Wednesday, August 06, 2025

Why we put off things we enjoy doing.

Interesting perspective from Hagen and Brien

Abstract

People commonly experience long gaps of time between getting to do things they love to do. In principle, the longer it has been since people last enjoyed something, the quicker they should jump at the chance to enjoy it again. In practice, five experiments reveal a case of the opposite: The longer since people's last enjoyable experience, the more they postpone returning—in part because they demand their return be “extra special” to offset the wait. This effect emerged across many controlled parameters. For example, participants chose to avoid contacting close friends after large vs. small gaps in contact, all else equal—a choice that undermined their immediate happiness. This effect further extended to COVID-19 contexts, regarding people's returns from lengthy shutdowns: Somewhat nonobviously, we found that participants delayed returning to everyday activities even longer (as opposed to jumping back at their first sufficiently good chance) if it meant that they could better mark the occasion. Finally, this effect was uniquely attenuated by helping participants reconstrue any chance to return as “extra special.” Together, these findings suggest that time delays create psychological barriers to returning, which people self-impose. People may increasingly avoid contacting loved ones, getting back into rewarding hobbies, and so on, the longer it has been since last time, promoting vicious cycles of deferment. Motivating people to return to experiences that would enhance their immediate happiness—experiences they still want to have and are now theirs to take—may be surprisingly difficult.

 

Monday, August 04, 2025

The coming societal collapse

I want to pass on this review in The Guardian by Damian Carrington, pointed out to me by a friend, titled   ‘Self-termination is most likely: the history and future of societal collapse.' It describes the just released "Goliath’s Curse" by Luke Kemp published in the UK on 31 July by Viking Penguin

An epic analysis of 5,000 years of civilisation argues that a global collapse is coming unless inequality is vanquished

“We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.

“I’m pessimistic about the future,” he says. “But I’m optimistic about people.” Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.

Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

The work is scholarly, but the straight-talking Australian can also be direct, such as when setting out how a global collapse could be avoided. “Don’t be a dick” is one of the solutions proposed, along with a move towards genuinely democratic societies and an end to inequality.

His first step was to ditch the word civilisation, a term he argues is really propaganda by rulers. “When you look at the near east, China, Mesoamerica or the Andes, where the first kingdoms and empires arose, you don’t see civilised conduct, you see war, patriarchy and human sacrifice,” he says. This was a form of evolutionary backsliding from the egalitarian and mobile hunter-gatherer societies which shared tools and culture widely and survived for hundreds of thousands of years. “Instead, we started to resemble the hierarchies of chimpanzees and the harems of gorillas.”

Instead Kemp uses the term Goliaths to describe kingdoms and empires, meaning a society built on domination, such as the Roman empire: state over citizen, rich over poor, master over slave and men over women. He says that, like the biblical warrior slain by David’s slingshot, Goliaths began in the bronze age, were steeped in violence and often surprisingly fragile.

Goliath states do not simply emerge as dominant cliques that loot surplus food and resources, he argues, but need three specific types of “Goliath fuel”. The first is a particular type of surplus food: grain. That can be “seen, stolen and stored”, Kemp says, unlike perishable foods.

In Cahokia, for example, a society in North America that peaked around the 11th century, the advent of maize and bean farming led to a society dominated by an elite of priests and human sacrifice, he says.

The second Goliath fuel is weaponry monopolised by one group. Bronze swords and axes were far superior to stone and wooden axes, and the first Goliaths in Mesopotamia followed their development, he says. Kemp calls the final Goliath fuel “caged land”, meaning places where oceans, rivers, deserts and mountains meant people could not simply migrate away from rising tyrants. Early Egyptians, trapped between the Red Sea and the Nile, fell prey to the pharaohs, for example.

“History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”

All Goliaths, however, contain the seeds of their own demise, he says: “They are cursed and this is because of inequality.” Inequality does not arise because all people are greedy. They are not, he says. The Khoisan peoples in southern Africa, for example, shared and preserved common lands for thousands of years despite the temptation to grab more.

Instead, it is the few people high in the dark triad who fall into races for resources, arms and status, he says. “Then as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.”

History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. “After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,” he says.

Collapses in the past were at a regional level and often beneficial for most people, but collapse today would be global and disastrous for all. “Today, we don’t have regional empires so much as we have one single, interconnected global Goliath. All our societies act within one single global economic system – capitalism,” Kemp says.

He cites three reasons why the collapse of the global Goliath would be far worse than previous events. First is that collapses are accompanied by surges in violence as elites try to reassert their dominance. “In the past, those battles were waged with swords or muskets. Today we have nuclear weapons,” he says.

Second, people in the past were not heavily reliant on empires or states for services and, unlike today, could easily go back to farming or hunting and gathering. “Today, most of us are specialised, and we’re dependent upon global infrastructure. If that falls away, we too will fall,” he says.

“Last but not least is that, unfortunately, all the threats we face today are far worse than in the past,” he says. Past climatic changes that precipitated collapses, for example, usually involved a temperature change of 1C at a regional level. Today, we face 3C globally. There are also about 10,000 nuclear weapons, technologies such as artificial intelligence and killer robots and engineered pandemics, all sources of catastrophic global risk.

Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. “The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a master Machiavellian manipulator.”

“Our corporations and, increasingly, our algorithms, also resemble these kinds of people,” he says. “They’re basically amplifying the worst of us.”

Kemp points to these “agents of doom” as the source of the current trajectory towards societal collapse. “These are the large, psychopathic corporations and groups which produce global catastrophic risk,” he says. “Nuclear weapons, climate change, AI, are only produced by a very small number of secretive, highly wealthy, powerful groups, like the military-industrial complex, big tech and the fossil fuel industry.

“The key thing is this is not about all of humanity creating these threats. It is not about human nature. It is about small groups who bring out the worst in us, competing for profit and power and covering all [the risks] up.”

The global Goliath is the endgame for humanity, Kemp says, like the final moves in a chess match that determine the result. He sees two outcomes: self-destruction or a fundamental transformation of society.

He believes the first outcome is the most likely, but says escaping global collapse could be achieved. “First and foremost, you need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths,” he says. That means running societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital technologies to enable direct democracy at large scales. History shows that more democratic societies tend to be more resilient, he says.

“If you’d had a citizens’ jury sitting over the [fossil fuel companies] when they discovered how much damage and death their products would cause, do you think they would have said: ‘Yes, go ahead, bury the information and run disinformation campaigns’? Of course not,” Kemp says.

Escaping collapse also requires taxing wealth, he says, otherwise the rich find ways to rig the democratic system. “I’d cap wealth at $10 million. That’s far more than anyone needs. A famous oil tycoon once said money is just a way for the rich to keep score. Why should we allow these people to keep score at the risk of destroying the entire planet?”

If citizens’ juries and wealth caps seem wildly optimistic, Kemp says we have been long brainwashed by rulers justifying their dominance, from the self-declared god-pharaohs of Egypt and priests claiming to control the weather to autocrats claiming to defend people from foreign threats and tech titans selling us their techno-utopias. “It’s always been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of Goliaths. That’s because these are stories that have been hammered into us over the space of 5,000 years,” he says.

“Today, people find it easier to imagine that we can build intelligence on silicon than we can do democracy at scale, or that we can escape arms races. It’s complete bullshit. Of course we can do democracy at scale. We’re a naturally social, altruistic, democratic species and we all have an anti-dominance intuition. This is what we’re built for.”

Kemp rejects the suggestion that he is simply presenting a politically leftwing take on history. “There is nothing inherently left wing about democracy,” he says. “Nor does the left have a monopoly on fighting corruption, holding power accountable and making sure companies pay for the social and environmental damages they cause. That’s just making our economy more honest.”

He also has a message for individuals: “Collapse isn’t just caused by structures, but also people. If you want to save the world then the first step is to stop destroying it. In other words: don’t be a dick. Don’t work for big tech, arms manufacturers or the fossil fuel industry. Don’t accept relationships based on domination and share power whenever you can.”

Despite the possibility of avoiding collapse, Kemp remains pessimistic about our prospects. “I think it’s unlikely,” he says. “We’re dealing with a 5,000-year process that is going to be incredibly difficult to reverse, as we have increasing levels of inequality and of elite capture of our politics.

“But even if you don’t have hope, it doesn’t really matter. This is about defiance. It’s about doing the right thing, fighting for democracy and for people to not be exploited. And even if we fail, at the very least, we didn’t contribute to the problem.”


Friday, August 01, 2025

Everything we experience comes from inside us

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. 

(This post first appeared on 1/29/2025)