Monday, April 20, 2026

What a self is.

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Reading Michael Pollan’s account of his meeting with Anil Seth in his recent book "A World Appears" has prompted me to write down ...
Friday, April 17, 2026

From Animal to Humans - Multimodality as a safeguard of honesty in communication and language

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I pass on the abstracts of an article by Hex et al to appear in Behavioral and Brain Sciences.  Motivated readers can obtain a PDF of the ma...
Wednesday, April 15, 2026

Executive Function: Universal Capacity or Schooled Skill?

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A recent PNAS article by Kroupin and colleagues challenges one of the most widely assumed constructs in cognitive science: that “executive ...
Monday, April 13, 2026

The Default Mode Network as a Bidirectional Interface Between World and Mind

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I want to pass on the abstract of a PNAS contribution from Zhang et al. titled " Sender–receiver subdivisions of the default mode netwo...
Thursday, April 09, 2026

AI, Agency, and the Quiet Hollowing of Mind

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Reading through the article " A Rational Optimist View Of Preventing Agency Decay " is a rich experience. For readers with less pa...
Tuesday, April 07, 2026

Memes Before Machines: The Real Cognitive Risk of the AI Age

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I strongly urge you to read a New York Times opinion piece by Willy Staley titled " Forget the A.I. Apocalypse. Memes Have Already Nuk...
Tuesday, March 31, 2026

AI use can compromise our serendipity, creativity, autonomy, and sense of agency.

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I have been reading numerous articles on pitfalls of using AI, and want to point to two in particular that I highly recommend for a slow and...
Monday, March 23, 2026

One terminal chats with another to start vibe coding a new dericbownds.net

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Writing MindBlog posts is on temporary hiatus because I have recently followed Claude's instructions to set up my Mac mini M3 to use Cla...
Wednesday, March 18, 2026

The polyvagal theory is dead - and HRV isn't a simple indicator of arousal

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I was recently struck by Baxter's Substack post (its title copied to be the title of this MindBlog post), which noted work critical of P...
Monday, March 16, 2026

The nature of intelligence and selves.

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I want to pass on the result of my extracting what I felt to be crucial chunks of text from Chapters 5 through 9 of Agüera y Arcas’s "W...
Friday, March 13, 2026

A seismic shift in our understanding of intelligence

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I've just spent the last three days reading large chunks of the remarkable book "What is Intelligence" by Agüera y Arcas. It i...
Thursday, March 12, 2026

AI Makes Workloads Worse, Not Better

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An article in today's Wall Street Journal by Ray Smith conforms so completely to my own work experience over the past week (I'm curr...
Thursday, March 05, 2026

Empathy as a Brain Rhythm: Orexin, Theta Oscillations, and Prosocial Behavior

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(The following is the final installment of a series of three posts on using ChatGPT to assist in the generation of MindBlog posts.  I think ...

A MindBlog-ready ChatGPT synthesis

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This post continues from the previous one to show  ChatGPT's response to my prompt "Let's go with the empathy / orexin paper fo...

Will Deric’s Mind Blog be firing Deric soon? Is AI is doing his job better?

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The short answer to both questions is yes and no.   I am finding that ChatGPT 5.2 ($20/month version) will scan the TOCs (tables of contents...
Monday, February 23, 2026

The geometries of change and the value of being human

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I pass on and also archive for myself the following three ChatGPT 5.2 summaries of three recent Johar essays: Summary of The Geometries of ...