Wednesday, August 05, 2026

When the Two Sides of Empathy Fall Out of Balance

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Shalev and Uzefovsky make some interesting distinctions between different forms of empathy. Here is ChatGPT's distillation of their tex...
Monday, August 03, 2026

AI as discovery, not invention.

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After reading Venkatesh Rao's essay "The Crooked Timber of AI" several times, I turned to my trio of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Clau...
Friday, July 31, 2026

Do Language Models Have a Global Workspace?

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A new Anthropic paper ( Gurnee, Sofroniew, Lindsey et al., July 2026 ) argues that language models have evolved something functionally like ...
Wednesday, July 29, 2026

The Neural Basis of Laughter

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Caruana and Scott (open source) distinguish ancient and more modern brain systems regulating our laughter:   Highlights Behavioral and clin...
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Monday, July 27, 2026

Contemporary Russian piano composers and Agentic AI

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The title of this post makes no sense until I explain that it names the two arenas I have been spending my time in over the past month, taki...
Friday, July 24, 2026

Top-Down To Bottom-Up: Rhythmic Synchrony Relaxes Social Priors to Enable Change

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Abstract (slightly edited) of an article by Connor Wood and accepted for publication in Brain and Behavioral Sciences: Interpersonal synchro...
Wednesday, June 24, 2026

What six AI models do and don’t know about me

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This post (for blogging and AI nerds) is the result of choosing an article by Noah Smith  from my daily input stream to actually read throug...
Monday, June 22, 2026

Future-Capable: Curiosity, Adaptability, and Kindness in the Age of AI

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I want to pass on the following edited Claude 4.8 reduction of a Colin Lewis article  which I recommend you read through in full form: Curio...
Friday, June 19, 2026

Boredom can be Good for You...

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Embracing boredom can calm the brain.... I pass on a science-for-the-general-public  Neuroscience News summary of an  article from The Conve...
Wednesday, June 17, 2026

When the Self Dissolves, the Precuneus Goes Quiet: A Rigorous Test of Meditation’s “Many-to-(n)One” Continuum

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 A recurring question on this blog is how much of what we take to be fixed about experience—time, space, agency, the bounded self—is actual...
Monday, June 15, 2026

A dimmer switch for reward: the vagus sets the gain

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In a Trends in Neurosciences Article Wang, Liu, and Bai, simplify and summarize the extensive experiments of Onimus, Arrivet and Gangarossa...
Friday, June 12, 2026

Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees

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From Bhambore et al. , in the June 4 issue of Science Magazine:  Editor’s summary Recent research has revealed that bumble bees are much mo...
Wednesday, June 10, 2026

Cleaning our brains during deep sleep

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I monitor my sleep both with the Oura Ring and the Apple watch, and have observed that my mental clarity and feeling rested on waking positi...
Monday, June 08, 2026

AI construed as a brilliant friend...Claude's New Constitution

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Colin Lewis, AI Research Scientist and Developer, has written a Substack essay on Anthropic Claude's New Constitution which deserves yo...