neuroscience 14

This week, I learned: POSSE - “Publish (on your) Own Site, Share Everywhere” - is a self-explanatory content sharing approach. 1 minute video introduction. Alternatives are: COPE: Create once, publish everywhere. POSE: Publish once, syndicate everywhere. PESOS: Publish elsewhere, syndicate to own site. PESETAS: Publish elsewhere, syndicate everything to a silo (one of the “elsewhere"s). Cory Doctorow’s essay on how Google will use AI against shoppers is a great lesson on several lessons in behavioral economics. Fighting it is hard, but here is generally good advice: ChatGPT Never buy when rushed. Set a max price. Compare 2+ options (TOTAL price) early. Shop logged-out for big purchases. Vortex is supported by DuckDB. It’s a better format than parquet for analysis and querying remotely. Gemini Research suggests that insight emerges when we struggle with a problem, get stuck, then DISENGAGE (to inhibit distractions). EEGs can predict insight ~8 seconds before it happens using this pattern. Gemini Books that have suggested this are: The Art of Thought (1926) The Act of Creation (1964) The Inner Game of Tennis (1974) Hare Brain, Toroise Mind (1997) Taoism’s Wu Wei: “muddy water, let stand, becomes clear” Zen Koans: giving students impossible riddles Books that have argued (probably incorrectly) that an impasse is a signal to push harder, not step back, are: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) by Max Weber, Edison’s 99% perspiration quote The 10X Rule (2011) Grit (2016) Can’t Hurt Me (2018) We are starting to talk like LLMs. Empirical evidence of Large Language Model’s influence on human spoken communication Email support for animated AVIF is limited. Though it’s perhaps the best compression format, and Apple Mail supports it well, Outlook on Windows does not support it. GMail converts it to GIF. Also, Google Groups does not yet support it. When I sent an animated AVIF in a Google Group email, it was replaced by the content proxy to this nonexistent URL. Portkey Models is a repo of model related data (e.g. price, max tokens, capabilities, etc.) for a large number of models. Somewhat similar to Simon Willison’s LLM Prices. git-filter-repo is a surprisingly easy way to rewrite your git history to remove specific files (e.g. large files, sensitive files). It can preserve timestamps, messages, etc. It just filters out specific files as if they were never committed. This can reduce the size of repos dramatically.

I read 51 books in 2025 (about the same as in 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.) With a difference: I used AI to read 44 of them in the last week of the year. Mind blowing The Ants by Bert Hölldobler. Finally, after 20 years of wanting to read it. It lives up to the hype. Wind and Truth (The Stormlight Archive, #5) by Brandon Sanderson. The only fiction I’ve taken notes for. (About 500 points.) Life changing (or at least, perspective changing) ...

I found this piece from “The Happiness Hypothesis” pretty interesting: In the 1990s, Damasio found that when certain parts of the orbitofrontal cortex are damaged, patients lose most of their emotional lives. They report that when they ought to feel emotion, they feel nothing, and studies of their autonomic reactions (such as those used in lie detector tests) confirm that they lack the normal flashes of bodily reaction that the rest of us experience when observing scenes of horror or beauty. Yet their reasoning and logical abilities are intact. They perform normally on tests of intelligence and knowledge of social rules and moral principles. ...

How to get smarter, one breath at a time. Time magazine on the benefits of meditation.

Human memory capacity is about filters, not storage.

Esref Armagan, blind painter. He has been blind all his life. Yet his paintings are realistic. Neural scans indicate that when he is painting, his visual cortex is stimulated as much as it is for normal people when they see objects. Comments naru 29 Jan 2005 12:00 pm: this guy (esref) is cool..a genius of sorts,,of course stud is cool too S Anand 29 Jan 2005 12:00 pm: I would also mention the genius of evolution. If he can know things like perspective without ever having seen, it means that sort of thing is hard-coded in our brain!

What we can do with brain scans today.

Excellent kuro5hin article on the brain and Turing machines. While on brains, kuro5hin also talks about geniuses.

While I thought that every cell in the human body had identical genetic make-up, it turns out that brain cells could have gained or lost some chromosomes. Now, that’s a pretty big discovery. via missing matter

I have an over-developed dorsal striatum. That’s the brain part that makes you want to eat when you’re not hungry, just because the food’s there. via Plastic

A neurological experiment indicates that we can make better decisions sub-consciously, even if we can’t explain why.

I found this site on neuroscience (for kids). Nice. Has lots of brain games (no – not smart ones – more like testing your reaction time, etc.) Actually I was reading up on neuroscience because of this article on how neuroscience helped figure out the meaning behind a Zen garden. via missing matter

Now we can control rat brains. Dr. Talwar’s comment is apt. “Nonetheless, the idea is sort of creepy.”

Brain map.