Yohan J John

Great topic! What Baudrillard would term "hyperreality" is this infusion of the virtual into the actual and the absorption and appropriation of the actual into the virtual, a process that is at once ubiquitous and naturalized for us in our de-naturalized and artificialized reality systems.

I can't decide which is my favorite, but Gumboots and Crazy Love Vol II are personal faves.

I used to pore over the liner notes of my dad's LP. This song was described as based on an "African walking rhythm".

I think it's a perfect album. Didn't like it as much as Graceland when I was a kid, but it has really grown on me.

Wow thanks!

YouTube video by NOUS Legacy Of Delhi's Urdu Bazaar

Beautiful and bittersweet video about the Urdu language in Delhi.

youtu.be/2m9F85AaAI0?...

No True Scottish Modeler...

Haha. Just last night I added this footnote on "all models are wrong" to my latest substack essay.

yohanjohn.substack.com/p/neuroscien...

Yes I was wondering the same thing!

Ooh if you find it let me know! It's a book?

Oh indeed! Hille's book really conveys this well.

Yeah he was a bit uncool for a few years but I get the impression that the new AI era is bringing him back, along with a few other "postmodernists".

Neuroscience should not blur the distinction between "forward" and "reverse" modeling Part 2 of a series on neuroscience and the hyperreal

Here's the next part of my series on neuroscience and hyperreality.

open.substack.com/pub/yohanjoh...

#neuroscience

"We also found that a deliberation urgency signal, which more heavily weighs later evidence, was fundamental to predicting decisions and explains past movement behavior in a new light."

Very cool.

Is it possible to compare organisms in terms of the ecological niches, independent of their behavioral strategies? I would assume that niches are a key factor in addition to genetics and morphology.

Obituary: Professor Maggie Boden The University of Sussex mourns the loss of Professor Margaret (Maggie) Boden, a pioneering figure in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.

Sad to hear of Margaret Boden's passing.

A few years ago I read her 1600-page opus 'Mind As Machine: A History of Cognitive Science', as part of a discussion group. A monumental work of scholarship, and one that is unlikely to be surpassed in depth and breadth.

www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/re...

Very interesting thread!

Predictive remapping of attention across eye movements - Nature Neuroscience Just before a rapid eye movement (saccade), attentional performance improves for the targeted position where the saccade will land. This behavioral study finds that attentional performance also improv...

Here's a paper on it.

I'm speculating, but it strikes me that using targeted dendritic inhibition and disinhibition is a plausible mechanism for changing the receptive field of a region so that it anticipates the post-saccadic position.

www.nature.com/articles/nn....

Mirror trends of plasticity and stability indicators in primate prefrontal cortex - PubMed Research on plasticity markers in the cerebral cortex has largely focused on their timing of expression and role in shaping circuits during critical and normal periods. By contrast, little attention h...

There is some evidence of a plasticity-vulnerability tradeoff in the prefrontal cortex: highly plastic areas tend to be the most susceptible to damage.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28921934/

We are like this only.

#India

Biologist folk (especially in evolutionary biology and/or ecology, but it don’t matter):

Can you give me your favorite examples of trade offs in biology? Organism or system don’t matter. Primary literature or reviews preferred.

Researcher: "We let the data speak for itself."

Earlier that day:

Shall read it properly soon.

Bit of a tangent, but are you familiar with predictive remapping in the visual system? I think an extension of your sort of model might be the best bet for modeling this otherwise baffling phenomenon. (Getting the vector addition to work is still a huge challenge tho.)

This is cool, and aligns with how I've been thinking about the roles of PV, CB and CR* interneurons in cortex and hippocampus.

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* which roughly map onto PV, SST and VIP in rodents.

how it feels when I read category theory

Today I learned that the manifold hypothesis might be traceable all the way back to Helmholtz.

From 'Operationalizing Kant Manifolds, Models, and Mathematics in Helmholtz's Theories of Perception'

doi.org/10.7551/mitp...

#psychology #neuroscience #philosophy

Ooh I don't think I've read this. Thanks!

Neuroscience and the Hyperreal Part 1 of a series on models in neuroscience

Only the first post is up, but yes, there's a connection!

yohanjohn.substack.com/p/neuroscien...

Well-spotted!

Your Kantian hammer is working nicely. :P

"To a person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Suitably generalized to a toolbox rather than a single tool, this is basically the starting assumption of every model of top-down influence on perception.