Zhuāngzǐ's Tree

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv

When I saw that energy vampire bit in What We Do In The Shadows I didn't realize people could actually believe it, and yet...

Inattentional noise leads to subjective color uniformity across the visual field Humans perceive a vividly colored world coherently across the visual field, even though our peripheral vision has limited color sensitivity compared t…

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"... observers perceive scene images achromatized in the peripheral region (chimera images) as full-color images... inattentional noise increases the occurrence of strong color signals that exceed the internal color detection criterion..."

Nishida lab

🧠📈

(link fixed) New theory: Categorization is Baked Into the Brain
It is not at the end of sensory processing but a core computation that begins at the earliest stages, occurring throughout the cortex as predictive feedback shapes feedforward processing. #neuroscience
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Our new study (Titled: Memory Loves Company) asks whether working memory hold more when objects belong together.

And yes, when everyday objects are paired meaningfully (Bow-Arrow), people remember them better than when they’re unrelated (Glass-Arrow). (mini thread)

the fun thing with Mark Proksch is you can often just pretend that his characters in other things are just Colin Robinson doing a particularly elaborate drain

Feels like a repeat of WW2 Fascism and its encroachment upon pro-social Christianity where more nationalistic versions of Christianity (inc. Pagan-inspired mixes) started to dominate the field alongside a shaky secular(ish) alliance deep into fringe and conspiracy nonsense.

Dreams - Su Shi (trans. Arthur Waley) Families, when a child is born Want it to be intelligent. I, through intelligence, Having wrecked my whole life, Only hope the baby will prove Ignorant and stupid. Then he will crown a tranquil life By becoming a Cabinet Minister.

Here's a poem by one of the old Chinese scholar bureaucrats that I think captures a certain Vibe very well

All my mates know the harrowing story of how I nearly drowned as a kid and had to be rescued by helicopter. The story came up at a birthday meal and my mum said that never happened. After a lot of arguing and Googling we've figured out I fell asleep watching a 999 TV reenactment

Unfortunately, while he is leaning into his political frame, the horrible person is sorta right about problems stemming from psychoanalytic views that never got fixed since the Satanic Panic era. There are massive problems with trauma pseudoscience and 'repressed memories' finding re-entry points.

it's a testament to how american political parties are less some set of structures and institutions than they are the totality of public perception, media coverage and casual impressions

Goddamn them all

Maladaptive behaviors and impulse control are already taken seriously and approached on their actual terms rather than conflating them with behavior problems that have additional physiological layers.

It's a behavior reinforcing hole external to our native brain's capacity for stupid arousal.

Job Garcia’s kidnapping by the Trump administration is the top story on the LA Times website right now.

www.latimes.com/california/s...

Unconvinced Yet Influenced: Vaccine Decision-Making in the Shadow of Misinformation ∗ Somayeh Tohidi † Ed Pertwee ‡ Mihaela Popa-Wyatt § June 18, 2025 Abstract This paper examines how misinformation may shape vaccine decision- making and lead to delay or refusal of vaccination, even in cases where individuals doubt its truth. We suggest that it can do this by subtly altering perceptions of vaccine risks and information source credibility. Under conditions of uncertainty, even relatively modest changes could be sufficient to lead an individual to delay or refuse vaccination. We use an expected utility framework to show that such behavioural changes, while shaped by misinformation, could still be considered an instrumentally ra- tional response under uncertainty rather than necessarily representing a cognitive failure. We identify three specific mechanisms through which misinformation might influence vaccine decision-making: (1) eroding the perceived credibility of authoritative information sources, (2) increasing the perceived undesirability of adverse effects from vaccination, and (3) a combination of relatively modest shifts in both credence and risk per- ception. Our model highlights the ‘stickiness’ of misinformation and un-

-derscores the need for proactive interventions, such as ‘pre-bunking’ and media literacy, while cautioning that these are not necessarily panaceas

Very cool forthcoming paper from @somayehtohidi.bsky.social and others! They argue that people end up rationally (in a certain technical sense) vaccine avoidant just by having various doubts made salient to them. It's a way one's media environment can harm.

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/77a7u...

Trump administration barred from using transit funds to force states’ compliance with ICE “Congress appropriated those funds for transportation purposes, not immigration enforcement purposes,” U.S. District Judge John McConnell said.

Back in April, the Trump Admin gave states a choice: comply with ICE, or lose funding for roads, bridges and public transit.

That ultimatum is completely illegal, a federal judge just ruled:

On June 6, 2025, the federal government initiated immigration raids across the City of Los Angeles. Protests swiftly followed, and some individuals involved in those protests were unruly and even violent. State and local law enforcement responded. The following day, President Trump ordered that members of the California National Guard be federalized, and thereupon assumed control of those forces. At this early stage of the proceedings, the Court must determine whether the President followed the congressionally mandated procedure for his actions. He did not. His actions were illegal-both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. He must therefore return control of the California National Guard to the Governor of the State of California forthwith.

JUST IN: Judge Charles Breyer finds that President Trump exceeded the scope of his authority and violated the 10th Amendment by federalizing the California National Guard and orders him to return control to Governor Newsom. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Idk man but when the administration that tried to reject humanitarian aid for Los Angeles when it was burning tries to justify their illegal military occupation by saying they aren’t going to let LA burn it kinda sounds like bullshit

Gabbard Admits to Asking AI What to Classify in JFK Files Gabbard revealed that she fed tens of thousands of documents about the JFK assassination into an AI program for review.

Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence fed the JFK files into an AI program, asking it to see if there was anything that should remain classified.
https://trib.al/AqWNKuR

Lee Jae-myung going beast mode

Lee Jae-myung, the South Korean politician who climbed the fence of the parliament to get inside and vote against martial law, has been elected president. Pretty cooool

They can pry my en and em dashes from my cold dead hands.

I think I first encountered 'Latinx' in the 2010s in queer student groups and social media, and it was being somewhat encouraged (but optional), so A.

I've barely even had any experience with B... since most of the people I encountered who took issue with 'Latinx' were likewise left/liberal.

Canada Wants to Kill 400 Ostriches. Kennedy and Dr. Oz Want to Save Them.

Breaking news from the can't-make-this-shit-up desk: The same folks who are certain that Fauci caused COVID by funding people to study bats in a Biosafety Level 4 facility now want to import 400 ostriches with the goddamn bird flu from Canada so they can live on Dr. Oz's ranch.

We who study the philosophy/sociology/science of science etc. have an obligation to explain the true gold standard.

It's not a checklist that makes a result impeccable, but rather the development of consensus among experts through nuanced interpretation of multiple (imperfect) sources of data.

Even common phenotypical expectations don't hold up against the variation within populations. Identifying "biologically real race" is way more complex than racists want it to be... and doesn't mean a fraction of what they want it to mean.

Then again, plenty of people claim they only do astrology 'for fun' but then make decisions about who they like or dislike, or roommates, based on it... so some of the self-reporting could just be how someone collapses memory into a narrative that is convenient to navigate their social moment.

Astrology Won’t Liberate Anyone Attempts to build a left-wing occultism are fundamentally unserious.

Always been a weird case of semi-ironic identifying with but not functionally incorporating 'beliefs'

foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/02/p...

after announcing that foreign students are being banned from Havard, Noem warns "this should be a warning to every other university to get your act together."

🚨 A new rule would let career scientists like NSF/NIH program officers be replaced by political appointees

Already 14,000+ public comments, deadline is Friday

📣 Comments can be short. Courts consider them—and scientists with NSF/NIH experience are especially impactful

Speak up! shorturl.at/WKuBj

My statement on the charges filed against me: