Neuroskeptic

Vaccines are off the hook for the autism caper. They've got Tylenol in custody now.

Did vaccines point the finger at Tylenol to save their own skin?

Are vaccines a snitch?😡

Sensory neurons drive pancreatic cancer progression through neuron-cancer pseudo-synapses pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41005304/ "Hello, is this pancreas?" "Pancreas can't come to the phone right now. This is cancer." ☹️

If the great psychologist Roger Shepard were still with us, he might not have been surprised by this. He proposed a helix model for auditory pitch perception, with one octave per turn.
There is something very human about this finding. It's like catching an LLM counting on its fingers.

Not a global map, but a local hash: grid cells decorrelate the representation of position and scramble long-range distance information Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex construct an intriguing multiperiodic representation of space whose properties have been the subject of much theoretical speculation. Here we combine modelin...

Grid cells are "more like a hash function than a global map or metric" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Grid cell representation is ideally set up to decorrelate and assign easily distinguishable labels to inputs

From a Nature piece on bad peer review comments www.nature.com/articles/d41... While most of these are "go away and never review again" tier, I can relate to a couple of these

A thousand sci-fi body horror stories writing themselves in my mind as I read this abstract

Neuron-to-cancer neurotransmission: lung cancer cells "can form functional synapses and receive synaptic transmission" from neurons pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40931078/ This is creepy

The first children born after the introduction of ChatGPT will be 3 years old in a couple of months.

I wonder what children who grow up interacting with LLMs will make of them? Will their intuitions about questions like "are AIs alive" differ from those of us old people?

Hmm, good point

AFAIK, before autism, the only real developmental diagnosis for children was "idiocy" (it went by many other names). Some children with autism probably got that label, but many would not have

My pet theory is that it was the introduction of universal education that made the difference.

Once all children had to go to school, it became possible/necessary to notice differences in how individual children behaved, in a way that previously never happened.

Many years ago, I was an #autism researcher, and here's a question I've been pondering for a while:

Why was autism discovered when it was?

Autism was, at the earliest, described in 1925 (Sukhareva) or 1940s (Kanner/Asperger) but presumably it always existed.

So why wasn't it recognized before?

"My relationship has very good Saturn" - illustrating the perils of self-report measures with nonsensical questions pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40929053/ I like this, but then I am quite Mars

In 2001, 73.4% of British men reported masturbating in the past month; by 2012 this was up to to 77.5% pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40932457/ 4.1% of men got more honest

Placebo effects in alternative medical treatments for anxiety: false hope or healing potential? - PubMed Healing crystals did not demonstrate anxiolytic effects beyond those of the placebo. Symptom change was mediated by expectancy and conditioning, particularly in individuals inclined toward intuitive o...

"Healing crystals did not demonstrate anxiolytic effects beyond those of the placebo." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40855750/ I mean...

A study on female soccer players has been retracted due to "lack of voluntary informed consent" and "excessive physical burden and harm imposed on the participants" pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... 😧

What is the relation between mind and brain?

The mind is like the brain's online persona.

The mind is all intelligent and mysterious, but in real life it's just a blob of neurons living in a cramped skull.

Heh, I just noticed a stupid habit of mine and figured out why I do it: because I’m stupid

Confused writing is usually a symptom of confused thinking. As we struggle to clarify writing, we clarify our thoughts. AI writing aids rob us of that struggle, leaving clean-looking text and thoughts still confused for lack of inspection. Writing is not just a product; it is a diagnostic tool.

Agreed. That seems too 'particular' to be a scientific fact.

"The heaviest house cat ever was called Himmy, he weighed 22kg" is trivia, but "the heaviest cat species ever was the smilodon, they weighed 400 kg" is more like science because it's more general

True, but sometimes a fact is confirmed by evidence but not considered scientific. e.g. consider "ice floats on water". Most people would say this is just a common sense fact, and not 'science', in my experience

I agree, this is a big part of it.

What makes a fact a "scientific fact" as opposed to just a fact?

For example, is "most dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago" a *scientific* fact? I think most people would say so. But why is that statement any more scientific than "the USA was founded in 1776", which is history not science?

"Akin to humans shaking a computer mouse to find the cursor on a screen, we show that head-fixed mice develop an active sensing strategy" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Colada[128] The Best Audit Study and its interesting shortcoming
datacolada.org/128

I still can't get over how the biggest research fraud scandal of recent years, is about a researcher who studied lying, cheating and dishonesty journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... It's life imitating art or something. @datacolada.bsky.social

Good point!

The potential risks of opening the mind's eye with psychedelic therapies pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40850037/ There is just the hint of Lovecraft about this

Fear conditioning biases olfactory sensory neuron frequencies across generations The main olfactory epithelium initiates the process of odor encoding. Recent studies have demonstrated intergenerationally inherited changes in the olfactory system in response to fear conditioning, r...

Lamarck returns? Preprint claims "that olfactory fear conditioning increases the number of odor-encoding neurons in mice that experience odor-shock conditioning (F0), as well as their unconditioned offspring" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I'm a Lamarckist because my father studied Lamarck

Introducing the Quantum Diet: Boost Your Mind and Body via Healthy Food, Drinks and Supplements Meal Plan for Planck-Scale Effects at Astrophysical Scale

The Quantum Diet: "Meal Plan for Planck-Scale Effects at Astrophysical Scale" "This isn’t just another diet fad." medium.com/quantum-psyc... 🤯