Neuroskeptic

The Shifting 'Self' of Science's Self-Governing Capacity: Four Decades of Research Integrity Discussions in Science and Nature pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41199636/

"17 pairs of female friends (N = 34; ages 16-18 years) spent two nights in a sleep laboratory: one night online socialising with their friend in another room (WhatsApp + Netflix), and one night watching Netflix alone without socialising" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41189527/ Sleep lab sleepover!

The name's Andrew... Just Andrew.

Interesting, thanks!

In languages with a grammatical gender, do AIs have a gender? For example, in French is it "le ChatGPT" or "la ChatGPT"?

Human-like individual differences emerge from random weight initializations in neural networks Much of AI research targets the behavior of an average human, a focus that traces to Turing’s imitation game. Yet, no two human individuals behave exactly alike. In this study, we show that artificial...

"ANN instances showed consistent variation in their alignment with specific human subjects." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... This particular network is just like me fr!

Slow Transition to Low-Dimensional Chaos in Heavy-Tailed Recurrent Neural Networks Growing evidence suggests that synaptic weights in the brain follow heavy-tailed distributions, yet most theoretical analyses of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) assume Gaussian connectivity. We syste...

"Slow Transition to Low-Dimensional Chaos" story of my life www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The brain is the stupidest object in the universe.

Every misunderstanding and bad idea in history came from a brain.

Before brains, no one was wrong about anything.

"For-profit journals disproportionately cite other for-profit journals, academia-friendly journals preferentially cite other academia-friendly journals, and non-profit journals likewise favor citations to non-profit sources." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A line attractor maintains aggressiveness during feeding in “hangry” mice Aggression evolved to protect resources such as food from competitors, but animals must balance fighting and feeding so that they facilitate rather than hinder re-establishment of energy homeostasis. ...

The neuroscience of hanger: "When confronted with food and an intruder, hangry mice alternated between feeding and fighting" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

If you say ANYTHING with your vocal cords, you NEED to get Broca's Area. I talk pretty much all day every day and Broca's Area makes my talking better. It actually is... correcting everything as I'm saying it.

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.