Aazad | آزاد @aazad@qoto.org

Migrating to https://neuromatch.social in a while.

How would I go about looking for literature on the molecular dynamics of maintaining cellular fidelity within entropic constraints of thermal agitation?

For instance, the upper limits of cellular regeneration from before the metabolic demands of the process impede morphological fidelity of cellular structures? Any landmark works or figures in the field I should start with?

The paradoxical notion of freeing my thoughts by trapping them with words will forever frustrate and fascinate me.

And I say this as someone with little to no inner monologue; what leaves my lips or fingertips are often the initial verbalizations of my thoughts.

And I often worry about the right sequence of words that will express the full range of my thoughts.

I feel like I lose a lot of "cognitive fidelity" in discourse because my thoughts have to be converted into the social currency of verbalization and manipulated and perceived accordingly.

It always feels so very inadequate, as someone much more eloquent than I could ever hope to be phrased it, "[...] like communicating dreams in smoke signals."

Then, when you factor in the social metagame we use language in, matters are significantly more complex because you have to account for not only the semantic fidelity of your thoughts but also pragmatics, prosody, tone, and other contextual cues.

It's also one of the primary reasons I'm working my way through learning American Sign Language (also it's useful to know) because I'm curious about if I would struggle the same way, or perhaps differently.

I've often wondered about the gestural nature of signing vs. the (mostly) non-gestural nature of verbalisation, and if lacking an inner-monologue somehow puts me at odds with words in the sense that having an involuntary inner monologue meant you were able to always have your thoughts and "stream of consciousness" rehearsed and well-prepared for social discourse or communication.

I'm not sure as far as literature goes; I could be far off base.

To paraphrase Kerouac, "One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple."

.. except, in my case, they need not be simple. Being the right ones is good enough.

anyone working in botanical pathology have any favorite model organisms for studying cellular senesence, probably from a metabolic perspective of nutrient deprivation?

I'm thinking of something non-vascular, ideally inexpensive in terms of maintenance/growth via simple culture mediums with a decent genebase

#neuro folks, help a middling undergrad out with some basic visual cognition woes? (at least, I assume it falls under that, but it's closer to a kind of visual agnosia, context-wise)

I'm struggling with the words to put them in the appropriate jargon so bear with me.

I'm looking for a a specific label or term as well as the benchmark metric re: visual information vs. detail in the following cases:

1) remembering how many letters are on a screen vs. the font the letters were in or other visual details

2) In a picture, remembering how many objects categorically (i.e. bicycle, car, ball, dog) vs. details (i.e. red bicycle, blue car, yellow ball, type of dog)

conceptually, does the recall of these qualities differ and is there a specific term for remembering some better than the other and if there are tradeoffs?

the context I have in mind is visual aphantasia and whether there's a qualitative vs. quantitative aspect to recall or reimagining visuals you've already seen or reconstructing memory

I hope this makes sense, any literature that covers something similar would be much appreciated

Has anyone got any recommendations for books or papers on Corvids in general?

Ideally the neuroethology behind their behavior but anything to start with should do.

any recommendations for literature review search engines?

Google Scholar is fine for cursory searches but lacking for deep dives

current workflow is asking people in the field for landmark papers, running them on ResearchRabbit and creating the notes in Obsidian

I'm not sure if I'm using the correct terminology because I don't know the right words, but is there a theoretical morphospace model equivalent for cell development? like Raup's model for gastropod shells, etc.

So for the last year or so, I've been increasingly interested in complexity theory and chaos dynamics within the context of self-organization and emergence, and I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations on texts or landmark papers on this niche, especially with regards to the nonequlibrium dynamics of abiogenesis & cellular morphogenesis.

Bonus points if it specifically talks about self-organizational aspects of biochem systems arise because of certain physiochemical properties that seem baked into the laws of physics that make them tend towards the intertia of entropic gradients, etc. and how information theory might tie into it all.

I'm also interested in the upper limits of these self-organizational processes as far as thermodynamic entropy S Shannon entropy H go, I think these are called Bekenstein bounds but I'm not quite sure and I could be grossly misunderstanding the concept.

I'd appreciate any reading that might help me first pick up the words I'm looking for to figure out the interplay between what I'd like to look at because, despite the reading I've done so far, I'm not sure what I know and I'm even less sure about what I don't know or might be missing.

Here are some relevant texts I've read so, just for reference to avoid repeated recommendations and so anyone can sort of gauge my existing content knowledge:

I'd consider Schroedinger's Mind & Matter, What Is Life and Kauffman's World Beyond Physics, and Origins of Order as foundational texts for the trajectory I'm interested in
Nick Lane's Transformer and Oxygen
Strogatz's Nonlinear dynamics and chaos (heavy read, need to give it another few rounds but maybe after I get through the recs I get from here hopefully)
Mitchell's Complexity and Intro to Genetic Algorithms
Juarrero's Dynamics in Action was a major game change but this could use another read over too
I've also gone through some of Medawar's writings, namely Aristotle to Zoos and his lecture, An Unsolved Problem of Biology
Edelman's text on molecular embryology 'Topobiology' has been very helpful to orient myself as well

I think.. landmark papers might be ideal, I could probably use my ability to parse them and understand their significant as a useful benchmark to gauge where I'm at right now. But anything anyone thinks might help me orient myself would be appreciated. Even if it's undergraduate math texts, because I could probably use those too considering I'm pretty lacking.

Boosts would be very much appreciated since I'm not sure if I've managed to find most of the complexity folks from Santa Fe here yet.

Thank you in advance.

Any #neuroscience podcast recommendations?