Anirudh Wodeyar @awodeyar@qoto.org

Trying to find ways to get better at doing math by studying its neural correlates.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_qwFfldMK4
"Overlapping neural responses to symbolic math and formal logic in the intra-parietal sulcus" Yun-Fei Liu, Dr. Shipra Kanjlia, and Dr. Marina Bedny 2020

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1603205113
"Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians" Marie Amalric and Stanislas Dehaene 2016

The dissimilarity with language networks is interesting, and maybe my hyperlexia and difficulties with dyscalculia relate to one another. The intraparietal involvement in math, logic, and the multiple demand system is extra interesting to me though, because it is also correlated with integration of perceptual information to organize scenes and represent objects. Thinking of doing #mathematics as manipulating imagined objects, instead of language-like representations like nominalism suggests, seems to fit the data.

It's like something the mathematician Yuri Manin said in his book, "Mathematics as Metaphor" (2007):

"But what are we studying when we are doing mathematics?
A possible answer is this: we are studying ideas which can be handled as if they were real things. (P. Davis and R. Hersh call them 'mental objects with reproducible properties')"

Just out in Nature Neuroscience:

Cortical regulation of two-stage rapid eye movement sleep

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01195-2?utm_source=neuro_etoc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=toc_41593_25_12&utm_content=20221130

Nature

Cortical–hippocampal coupling during manifold exploration in motor cortex
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05533-z

I’m very proud to share: A smartphone intervention that enhances real-world memory and promotes differentiation of hippocampal activity in older adults.
Work led by @_chris__martin_@twitter.com, w/ @chrishoney@twitter.com @bryan_hong_@twitter.com @rachelnewsome@twitter.com @melellen_m@twitter.com (1/6)

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2214285119

The beginning of this AMA episode from Sean Carroll's Mindscape podcast was really great. I don't mean the initial part related to climate denial and social media (even though that was also interesting), but instead the next part about how he judges whether a new scientific paper is worth his time to dig deeper, since our attention is maybe our most precious resource.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/04/03/ama-april-2023/
(1/2)

A striking visualisation of #climatechange: the date of Kyoto cherry blossoms' reaching full bloom, plotted over the past 1000 years.

Thanks to the cultural significance of cherry blossoms in Japan, we have data on the specific day of the year when a very particular species of cherry blossom (P. jamasakura) reached "full-flowering" (満開) in a specific area on the outskirts of Kyoto (Arashiyama), all the way back to 800 AD.

The trend of the past 50 years is hard to miss…

A version of the "zooming in" animation up in the thread where the color of hats and clusters is based on their rotation (and the saturation is based on hat/cluster type), and the lowest level oscillates between the possible shapes.

We're looking for help to build a wireless, solar-powered chat network across the Philly area! Are you interested in learning about off-grid solar power? Do you have a sunny place on your roof, in your yard, or near an upstairs window where you can leave a small radio transceiver? This workshop may be for you!

Each participant will receive a free kit with all the parts needed to build a solar-powered LoRa radio node. You'll assemble the kit, mount it in a weatherproof enclosure (provided by you), and use the Meshtastic app to start sending encrypted text messages.

Registration opens Monday, April 3rd at 8:30 p.m. You can sign up on our site:
https://iffybooks.net/event/solar-chat-network

Supplies for this workshop are provided by a grant from the Engaged Humanities Studio at Swarthmore College. Many thanks to @pixouls for helping plan the event!

I don't know whether it counts as hyperventilating, but my relative high level of concern about the type of AI that LeCun put out there himself with #Galactica is that not that there is some sort of hard take off. It's that he and so many others are creating systems that can flood the zone with shit at a rate that would leave Steve Bannon reeling in shock and awe.

In a world where a bit of math can pass as human on the internet, we are obliged to be more unpredictable, more chaotic.

Be the language model failure mode you want to see in the taco.

You are here.

(March 2023 update)

Let's do #JoinMastodonDay on 9th of March!

Before: spread the word! Get to know Mastodon, choose a server, export contacts from 'other platforms', ...

On the 9th: Mastodon users write & boost tutorials and tips, share #Introduction posts, advertise servers, send invite links, ... and the Newcomers Come!

After: keep helping newcomers and sharing intro posts.

What say you? 😃​ Please boost if you're in!

an idea of @noellemitchell@mstdn.socialinspired by @alexwild 's #LeaveTwitterDay *

For #InternationalWomensDay, the entire collection of the Cambridge Elements series on women in the history of philosophy is available to download for free: https://www.cambridge.org/core/publications/elements/cambridge-elements-series/women-in-the-history-of-philosophy

#philosophy #HistoryOfPhilosophy #feminism #herstory @philosophy

Hello world! Elon Musk picking a twitter fight with Icelandic philanthropist and man of the year 2022 Haraldur Thorleifsson ended up being the final push that we needed, so now we are here on Mastodon. We don't know how any of this works, but follow us for posts on vision science, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience, and stupid memes.

A short argument for why the big publishers cannot be part of a publishing reform effort

Science is stuck in a vicious cycle it is hard to escape from. The decision to publish a scientific paper is made based on an evaluation of its likely importance and technical correctness. Scientists are evaluated based on these publication decisions, and resources (jobs, grants and promotions) are distributed accordingly.

The current system distorts scientific priorities. Science is incredibly competitive, resources are allocated on a short term basis, and the primary metric used to evaluate scientists is their publication record. As a consequence, there is an unavoidable pressure to select problems and design studies that can lead to results that are likely to be favourably evaluated and published in the short term. This is in opposition to the long term scientific value, a fact that appears to be widely acknowledged by working scientists (https://www.vox.com/2016/7/14/12016710/science-challeges-research-funding-peer-review-process).

The current system is a vicious cycle and stable equilibrium. In principle, we could choose to evaluate scientists and their work in a better way. However, no individual or small group can do this alone. If an institution chooses to hire scientists who do work that they believe will be of enduring scientific value despite being unlikely to win short term grant funding, they will take a huge financial hit. Public research is under such severe resource constraints that this is simply not feasible for most institutions even if they wished to do so. Similarly, a public funding body that makes decisions based on long term scientific value and not short term publishability is likely to be able to count fewer high profile papers in their output, and compared to other funding bodies will appear to be underperforming when they are reviewed at the government level. Individual scientists have even less flexibility than these institutions.

Journal prestige cements this problem. It is the widespread availability of an easily calculated metric based on journal prestige that makes this cycle so hard to break. If there were no such metric, different groups could try different approaches and the effect would not be so obvious in the short term. The availability of the metric forces all institutions to follow the same strategy, and makes it hard to deviate from this strategy.

The majority of big publishers commercial value rests on their journal prestige. If there were no funding implications to publishing in one journal rather than another, scientists would be free to choose based on price or features. There are widely available solutions with better features at virtually no cost. Consequently, the entire business model of these publishers would collapse without the journal prestige signal.

Big publishers therefore cannot be part of the needed reforms. The success of these reforms would untie the evaluation of the quality of scientific work from the journal it is published in, and this would destroy the business model of these publishers. They will therefore do everything in their power to resist such reform.

Divorcing from the big publishers will not be enough. Journal prestige is the cement of the current negative stable equilibrium, but eliminating that will not guarantee a globally better system. We need systems for publishing and evaluating science that is diverse and under the control of researchers. This is what we intend to do with Neuromatch Open Publishing (https://nmop.io/).

Two excellent journalism discussions of the minefield that is ChatGPT. I really like thinking of it in terms of the classic ELIZA condition - that it is a mirror reflecting our own selves back at us. That the minefield is not that students will use it to write essays but that we will lose ourselves in the mirror.

(The disturbing part of ChatGPT professing its love and trying to get the NYT journalist to leave his wife is not that ChatGPT mimics emotion, but that a sufficiently large portion of long conversations on the internet are catfishing that it started mirroring that catfishing back.)

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23617185/ai-chatbots-eliza-chatgpt-bing-sydney-artificial-intelligence-history

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/the-prompt-box-is-a-minefield-ai

So... what are the differences between #ThetaSequences and #Replay (in the rodent #Hippocampus ?

Here is an illustration from real data!

Fig 1 shows ~70 #PlaceCells firing while a rat runs on a maze to reach a reward. See how the activity is different between running and pausing?
Fig 2 shows possible theta sequences.
Fig 3 shows possible replay.

Spot the differences & check alt text for more info!

PS: (very simple) #Matlab code to plot this is available here !

1/2

Cardiogenic control of affective behavioural state https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05748-8 ... (this looks wild, interesting, and important, #Deisseroth)