#cognitivescience

Thought provoking essay on anthropomorphism and our interpretation of animal behaviour. Make sure to read the comment section as well.

Clearly, the way in which we ascribe - or identify - animal emotions will help shape our thinking about how we ought to treat them.

Less obviously, revising our views about anthropomorphism might change our thinking about moral responsibility. What are we thinking and doing when we say "Good dog!"?

https://aeon.co/essays/when-is-enjoying-funny-animal-videos-not-anthropomorphism

#Animals #Ethology #Philosophy #Bioethics #CognitiveScience #Psychology #Ecology #MoralPhilosophy #Ethics #Science

The latest episode of my "Theory of Change" podcast is out.

Venkatesh Rao joined me to cut through the AI hype and doomerism, exploring how large language models really work and why "mediocrity" is often the secret ingredient behind breakthroughs in evolution, technology, and the economy.

https://plus.flux.community/p/why-mediocrity-seems-to-be-the-key

#ai #cognitivescience #biology

ARC-3, a sneak peek at the next-gen, interactive reasoning benchmark designed to illuminate the capability gap between today's AI and tomorrow's AGI.

Play First 3 Games
https://three.arcprize.org/

As with previous ARC tests, the actual games used for testing AI are kept secret. AI algorithms must learn the games on the spot.

There are no instructions. You must play the game to discover controls, rules, and goal.

Interactive Reasoning Benchmarks (IRBs) test for a broad scope of capabilities:

• Exploration
• Percept -> Plan → Action
• Memory
• Goal Acquisition
• Alignment

Game Design Constraints

• Easy for humans (can pick it up in <1 min of game play)
• Core Knowledge Priors (no language, trivia, cultural symbols)
• Should require no instructions to play
• Should be fun for humans and playable in 5-10 minutes
• Innovative and novel game mechanics encouraged (Hidden state, theory of mind, long term planning, navigating other agents, etc.)

#AI #ML #MachineLearning #AGI #ARC #cognition #cogsci #cognitiveScience #deepLearning

How Brain Circuits Influence Mood, Behavior, and Social Skills

#BrainCircuits #Neuroscience #MentalHealth #BrainNetworks #EmotionAndDecision #DefaultModeNetwork #BasalGanglia #LimbicSystem #Neurobiology #CognitiveScience

https://youtube.com/shorts/OQ_sy3WfFG8?feature=share

A team from the Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center (CIMCYC, cimcyc.bsky.social) published a #programming guide aimed at students in #psychology and #cognitive #neuroscience. This evolving set of #tutorials offers a curated collection of conceptual reflections, practical examples, and methodological recommendations. The material is available in #Python, #RStats, and #MATLAB.

https://wobc.github.io/programming_book/
#CognitiveScience #OpenScience

Brainpower Unlocked: Scientists Pinpoint Cells Driving Intelligent Behavior

#Brainpower, #Neuroscience, #Intelligence, #CognitiveScience, #BrainResearch, #NeuroscienceDiscovery, #SmartMind, #BrainCells, #Neuroplasticity, #HumanIntelligence

https://medium.com/@jckapadia003/brainpower-unlocked-scientists-pinpoint-cells-driving-intelligent-behavior-b2aecd707a23

Neurotransmitters and Brain Health: The Science Behind Memory and Mood

#BrainChemistry #Neurotransmitters #Neuroscience #BrainHealth #MentalHealth #Glutamate #Serotonin #Dopamine #BloodBrainBarrier #NeuralCommunication #Neuroplasticity #BrainFunction #Neurobiology #CognitiveScience #MentalWellness

https://youtube.com/shorts/oM4FjZm4FEg?feature=share

Fascinating but not surprising: smarter people tend to question moral foundations more, especially those based on tradition, conformity or group loyalty. Maybe it’s not a lack of morality, but a refusal to accept inherited dogma.

#psychology #intelligence #morality #criticalthinking #cognitivescience #research

https://www.psypost.org/people-with-higher-cognitive-ability-have-weaker-moral-foundations-new-study-finds/

The Mind as Semi-Solid Smoke

This post continues the series on Socratic Thinking, turning the space-and-place lens inward to examine the mind itself. Human minds can be thought of as an imperfect place with the ability to create their own insta-places to navigate ambiguity. 

Exploration in any real or conceptual space needs navigational markers with sufficient meaning. Humans are biologically predisposed to seek out and use navigational markers. This tendency is rooted in our neural architecture, emerges early in life, and is shared with other animals, reflecting its deep evolutionary origins 1,2 .  Even the simplest of life performing chemotaxis uses the signal-field of food to navigate. 

When you’re microscopic, the territory is the map; at human scale, we externalise those cues as landmarks—then mirror the process inside our heads. Just as cells follow chemical gradients, our thoughts follow self-made landmarks, yet these landmarks are vaporous.

From the outside our mind is a single place, it is our identity. Probe closer and our identity is nebulous and dissolves the way a city dissolves into smaller and smaller places the closer you look. We use our identity to create the first stable place in the world and then use other places to navigate life. However, these places come from unreliable sources, our internal and external environments.  How do we know the places are even real, and do we have the knowledge to trust their reality? Well, we don’t. We can’t judge our mental landmarks false. Callard calls this normative self-blindness: the built-in refusal to saw off the branch we stand on.   

Normative self-blindness is a trick to gloss over details and keep moving. Insta-places are conjured from our experience and are treated as solid no matter how poorly they are tied down by actual knowledge. We can accept that a place was loosely formed in the past, an error, or is not yet well defined in the future, is unknown. However, in the moment, the places exist and we use them to see. 

Understanding and accepting that our minds work this way is a key tenet of Socratic Thinking. It makes adopting the posture of inquiry much easier. Socratic inquiry begins by admitting that everyone’s guiding landmarks may be made of semi-solid smoke.

1Chan, Edgar, Oliver Baumann, Mark A. Bellgrove, and Jason B. Mattingley. “From Objects to Landmarks: The Function of Visual Location Information in Spatial Navigation.” Frontiers in Psychology 3 (2012). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00304

2Freas, Cody A., and Ken Cheng. “The Basis of Navigation Across Species.” Annual Review of Psychology 73, no. 1 (January 4, 2022): 217–41. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020821-111311.

#AgnesCallard #cognitiveBiases #cognitiveScience #criticalThinking #decisionMaking #epistemology #evolutionaryPsychology #humanPsychology #identity #introspection #mentalModels #metacognition #mindset #navigation #neuroscience #normativeSelfBlindness #personalDevelopment #philosophy #sensemaking #socraticThinking #spaceAndPlace

From Blueprints to Signals: Understanding Phenotypes and Endophenotypes in Neuroscience

#Neuroscience #BrainAndBehavior #MentalHealth #BrainMapping #NeuralCircuits #EmotionAndMemory #MentalDisorders #BrainRegions #CognitiveScience #MindAndBehavior

https://youtube.com/shorts/J_pQyOQdeLQ?feature=share

Thinking with places 

“A farmer has to cut down trees to create space for his farmstead and fields. Yet once the farm is established it becomes an ordered world of meaning—a place—and beyond it is the forest and space.” — Yi-Fu Tuan

Thinking itself is place-making: the act of converting undifferentiated possibility into navigable meaning.

A place comes into being the moment we interrupt undifferentiated space. Place-making is fundamentally an act of interruption. Space is thought of as possibility but is unavailable without the signposts of place. When a place is created we impose a way of looking, being, and acting on the space of choice. The place you pick to navigate your space defines the identity you will inhabit during your quest. Every tool is a micro-place: it frames what can be thought and forecloses alternative moves. They enforce the kind of thoughts that can be had, the type of exploration that can be done, and configures space in an opinionated way. 

Picking a tool commits us to a world view. Consider the space of ‘good TV shows’. Family, friends and culture have made the choice of what good means. When Netflix suggests shows it uses your watching history as a probe to create place so that every individual is always watching ‘good’ shows. The pure possibility space of the search bar is disrupted by the suggestions provided.

Like algorithmic curation, Socratic dialogue also interrupts space, it is interrogation as cartography. Socratic thinking is also an act of interruption and making concrete what was nebulous. It’s asking us to specify which show, if we claim to love TV. Socratic thinking (henceforth referred to as just thinking) starts by probing that which does not need questioning, the answers that are obvious the ones that everyone knows. This may seem foreign at first glance but we do this all the time, say we make a list of our favorite TV shows, someone always says you are missing this or that show and that this list is completely wrong. This kind of disagreement leads to the shared quest of answering the question, ‘What is it to be entertained?’. 

Thinking pursues knowledge through the act of stabilizing answers to such questions by creating places in those unexamined areas. Discussion allows us to map. There is usually no well defined answer for such questions, if there were, they would simply be problems that we could solve with a google search. The quest stops when the parties involved are satisfied that they have arrived at an answer. Thinking is the act of place-making by taking something that was ungraspable and tying it down with knowledge. Place is, after all, an “ordered world of meaning” and we can use these places to create home bases from which to explore.   

Even without other people simply engaging with the reality of the universe is sufficient for thought. Places are stable systems which provide a surface on which your thoughts and hypothesis can be tested. Even if there is no other person around and you’re simply engaged with looking at the world can uncover a new truth tied down by knowledge.  

Thinking is the process of updating beliefs based on the mini places that make up the space that you’re interrogating. Each place is a noisy pointer to the underlying truth, and each updating of belief allows you to get closer to the knowledge you seek.

#algorithmicCuration #cognitiveScience #criticalThinking #epistemology #mentalModels #philosophy #senseMaking #socraticMethod #spaceAndPlace #toolUse #worldview #yiFuTuan

Having trouble falling asleep—or staying asleep?

I've put together a broad, research-backed collection of sleep tips that you can actually use. Most are based on peer-reviewed science, and the page is continuously updated.

Tips for:

Falling asleep
Staying asleep
What to do if you wake up at night
Managing light, caffeine, mindset, and more
Check it out: http://mysleepbutton.com/support/msb-sleep-tips/

#Sleep #Insomnia #ScienceBased #CognitiveScience #Wellbeing
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TikTok and similar platforms linked to body dissatisfaction and eating disorder symptoms

https://www.psypost.org/tiktok-and-similar-platforms-linked-to-body-dissatisfaction-and-eating-disorder-symptoms/

#health #mentalhealth #psychology #neuroscience #cognitivescience #technology #tech #socialmedia #tiktok #reels #shorts #bodydissatisfaction #eatingdisorders

Journey into the Mind: How Brain Networks Enable Thought, Emotion, and Social Life

#BrainScience #Neuroscience #PrefrontalCortex #DefaultModeNetwork #SelfReflection #Memory #SocialCognition #BrainHealth #Neuroplasticity #MentalWellness #Neurochemistry #StressAndBrain #CognitiveScience #BrainConnections #MindAndBrain

https://youtube.com/shorts/rMO3K_97PCY?feature=share

MIT study: ChatGPT users showed lowest brain engagement vs Google/no-tool groups when writing essays. 83% couldn't recall their own content minutes later. AI dependency may weaken memory & critical thinking. #MIT #ChatGPT #AI #BrainHealth #CognitiveScience #Research #Education

MIT shows how your brain tackles the impossible—by switching strategies like an AI under pressure. #CognitiveScience #Neuroscience #AIandHumans

https://geekoo.news/the-secret-algorithms-inside-your-brain/

Your brain’s hidden beat could be the key to intelligence. New research finds smarter people synchronize their thoughts like a mental orchestra. #BrainWaves #Neuroscience #CognitiveScience

https://geekoo.news/your-brains-rhythms-may-predict-how-smart-you-are/

Your Brain Has a Hidden Beat -- and smarter minds sync to it like a well-rehearsed orchestra! New research shows theta waves (4-8 Hz) synchronize better in high-cognitive brains during demanding tasks. Better neural timing = sharper focus when the pressure's on.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/06/17/0048247/your-brain-has-a-hidden-beat----and-smarter-minds-sync-to-it

#Neuroscience #BrainResearch #CognitiveScience

#Checklists have massive benefit in #aviation, #engineering, and #medicine.

Now #cognitiveScience has a list of 51 simple yes-no questions (from experts around the world) to design and assess #research — its quality, #reproducibility, etc.

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-025-02705-3

#philSci #edu

In my latest Theory of Change episode, I spoke with political scientist Eric Oliver about his research showing that American political divides reflect cognitive divides between "intuitionists" who think with their guts and "rationalists" who prefer abstract thinking.

His book predicted the RFK-Trump synthesis so is worth much discussion. https://plus.flux.community/p/americas-political-divide-is-psychological

#cognitivescience #polisci #psychology