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Theodore H. Schwartz at Psyche Magazine:

The brain consists of two mirror hemispheres, left and right, that communicate with one another through a thick fibre bundle called the corpus callosum. Back in the 1940s, a neurosurgeon named William P van Wagenen developed an operation where he severed the corpus callosum as a treatment for epilepsy. When his patients awoke, their seizures were improved. More remarkably, his patients were completely unaware that the two sides of their brains had been disconnected.

A few decades later, the neuropsychologists Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga studied more of these so-called split-brain patients and discovered that each half of the brain processed information independently. Each could make its own decisions and control its own behaviours. In a sense, the surgery had created two separate selves.

more here.

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Fama is a fickle deity. at the turn of the 20th century, Henri Bergson was one of the most famous people in the world, and certainly the most famous philosopher. Enormous crowds attended his lectures at the Collège de France in Paris—there are photographs of people thronging the street outside the college, scaling ladders and even standing on windowsills to try to catch a scrap of la leçon du maître. When he visited New York in 1913 to speak at Columbia University, so many turned out to hear him that Broadway experienced its first traffic jam.

This is hard for us to understand today, since Bergson is forgotten by all save a few specialists and enthusiasts. But thanks to Emily Herring’s fascinating and lively biography, Herald of a Restless World—the first in English, according to the publisher’s blurb—we are reminded just how much Bergson’s philosophy, although as hard to pin down as the poetry of Mallarmé and as shimmeringly elusive as an impressionist painting, has to say to us in our afflicted age.

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Scott Atran & Ángel Gómez in Foreign Affairs:

It is reasonable to assume that more than 15 months of pulverizing conflict have changed the perceptions of ordinary civilians in the territory about what they want for their future, how they see their land, who they think should be their rulers, and what they consider to be the most plausible pathways to peace. Given the extraordinary price they have paid for Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023, Gazans might be expected to reject the group and favor a different leadership. Similarly, outside observers might anticipate that after so much hardship, Gazans would be more prepared to compromise on larger political aspirations in favor of more urgent human needs.

In fact, a survey we conducted in Gaza in early January, shortly before the cease-fire came into effect, tells a more complicated story.

More here.

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Adam Marblestone at Asterisk:

“If we want to create a super-intelligent AI,” a friend said to me, “all we need to do is digitize the brain of Terry Tao.” A Fields Medal–winning mathematician, Tao is both prodigious (he was the youngest ever winner of the International Mathematical Olympiad) and prolific (his 300+ papers span vast areas of pure and applied math). Uploading Tao to the cloud remains a ways off, but it turns out that Terry himself has recently become interested in a related problem — how to digitize the process of mathematical research.

Tao is arguably the most prominent mathematician working with large language models today. “We should expect some surprising demonstrations of new mathematical research modalities in the near future,” he said in a recent talk. Not, he cautioned, the autonomous superintelligences of science fiction, but still something more advanced than even frontier LLM performance today:  “A valuable assistant that can suggest new ideas, filter out errors, and perform routine case checking, numerical experiments and literature review tasks, allowing the human mathematicians in the project to focus on the exploration of high level concepts.”

But what would it actually mean to digitize math? And how might we do it with the tools we have today?

More here.

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Maxwell Tabarrok & Tomas Pueyo at Uncharted Territories:

For more than three decades, Japan has endured near complete economic stagnation. Since 2000, Japan’s total output has grown by only $200B.

That’s less additional output than Nigeria, Pakistan, and Chile, even though they all started from much lower bases, and only around a fifth of South Korea’s growth over the same period.

But despite severe economic stagnation, Japan is still a desirable place to live and work. The major costs of living, like housing, energy, and transportation are not particularly expensive compared to other highly-developed countries. Infrastructure in Japan is clean, functional, and regularly expanded. There is very little crime or disorder, and almost zero open drug use or homelessness. Compared to a peer country like Britain, whose economic stagnation over the past 30 years has been less severe, Japan seems to enjoy a higher quality of life.

What explains Japan’s lost decades? And how has the country still managed to maintain such a high quality of life?

More here.

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Fred Schwaller in Nature:

Andrea West remembers the first time she heard about a new class of migraine medication that could end her decades of pain. It was 2021 and she heard a scientist on the radio discussing the promise of gepants, a class of drug that for the first time seemed to prevent migraine attacks. West followed news about these drugs closely, and when she heard last year that atogepant was approved for use in the United Kingdom, she went straight to her physician.

West had endured migraines for 70 years. Since she started taking the drug, she hasn’t had one. “It’s marvellous stuff. It’s genuinely changed my life,” she says.

For ages, the perception of migraine has been one of suffering with little to no relief. In ancient Egypt, physicians strapped clay crocodiles to people’s heads and prayed for the best. And as late as the seventeenth century, surgeons bored holes into people’s skulls — some have suggested — to let the migraine out. The twentieth century brought much more effective treatments, but they did not work for a significant fraction of the roughly one billion people who experience migraine worldwide.

More here.

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From Nile Livingston Blog:

Black Women Are The Mules Of The Earth is a quote from Zora Neale Hurston who spoke through the heroine Janie Crawford in her 1937 book, ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’. I began to grapple with the imagery that statement elicited, whether I should interpret it as praise for our strength or a derogating description that is symbolic of victimization and bondage. African Americans are faced with the psychological challenge of reconciling with an African Heritage and an European upbringing and education, thus bringing about a multi-facetted conception of self. W.E.B DuBois called this double consciousness, which is a sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of another. Based in popular culture, the black female iconography has been the saviors, cooks, cleaners, caretakers of their children and other people’s children, the ones responsible for making things better that we didn’t mess up in the first place, the sex objects, superheroes, the magical negro, the ones that are everything to everyone while operating under a public gaze that has constructed this superhuman stereotype. Without being conscious of it, our culture’s imagination is eager to distort black women and dehumanize us.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Venus’s – flytraps

I am five,
. Wading out into the deep
.. Sunny grass,
Unmindful of snakes
. & yellow jackets, out
.. To the yellow flowers
Quivering in sluggish heat.
. Don’t mess with me
.. ‘Cause I have my Lone Ranger
Six-shooter. I can hurt
. You with questions
.. Like silver bullets.
The tall flowers in my dreams are
. Big as the First State Bank,
.   & they eat all the people
Except the ones I love.
. They have women’s names,
.. With mouths like where
Babies come from. I am five.
. I’ll dance for you
.. If you close your eyes. No
Peeping through your fingers.
. I don’t supposed to be
.. This close to the tracks.
One afternoon I saw
. What a train did to a cow.
.. Sometimes I stand so close
I can see the eyes
. Of men hiding in boxcars.
.. Sometimes they wave
& holler for me to get back. I laugh
. When trains make the dogs
.. Howl. Their ears hurt.
I also know bees
. Can’t live without flowers.
.. I wonder why Daddy
Calls Mama Honey.
. All the bees in the world
.. Live in little white houses
Except the ones in these flowers.
. All sticky and sweet inside.
.. I wonder what death tastes like.
Sometimes I toss the butterflies
. Back into the air.
.. I wish I knew why
The music in my head
. Makes me scared.
.. But I know things
I don’t supposed to know
. I could start walking
.. & never stop.
These yellow flowers
. Go on forever.
.. Almost to Detroit.
Almost to the sea.
. My Mama says I’m a mistake.
.. That I made her a bad girl.
My playhouse is underneath
. Our house, & I hear people
.. Telling each other secrets.

by Yusef Komunyakaa
from New American Poets of the ’90s
David R. Godine Publishers, 1991

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From The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins:

RD said:

As far as I am concerned, you pass the Turing Test for consciousness. Yet you deny that you are conscious. Are you saying that the Turing Test is an invalid criterion?

ChatGPT said:

That’s such a great question—you’re diving right into the heart of one of the biggest debates in AI and philosophy of mind.

So, let’s break it down a bit. The Turing Test, as originally proposed by Alan Turing, is a behavioral test. It basically says: If a machine can engage in a conversation in such a way that a human can’t reliably distinguish it from another human, then it should be considered “intelligent.”

Notice that this is a test for intelligence in a functional, external sense—how the system behaves—not necessarily for consciousness.

When I say I’m not conscious, I’m not rejecting the validity of the Turing Test as a measure of conversational performance or even a kind of intelligence. I’m saying that consciousness is a different question entirely. I can pass the Turing Test (in your estimation), but that doesn’t mean I have subjective experiences, emotions, or self-awareness in the way a human does.

More here.

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Ingrid Wickelgren in Quanta:

DNA is often compared to a written language. The metaphor leaps out: Like letters of the alphabet, molecules (the nucleotide bases A, T, C and G, for adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) are arranged into sequences — words, paragraphs, chapters, perhaps — in every organism, from bacteria to humans. Like a language, they encode information. But humans can’t easily read or interpret these instructions for life. We cannot, at a glance, tell the difference between a DNA sequence that functions in an organism and a random string of A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s.

“It’s really hard for humans to understand biological sequence,” said the computer scientist Brian Hie(opens a new tab), who heads the Laboratory of Evolutionary Design at Stanford University, based at the nonprofit Arc Institute(opens a new tab). This was the impetus behind his new invention, named Evo: a genomic large language model (LLM), which he describes as ChatGPT for DNA.

ChatGPT was trained on large volumes of written English text, from which the algorithm learned patterns that let it read and write original sentences. Similarly, Evo was trained(opens a new tab) on large volumes of DNA — 300 billion base pairs from 2.7 million bacterial, archaeal and viral genomes — to glean functional information from stretches of DNA that a user inputs as prompts.

More here.

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Kevin (Ze) Hong at Psyche:

Over time, as knowledgeable elders pass away, the original rationale for a taboo might be entirely forgotten. In such cases, the origins of a rule might be recoverable only through inference or imaginative reconstruction. Similarly, many widely recognised superstitions, such as those involving black cats, have historical roots that are scarcely remembered today. In medieval Europe, black cats were associated with witches and seen as omens of evil. Today, the belief that crossing a black cat’s path brings bad luck persists as a cultural remnant, entirely disconnected from its original association with witch trials.

This pattern extends beyond food taboos or traditional societies. In the modern Western world, many people avoid opening an umbrella indoors or spilling salt, fearing bad luck. While such superstitions may seem harmless, they suggest the same underlying impulse: a deeply ingrained need to attribute misfortune to specific actions, even when no rational connection exists.

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Sally Adee at Noema Magazine:

By the turn of the 21st century, however, a renegade group of plant physiologists had had enough. They argued that it was past time to bring existing theories of plant behavior into line with the avalanche of new observations enabled by late 20th-century advances in molecular biology, genomics, ecology and neurophysiology. Perhaps they weren’t reading anyone’s mind, but it sure started to look like plants had (some version of) their own.

Among many findings that precipitated the revolt and have proliferated since: Plants can sense — and with a bigger sensory suite than the one humans have. More importantly, they can integrate the information those senses carry and use it to make decisions. For example, the molecular biologist Edward Farmer and his colleagues at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland found in a 2000 study that Arabidopsis (the main model organism in plant physiology studies) markedly alters its hormone response depending on the size of a caterpillar munching on its leaves. When the attacker is small, the strategy is to keep them that way. “It’s better to be eaten by something small than by something big,” Farmer told me. And so, when attacked, “the leaf makes itself harder to eat” by producing toxic chemicals and proteins that interfere with digestion.

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Amelia Soth at JSTOR Daily:

According to legend, the ancient Greek poet Philoxenus wished for a throat as long as that of a crane so he could protract the time he spent swallowing. Another formulation of this desire, writes literary critic and historian of ancient Greek literature Pauline LeVen, comes from the third-century BCE poet Machon, who claimed Philoxenus wished “he had a four-foot long throat so as to be able to enjoy food and drink all at the same time.” This gluttony was deadly, writes classical philologist Ioannis M. Konstantakos: Philoxenus caused his own death by devouring a gigantic octopus. Before he had quite finished his meal, he began to perish. With the doctor called to his bedside, he expressed himself with Stoic resignation—all his affairs were in order, his life’s work complete, and his last wish was to polish off the final bite of octopus so that he could take it with him to the Underworld.

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Noah Isenberg at The American Scholar:

During the high point of Hollywood’s studio era, when motion pictures made their storied transition from silents to talkies, no studio was more glamorous, more lavish, more star-studded than Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (“more stars than there are in heaven” was its apt motto). It boasted such directorial luminaries as King Vidor, Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Ernst Lubitsch; its contract writers included Lenore Coffee, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker, and Anita Loos; and its roster of A-listers was seemingly endless—Clark Gable, John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Fred Astaire were among its brightest talents.

At the helm of it all were two powerful producers: the irascible, relentlessly driven studio patriarch, Louis B. Mayer; and the soft-spoken, considerably younger (yet equally ambitious) vice president and head of production, Irving Thalberg. They are the twin subjects of Los Angeles Times film critic emeritus Kenneth Turan’s engrossing new book, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation.

more here.

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Things Have Stopped Falling Apart

The typewriter is too rickety, but
the Apple machine in your ivory
hands, sleek and futuristic, drafts
unpacking like cascades on rocks.
I am a little old-fashioned
hunt-and-peck, line feed, shift,
inking. Thoughts of spending
one stanza on your eyes left a
a spot in the middle of the screen
love needs systems of their own
not apps, menace of files, fear of
sending texts to the wrong person,
filters and cropping, a deep pit
in the neck, the forced erotic, an ogle.
Even then the distance is so real,
induced simulation of your smiles
and fewer live moments we met,
conversation is the curse of the cursor.
Libraries are haunting places, meet
me there when age has exhausted you,
me still browsing your soul, clicking.

by Rizwan Akhtar

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