Saugat Bolakhe in Quanta:

Memory doesn’t represent a single scientific mystery; it’s many of them. Neuroscientists and psychologists have come to recognize varied types of memory that coexist in our brain: episodic memories of past experiences, semantic memories of facts, short- and long-term memories, and more. These often have different characteristics and even seem to be located in different parts of the brain. But it’s never been clear what feature of a memory determines how or why it should be sorted in this way.

Now, a new theory backed by experiments using artificial neural networks proposes that the brain may be sorting memories by evaluating how likely they are to be useful as guides in the future. In particular, it suggests that many memories of predictable things, ranging from facts to useful recurring experiences — like what you regularly eat for breakfast or your walk to work — are saved in the brain’s neocortex, where they can contribute to generalizations about the world. Memories less likely to be useful — like the taste of that unique drink you had at that one party — are kept in the seahorse-shaped memory bank called the hippocampus.

More here.

John Simpson in The Guardian:

Even people around President Biden now accept that pulling out of Afghanistan in the way the US did two years ago was an utter disaster. It ruined the lives of millions, destroyed the social and economic advances of 20 years, and returned the country’s women to a state of slavery. The result was to make the US look weak and pathetic; no wonder Vladimir Putin decided he could safely invade Ukraine, only six months later.

The suffering of ordinary Afghans as they panicked and tried to escape the Taliban shocked the entire world. The scenes in the approaches to Kabul airport on those 17 boiling hot August days were unbearable. People tore at one another and trod the dying underfoot in order to get to the barbed wire that separated them from the airfield, screaming and waving the bits of paper they hoped would get them out of the country. The Taliban fighters lost all control, hitting out indiscriminately with their rifle butts, and firing into the air or at people’s feet. Some women tried to throw their babies over the barbed wire to the British and American soldiers on the other side; more than one baby landed on the wire itself.

More here.

Meat Market

—after Lebanon, a country with one of the worst economic crises since the 19th century

the price of bread has gone up again. Throngs of cars
slouch toward shuttering gas stations. The currency, a farce

with each swing of the gavel, numbers
soar. Fifty thousand pounds by day’s end.

what’s another ten thousand? Or a hundred thousand?
a hundred and forty thousand pounds to the dollar

my mother’s aged laugh thunders about the
price of rice. I worry myself out of an appetite

I want to believe in miracles, instead
I starve gratitude with guilt.

how much for meat today? There are
no lambs left to sacrifice in the afterlife.

the tomatoes wilt into speckled
wax. I bury them in the mountains.

my mother’s aged laugh thunders about the price
of olive oil. I swallow glass in small gulps.

look, the crops melt into a starved earth
peppered with griefs my people speak like spells.

behold, a nation where time itself is a construct.
where every day is simultaneously 1975, 2003, and 2020.

few things are as grotesque as survival but what if
we made this life so beautiful it has no choice but to bend.

by Lara Atallah
from Split This Rock

From Nature:

In a recent study published in Nature, Serger et al. connected intermittent fasting (IF) to gut microbiome alterations and enhanced peripheral nerve regeneration following injury.¹ Fasting has been purported to have neuroregenerative effects, but the underlying mechanisms remained unclear. The authors found that IF-induced elevation of IPA (a microbiome-derived metabolite) promotes neutrophil infiltration into the dorsal root ganglia (DRG), which enhances the regeneration of sciatic nerve fibers.

Peripheral nerve injuries, acquired through mechanical stress to the nerve, affect more than 20 million people in the US alone, leading to an enormous social and economic burden.² Treatment for nerve injuries involves microsurgery and despite advancements there are still major challenges that prevent a full recovery.² The peripheral nervous system has self-regenerative properties; however, these intrinsic properties are often insufficient and complete recovery is not achieved.² As a consequence, more than 50% of affected individuals are not satisfied with their sensory recovery, have limited motor recovery, and neuropathic pain often develops.² Thus, the need for new therapeutic strategies to promote nerve regeneration is urgent. The regenerative effects of environmental factors like diet and calorie restriction have been previously investigated. In their recent study, Serger et al. make an elegant connection between fasting, the gut microbiome, and neuroimmune pathways, which together improve regeneration in a mouse model of nerve injury.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Tanya Bush in Guernica:

Italy would be where I would whisk, mix, and knead my way into an idealized self. If I could get there, I would shed my anxious energy and compulsive need for affirmation, my nasty addiction to the cool-mint vape. I would slow down; I would journal. I would become tan and strong from simple pastas. I would eat intuitively — no more take-out burritos in the middle of the night, no more nubby cheeses scrounged from the bowels of the fridge. If I could find a way to go to Italy, I would become a real baker.

More here.

R. Douglas Fields in Quanta:

One day, while threading a needle to sew a button, I noticed that my tongue was sticking out. The same thing happened later, as I carefully cut out a photograph. Then another day, as I perched precariously on a ladder painting the window frame of my house, there it was again!

What’s going on here? I’m not deliberately protruding my tongue when I do these things, so why does it keep making appearances? After all, it’s not as if that versatile lingual muscle has anything to do with controlling my hands. Right?

Yet as I would learn, our tongue and hand movements are intimately interrelated at an unconscious level. This peculiar interaction’s deep evolutionary roots even help explain how our brain can function without conscious effort.

More here.

Angus Deaton in the Boston Review:

Smith was not only a great thinker but also a great writer. He was an empirical economist whose sketchy data were more often right than wrong; he was skeptical, especially about wealth; and he was a balanced and humane thinker who cared about justice, noting how much more important it was than beneficence. But the story I want to tell is about economic failure and about economics failure, and about how Smith’s insights and humanity need to be brought back into the mainstream of economics. Much of the evidence that I use draws on my work with Anne Case as well as her work with Lucy Kraftman on Scotland in relation to the rest of the UK.

In her recent book Adam Smith’s America (2022), political scientist Glory Liu reports that in 1976, at an event celebrating the bicentenary of the publication of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, George Stigler, the eminent Chicago economist, said “I bring you greetings from Adam Smith, who is alive and well and living in Chicago!” Stigler might also have noted that the U.S. economy was flourishing too, as it had been for three decades, and might have been happy to connect the flourishing of Smith and the flourishing of the economy.

More here.

David Shariatmadari in The Guardian:

Halfway through my interview with the co-founder of DeepMind, the most advanced AI research outfit in the world, I mention that I asked ChatGPT to come up with some questions for him. Mustafa Suleyman is mock-annoyed, because he’s currently developing his own chatbot, called Pi, and says I should have used that. But it was ChatGPT that became the poster child for the new age of artificial intelligence earlier this year, when it showed it could do everything from compose poetry about Love Island in the style of John Donne to devise an itinerary for a minibreak in Lisbon.

The trick hadn’t really worked, or so I thought – ChatGPT’s questions were mostly generic talking points. I’d asked it to try a bit harder. “Certainly, let’s dive into more specific and original questions that can elicit surprising answers from Mustafa Suleyman,” it had trilled. The results still weren’t up to much. Even so, I chuck one at him as he sits in the offices of his startup in Palo Alto on the other end of a video call (he left DeepMind in 2019). “How do you envision AI’s role in supporting mental health care in the future,” I ask – and suddenly, weirdly, I feel as if I’ve got right to the heart of why he does what he does.

More here.

David Shariatmadari at The Guardian:

The Coming Wave distils what is about to happen in a forcefully clear way. AI, Suleyman argues, will rapidly reduce the price of achieving any goal. Its astonishing labour-saving and problem-solving capabilities will be available cheaply and to anyone who wants to use them. He memorably calls this “the plummeting cost of power”. If the printing press allowed ordinary people to own books, and the silicon chip put a computer in every home, AI will democratise simply doing things. So, sure, that means getting a virtual assistant to set up a company for you, or using a swarm of builder bots to throw up an extension. Unfortunately, it also means engineering a run on a bank, or creating a deadly virus using a DNA synthesiser.

The most extraordinary scenarios in the book come from the realm of biotech, which is already undergoing its own transformation thanks to breakthroughs such as Crispr, the gene-editing technology. Here, AI will act as a potent accelerant. Manufactured products, Suleyman tells us, could one day be “grown” from synthetic biological materials rather than assembled, using carbon sucked out of the atmosphere.

more here.

Kira Thurman at the New York Times:

In 1947, the Black German musician Fasia Jansen stood on a street in Hamburg and began to sing the music of Brecht in her thick Low German accent to anyone passing by. Perhaps she’d learned the songs from prisoners and internees at Neuengamme, the concentration camp where she’d been forced to work four years earlier. Perhaps she’d learned them in the early days after the war, when she’d performed with Holocaust survivors at a hospital in 1945. One thing was clear: As Jansen wrestled with her trauma, song was at the center of her experience.

Jansen does not appear in Jeremy Eichler’s new book, “Time’s Echo,” but the impulse to turn to music during and after the Holocaust is at the heart of it. Eichler, The Boston Globe’s chief classical music critic, suggests that music can help us remember what we’ve lost. “Time’s Echo” is an engrossing recovery project that reveals the depths of Europe’s ability — and inability — to mourn those losses.

more here.

Poem

If we have no soul
something aches
in us anyway

Heaves our breath
pumps our blood

Sun thrown across treetops
Do you see New Mexico?

Windstorms
crack across it
days break
against it

I hurt
for dry dirt
big sky
bell in a tower
sage
across the eye

Burnt land
old sand carcass
your rosebuds
are hardening
your leaves turning
my heart
burning

by Natalie Goldberg
from Top of My Lungs
The Overlook Press, 2002

Herman Mark Schwartz in The Syllabus:

We noticed you aren’t using the term neoliberalism much in your recent work. While we’re not partisan regarding whether neoliberalism is dead or alive, what do you think about the utility of framing debates in global political economy in those terms? Have there been structural changes in the last five to ten years that merit retiring that term in your field?

The short version is that I think that neoliberalism is one of those empty labels like financialization and globalization, which conceal much more than they reveal. Financialization, yeah, it’s about money, but what specifically? Globalization, it’s about the integration of what had been somewhat insulated parts of the global economy, but so what? And neoliberalism, similarly, only tells us that we’re no longer living in what Bob Jessop and others have called the Keynesian welfare state model. As President Nixon once said, “Even though we’re all Keynesians, we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

More than a five- or ten-year perspective, you really need to go back 30, 40, 50 years to understand what’s going on. Much as we – and here I use “we” very expansively – were living in welfare states that were constructed in the ’30s, ’40s, but especially the ’50s and ’60s, today we are living in an economy and a set of social structures that were already emerging at the end of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s.

More here.