The “neural fingerprint” of psychedelics was spotted among hundreds of brain scans of people on LSD, psilocybin, DMT, mescaline and ayahuasca,
pointing to a shared impact on the brain’s behaviour.
The finding emerged from a major study that combined 11 brain imaging datasets from around the world
in an effort to build a reliable picture of how the substances temporarily rewire the brain.
Dr Danilo Bzdok and his colleagues analysed more than 500 brain scans from 267 p…
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have shown that
bacteria can learn from past experiences,
store memories across generations
and adapt their behavior to changing environments
all without a brain or nervous system
https://www.cmu.edu…
fly_larva: Drosophila larva brain (2023)
A complete synaptic map of the brain connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using three-dimensional electron microscopy–based reconstruction. Node metadata include the neuron hempisphere, hemispherical homologue, cell type, annotations, and inferred cluster. Edge metadata include the type of interaction (`'aa'`,…
An interview with Galen Buckwalter, a BCI recipient in a Caltech brain implant study, on his recent ability to use the implant to produce musical tones (Emily Mullin/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/meet-the-man-making-music-with-his-brain-implant/
The "youngsters" in the bar where I am are talking about the number of brain strokes they have had. I... I believe I am the youngest by around 20 years around here.
LLMs have no concept of "true" or "good." But they are trained to signal high-quality work. Meanwhile, bosses are pressuring workers: go faster, produce more, let the AI cook.
Study after study documents what this does to the human brain: cognitive surrender. We're "in the loop" but the bot calls the shots.
Read more in this week's issue of the Product Picnic newsletter:
RE: https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116529331753494872
This study raises a lot of “methodology vs conclusions” red flags — or at least what I’m seeing doesn’t jibe with how it’s being presented.
(It comes off like “using AI causes brain damage!!” but the actual experiment seems more like it shows that if you let people use a calculator on a test and then yank it away without warning 3/4 of the way through, they get pissed off and bail.)
I’m all for dunking on AI in education, but maybe take this one with a dose of skepticism until the dust settles.
I hope the world still exists when my NDAs expire. I hope my brain hasn't imploded by then.
One thing they don't tell you (or perhaps know) about antidepressants is that you can and likely will continue to have the brain zaps later, even when you've stopped taking them for a while-- I'm talking months later. Not that antidepressants don't work- they can, and do. But just something to be prepared for.
#MentalHealth
O Gods! I had a brain worm one-hit wonder pop song stuck in my head last night. This morning it came back. So I started to think of an Offenbach song to counter it -- now they're BOTH going at the same time! I better practice some new music, quick.
Jeez. Next time I'll make sure they're in highly incompatible time signatures!
#Music
cintestinalis: Tadpole larva brain (C. intestinalis)
Entire connectivity matrix for the complete brain of a larva of Ciona intestinalis. Each directed edge represents a synaptic connection from pre-synaptic cell i to post-synaptic cell j (may not be a neuron). Edge weights represent the cumulative depth of presynaptic contacts in µm.
This network has 205 nodes and 2903 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted
Bec's Unhinged Reviews
The local weirdness, the big headlines, the TV that melts your brain, the everyday moments that deserve a gentle roast and a hard laugh. It's opinionated, community-fuelled, and proudly unpolished...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpo…
@… Interesting! I’ll look into it, thanks! The actual app I’m targeting makes use of many OS-level features (custom menus, taskbar icons, etc) and has background services to deal with network events. But if I can do that in Bun, I’d be stoked. Rust is cool but a big lift for my brain. I don’t like Javascript but at least I understand it
(YouTube) #Neuralink: Accessing new brain regions with surgical robotics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93yWGUiYFEk Totally naive: "Every problem has a specific location in your brain";
Sorry, brain fart and typo. Part of the problem with trying to do philosophy when mentally ill is I have a lot of brain fog, and can't really evaluate how good my ideas are.
However, when I typed 'survival', what I meant to type (and thought I had typed, was 'society'.
Babies are bleeding to death as parents reject a vitamin shot given at birth - ProPublica https://apple.news/AILfklhbqToOdkpsHVDk57g
Remember the vacuum tube train? The car tunnels? The brain implant chip? The humanoid robots? Making government “efficient”? An AGI based on… tweets (wtf)?
But sure, colonizing Mars is totally real.
Brain-Computer-Interface: zunehmender Einsatz, Risiken, lückenhafte Rechtslage
BCIs können helfen, motorische Fähigkeiten und Kommunikation wieder zu ermöglichen. Das Potenzial ist enorm, Rechtslage und Ethik noch weitgehend ungeklärt.
Think of the song that's the biggest ear worm to you lately.
Now thinking about an automatic body function that usually don't think about but is hard to ignore once you do.
Now think about that really awkward thing you said a long time ago that your brain brings up at 2 in the morning.
Goodnight >:3
I find a form of active de-computing is one of the best ways to cope with the current exceeding world pain exhaustion & LLM brain drain around, i.e. doing more things offline, with your hands/body, being more present in your world, getting into crafts/materials, creating/fixing/mending things and sharing your lessons learned with others (in that sense quite in the spirit of open source culture).
To some this is may be just another form of entitled escapism, though I see it as activ…
Not the usual stuff I post.
For those who have been hearing of a Fly Brain being uploaded, the work you've been hearing of is impressive, yet as always the pop science media has warped what happened a bit:
„The Fly Brain Breakthrough Is Real. The “First Brain Upload” Narrative Is Not.”
https://…
I have some sketches of an essay that I need to write, but I think it's worth brain-dumping a bit more in the mean time.
#LLMs are an attempt to make tech grow forever. But like, how many "your mom/a friend, but done by a precarious worker instead" apps do we really need? Everything right now is in the AI grift hole, but there's almost nothing of interest (even if you ignore the ethical concerns). Like, no, I don't fucking want a robot to lie to me about my groceries. That doesn't sound like a useful feature. There's a lot of useless shit being pumped out to prop up the bottom line, and a lot of people just want to be able to use their old phone for more than a couple of years.
No one is happy with this. No one wants this. Except the billionaires who are forcing us all to drink the capitalism koolaid, because they'd rather exterminate life on earth than live in a world where they experience consequences.
Nothing grows forever. That's not how literally anything in reality works, or has ever worked, at all in history. Some people think that the universe itself may work like that, but that's only an educated guess. Finite things don't grow forever. Every organism, every society, every technology, every dynamic and adaptive system we have ever known goes through a growth phase and then goes in to a stabilization phase. Or, following a Malthusian pattern, grows until it reaches a catastrophic point and collapses. Like lemmings. Or reindeer. Or cancer.
The Dissociated Universe: Bernardo Kastrup’s Analytic Idealism and the Mind That Contains the World
This essay completes a sequence. The first article considered Iain McGilchrist's panpsychist proposal that matter is a phase of consciousness, the way ice and vapor are phases of water. Its companion examined Daniel Dennett's illusionism, which argued that consciousness as we ordinarily conceive it is a user illusion the brain stages for itself. The third position, the…
About one in eight people globally have some form of sleep apnea.
Sleep apnea causes breathing to stop and start several times during sleep.
This happens because either your airway is blocked, known as obstructive sleep apnea,
or you brain isn’t controlling your breathing as it should, known as central sleep apnea.
For decades, the main form of treatment for this population has been the continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine, which helps keep a person’s a…
A wandering mind is not the enemy of focus. It is the foundation of it. Your brain does not run on intensity. It runs on rhythm.
#NeuroScience
When I got in to tech, things felt fragile. After years of trying to fix things, I spent more years feeling as though the information apocalypse was immanent. Everywhere I turned, something was broken horribly. I can't even count the number of times I've just had to be like, "oh fuck. That's really bad. I knew it was bad, but like... oh fuck."
We have *all* had our identity stolen. I don't even know how many times my social security number has been in a data breach. How many of my medical records are on the market? But yeah, sure, let's accelerate that.
The problem was never that we couldn't find problems. The problem has always been "leadership" being unwilling to invest in fixing them. The problem has always been this mind-set of growth-at-any-cost.
I tuck these things away in my brain, and they sit there gnawing on my sanity, like little RFK worms.
I'm getting stack frames corrupted (or else I'm hitting the wrong stack frames) and I can't see why. My brain is far too messed up to deal with this level of shit just now!
#PostScarcitySoftware
#TheJoyOfSoftwareEngineering
"You wouldn't normally buy this pile of dogshit, but what if we mixed all this dogshit together with shit from other animals and put a pretty bow on it and called it a cupcake? Would you buy it then?"
https://beige.party/@maxleibman/116507984376346134
The first gene therapy for deafness earns FDA approval.
About sixty percent of all babies born deaf have some underlying genetic cause,
and mutations in the OTOF gene account for between 2 and 8 percent of them.
That gene encodes a protein called otoferlin, which enables hair cells inside the ear to transmit messages into the brain.
The OTOF gene is quite long, though, stretching about 90,000 bases of DNA.
This means it’s too long to ‘package’ inside a single vi…
I woke at 2am and it's now 3am and my brain is still swirling. Unlike my usual insomnia routine, I am choosing to read my masto feed in the hope that my brain changes direction and settles down. Good luck to anyone else awake and struggling to sleep.
Flourish, which is building Cortex AI, a brain-like synthetic intelligence system that uses less power than LLMs, raised $500M, including $100M from Jeff Bezos (Steven Levy/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/jeff-bezos-is-funding-a-wild-hunt-for-t…
EyeBrain: Left and Right Brain Lateralization Activity Classification Through Pupil Diameter and Fixation Duration
Ko Watanabe, Pooja Pol, Nicolas Gro{\ss}mann, Shoya Ishimaru, Andreas Dengel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23562 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.23562 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.23562
arXiv:2604.23562v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The relationship between brain lateralization and cognitive functions is well-documented. The left hemisphere primarily handles tasks such as language and arithmetic, while the right hemisphere is involved in creative activities like drawing and music perception. Eye-tracking technology has shown the potential to reveal cognitive states by measuring ocular metrics such as pupil diameter and fixation duration. However, the ability to distinguish lateralized brain activity using these ocular metrics remains underexplored. Here, we demonstrate that pupil diameter and fixation duration can effectively classify left and right brain hemisphere activities. We obtained a considerably high classification performance, with an F1 score of 0.894. The results suggest that ocular metrics are robust indicators of lateralized brain activity and can be applied in cognitive monitoring and neurorehabilitation. Our future work expands on this by integrating these methods into real-time applications EyeBrain, potentially broadening their use across various cognitive and neurological domains.
toXiv_bot_toot
Sweet jesus, I think the brain worms have worked on this one beyond remedy. The whole thing is toast.
fly_larva: Drosophila larva brain (2023)
A complete synaptic map of the brain connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using three-dimensional electron microscopy–based reconstruction. Node metadata include the neuron hempisphere, hemispherical homologue, cell type, annotations, and inferred cluster. Edge metadata include the type of interaction (`'aa'`,…
Meta FAIR: KI-Zwilling für menschliche Neuronen
TRImodal Brain Encoder in zweiter Version veröffentlicht. Meta FAIR kann damit vorhersagen, wie das menschliche Gehirn reagiert.
https://www.heis…
One of those things about claims of “AGI” is that to really build a human-like intelligence we’d have to simulate a human brain as whole because 1. it’s the only thing we know that produces human intelligence and 2. no one knows how it actually works.
Because of (2) it’s irrelevant what anyone says about LLMs or any other technology (with the exception of simulating a whole brain)—you can’t know if a technology is intelligent like a human because we don’t know what that means or how that works.
Fun thing, it turns out it’s impossible to simulate a whole brain with the resolution required (basically quantum physics level), and you’d have to emulate a chemical and physical environment for the brain as well (it will also need a body etc.).
You’d also have to simulate other humans with brains from which the brain can learn; but to simulate those you’d have simulate evolving humans from single-cell organisms first etc etc ad infinitum
fly_larva: Drosophila larva brain (2023)
A complete synaptic map of the brain connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using three-dimensional electron microscopy–based reconstruction. Node metadata include the neuron hempisphere, hemispherical homologue, cell type, annotations, and inferred cluster. Edge metadata include the type of interaction (`'aa'`,…
Massachusetts-based brain implant company Axoft raised a $55M Series A and says it tested its device in a Shanghai patient, with plans for more trials in China (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…
No! No no brain, no brain. no brain. Toot toot toot toot [unintelligible] like-like-like-like YeAH toot. boost. toot. boost. toot. toot toot toot toot like-like-like-like mastodon no brain. mastodon no brain. boost-toot-boost-toot. never! never! never! brain. boost toot boost toot. Never think!
https://
It's a week since my last #PostScarcitySoftware entry. The version of eval/apply copied from `0.0.6` still doesn't compile, let alone work. There are reasons. I've been ill — my brain really is fucked — and I've had urgent outdoor work.
There is progress. I am cleaning up bits of old cruft as I go. But I don't think copying the old code was a good decision. I…
A study in Nature Health finds that microplastics and nanoplastics
were at a higher level in brain tumour samples from living patients
than in healthy human brain samples from cadavers,
with a correlation between microplastic surface area and tumour proliferation. https://go.nature.com/4cuBK4I…
(YouTube, 2025) The surprising way the brain is wired https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9939jVJIZYo "What if vast areas of the brain contribute to many different functions and its connectivity is far more intricate than we once believed?"
Chinese brain-computer interface startup Gestala raised $21.6M co-led by Guosheng Capital and Dalton Venture at a $100M to $200M valuation, per CEO Phoenix Peng (Kate Park/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/11/bci-startu…
cintestinalis: Tadpole larva brain (C. intestinalis)
Entire connectivity matrix for the complete brain of a larva of Ciona intestinalis. Each directed edge represents a synaptic connection from pre-synaptic cell i to post-synaptic cell j (may not be a neuron). Edge weights represent the cumulative depth of presynaptic contacts in µm.
This network has 205 nodes and 2903 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted
Physical Intelligence says its new model, π0.7, can direct robots on tasks they weren't trained on, an "early sign" of generalization, surprising researchers (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/202…
Would getting a Neuralink Blindsight brain implant for restoring vision be worth it? #BCI
fly_larva: Drosophila larva brain (2023)
A complete synaptic map of the brain connectome of the larva of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using three-dimensional electron microscopy–based reconstruction. Node metadata include the neuron hempisphere, hemispherical homologue, cell type, annotations, and inferred cluster. Edge metadata include the type of interaction (`'aa'`,…
If you compare the challenges that a Neuralink Blindsight brain implant for restoring vision still has to overcome with the challenges for The vOICe (sound-guided mental imagery)... https://www.artificialvision.com/neuralink.htm Supporting independent and open science
US company Paradromics on brain-computer interfaces: China's recent developments and what they mean for the US https://www.paradromics.com/blog/china-bci-developments Seems at odds with how the US administration keeps eroding the scientific ecosystem in the US;
How psychedelics push your brain to dream while awake https://theconversation.com/how-psychedelics-push-your-brain-to-dream-while-awake-new-study-276708 Now how to nudge the brain of blind people to see through sound-guided mental image…
How psychedelics push your brain to dream while awake https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-03-psychedelics-brain.html "psychedelics make the brain more likely to 'see' images from memory rather than what's actually in front of it"; mental imagery
It's not that The vOICe vision BCI is so good, it's that invasive BCIs for (restoring) vision are far worse than often claimed. The human brain is not plug-and-play. https://chatgpt.com/share/69f448a9-de04-83eb-9720-98a2f66ca7e5
By linking up visual and auditory processing in the human brain, The vOICe vision BCI can act as both a fully noninvasive visual prosthesis for the totally blind and as a research vehicle for macroscopic neuroscience https://www.artificialvision.com/neuralink.htm
Astrocytes connect specific brain regions through plastic networks (in mice) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10426-6 "communication between distant brain regions that is mediated by plastic networks of gap junction-coupled astrocytes";
Brain-computer interfaces in healthcare: building the picks and shovels company while the giants fight over gold #BCI
AI at Meta: TRIBE v2 (Trimodal Brain Encoder), an #AI model of the human #brain, predicting neural responses to sight, sound and language https://aidemos.atmeta.com/tribev2/
Trying to draft a kind of "graphical abstract" on visual prosthesis BCI options... brain implants with electrodes, ultrasound with optogenetics or nanoparticles, and noninvasive visual-to-auditory sensory substitution. Suggestions for improvement? #neuroscience
Seeing and imagining are handled by the same brain cells https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2026/05/12/seeing-and-imagining-are-handled-by-the-same-brain-cells/
"Researchers make advances in understanding how human brains ar…
To ChatGPT: Elon Musk focuses on scalable technologies, also for the upcoming Neuralink Blindsight brain implant for the blind. At some point these implants will start to fail in patients. Will Neuralink's handling of failing brain implants prove scalable? https://chatgpt.com/share/69c85655-c24
Lucid dreaming shows that the human brain can go into a state of vivid mental imagery. If and once we can effectively tap into that, sound-guided mental imagery will restore veridical vision to the blind https://www.artificialvision.com/literature.htm
@cdarwin@c.im
