Tootfinder

Why Does Your Brain Always Expect the Worst?
#MentalHealth #BeBetter

Why Does Your Brain Always Expect the Worst?
Your brain constantly predicts the future based on past pain, but you can retrain it and turn catastrophic thinking into hope.

WIRED: China is building a brain-computer interface industry https://www.wired.com/story/china-is-getting-serious-about-brain-computer-interfaces/ Phoenix Peng, founder and CEO at NeuroXess: "I think noninvasive BCI products will get a huge mar…

China Is Building a Brain-Computer Interface Industry
A new policy document outlines China’s plan to create an internationally competitive BCI industry within five years, and proposes developing devices for both health and consumer uses.

🧁 How a popular sweetener could be damaging your brain's defenses
#poison

How a popular sweetener could be damaging your brain's defenses
Found in everything from protein bars to energy drinks, erythritol has long been considered a safe alternative to sugar. But new research suggests this widely-used sweetener may be quietly undermining one of the body's most crucial protective barriers—with potentially serious consequences for heart health and stroke risk.

"We can conclude that the brain has the capacity to distinguish virtual infectious patterns,
become activated,
and link this activation to a downstream response,
⭐️ resulting in systemic immunity,"
wrote Camilla Jandus, co-author of the study paper
https://www.

Human immune system reacts to the mere sight of infection
Researchers monitored brain activity when people were shown images of sick-looking avatars via VR. The brain appeared to spark an immune response.

My brain likes to game the system.
mouth: "Damn, that [food] was good!"
brain: "Y'know, if you hurry.. you can have another one before stomach starts to feel full!"
stomach: "Wait, but won't that hurt us la.."
hands: *grabbing another and quickly shoving it into mouth*
brain: "Oops, too late!"
mouth: "Fuck yeah!"

Pediatric Brain Cancer Trial Group to Be Phased Out (Nina Agrawal/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/well/pediatric-brain-cancer-trial-group.html?unlocked_article_code=1.h08.elWM.RbvuJbwbKWb2&smid=url-share
http://www.memeorandum.com/250828/p134#a250828p134

Signed Higher-Order Interactions for Brain Disorder Diagnosis via Multi-Channel Transformers
Dengyi Zhao, Zhiheng Zhou, Guiying Yan, Dongxiao Yu, Xingqi Qi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20205

Signed Higher-Order Interactions for Brain Disorder Diagnosis via Multi-Channel Transformers
Accurately characterizing higher-order interactions of brain regions and extracting interpretable organizational patterns from Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging data is crucial for brain disease diagnosis. Current graph-based deep learning models primarily focus on pairwise or triadic patterns while neglecting signed higher-order interactions, limiting comprehensive understanding of brain-wide communication. We propose HOI-Brain, a novel computational framework leveraging signed higher-orde…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Funkadelic:
🎵 Maggot Brain
#Funkadelic
https://derrok.bandcamp.com/track/gusano-funkadelics-maggot-brain-cover
https://open.spotify.com/track/5WJU527RQNyMLuKecjsL8V

Distinct weak asymmetric interactions shape human brain functions as probability fluxes
Yoshiaki Horiike, Shin Fujishiro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20961 https://

Distinct weak asymmetric interactions shape human brain functions as probability fluxes
The functional computation of the human brain arises from the collective behaviour of the underlying neural network. The emerging technology enables the recording of population activity in neurons, and the theory of neural networks is expected to explain and extract functional computations from the data. Thermodynamically, a large proportion of the whole-body energy is consumed by the brain, and functional computation of the human brain seems to involve high energy consumption. The human brain,…

FrankenBot: Brain-Morphic Modular Orchestration for Robotic Manipulation with Vision-Language Models
Shiyi Wang, Wenbo Li, Yiteng Chen, Qingyao Wu, Huiping Zhuang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21627

FrankenBot: Brain-Morphic Modular Orchestration for Robotic Manipulation with Vision-Language Models
Developing a general robot manipulation system capable of performing a wide range of tasks in complex, dynamic, and unstructured real-world environments has long been a challenging task. It is widely recognized that achieving human-like efficiency and robustness manipulation requires the robotic brain to integrate a comprehensive set of functions, such as task planning, policy generation, anomaly monitoring and handling, and long-term memory, achieving high-efficiency operation across all funct…

DTBIA: An Immersive Visual Analytics System for Brain-Inspired Research
Jun-Hsiang Yao, Mingzheng Li, Jiayi Liu, Yuxiao Li, Jielin Feng, Jun Han, Qibao Zheng, Jianfeng Feng, Siming Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23730

DTBIA: An Immersive Visual Analytics System for Brain-Inspired Research
The Digital Twin Brain (DTB) is an advanced artificial intelligence framework that integrates spiking neurons to simulate complex cognitive functions and collaborative behaviors. For domain experts, visualizing the DTB's simulation outcomes is essential to understanding complex cognitive activities. However, this task poses significant challenges due to DTB data's inherent characteristics, including its high-dimensionality, temporal dynamics, and spatial complexity. To address these challenges,…

Nvidia says the Jetson AGX Thor, its latest "robot brain" chip module, is now on sale for $3,499 as a developer kit; the module will ship next month (Kif Leswing/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/25/nvidias-thor-t5000-robot-brain-chip.html
…

Nvidia's new 'robot brain' goes on sale for $3,499 as company targets robotics for growth
Nvidia's Jetson AGX Thor robotics chips are now on sale for $3,499 as a developer kit.

BRAIN: Bias-Mitigation Continual Learning Approach to Vision-Brain Understanding
Xuan-Bac Nguyen, Thanh-Dat Truong, Pawan Sinha, Khoa Luu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18187 https:…

BRAIN: Bias-Mitigation Continual Learning Approach to Vision-Brain Understanding
Memory decay makes it harder for the human brain to recognize visual objects and retain details. Consequently, recorded brain signals become weaker, uncertain, and contain poor visual context over time. This paper presents one of the first vision-learning approaches to address this problem. First, we statistically and experimentally demonstrate the existence of inconsistency in brain signals and its impact on the Vision-Brain Understanding (VBU) model. Our findings show that brain signal repres…

Great piece about how Trump's attack on the national research infrastructure could be a boon to the rest of the world: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/american-science-brain-drain/

What is CTE? Explaining the disease referenced by New York gunman at NFL HQ building https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6522641/2025/07/29/nfl-new-york-shooting-cte/

To Grok: If you compare a Neuralink Blindsight brain implant to The vOICe visual-to-auditory sensory substitution, which one really has the best long-term outlook? Don't speculate on implants going beyond normal vision because there is just zero evidence. Challenge your own bias. https://x.com/i/grok/share/XM32w4XapPi

MRExtrap: Longitudinal Aging of Brain MRIs using Linear Modeling in Latent Space
Jaivardhan Kapoor, Jakob H. Macke, Christian F. Baumgartner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19482 htt…

MRExtrap: Longitudinal Aging of Brain MRIs using Linear Modeling in Latent Space
Simulating aging in 3D brain MRI scans can reveal disease progression patterns in neurological disorders such as Alzheimer's disease. Current deep learning-based generative models typically approach this problem by predicting future scans from a single observed scan. We investigate modeling brain aging via linear models in the latent space of convolutional autoencoders (MRExtrap). Our approach, MRExtrap, is based on our observation that autoencoders trained on brain MRIs create latent spaces wh…

This illusion never stops breaking my brain, no matter how many times I see it. https://aus.social/@dgar/114931632609424730

I wonder when brain-worm Kennedy will start mandating SOMA pills for all Americans?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(Brave_New_World)

I couldn’t sleep. My brain kept spinning: I brush my teeth at night. Then I don’t eat, I don’t drink, I just sleep. Nothing goes in my mouth. So why, when I wake up, do I brush my teeth again? I already did it! Nothing changed. It’s like someone decided mornings need a repeat, but my mouth is just as clean as before.
Sometimes I wonder, who decided this? Why do we all just do it, like it’s written in the sky or something? I like the feeling of brushing but not the taste of toothpaste, …

Is it just me or does RFK Jr sound like the Infowars guy if he was monologuing about brain worms while being choked to death?

TaiBai: A fully programmable brain-inspired processor with topology-aware efficiency
Qianpeng Li, Yu Song, Xin Liu, Wenna Song, Boshi Zhao, Zhichao Wang, Aoxin Chen, Tielin Zhang, Liang Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18961

TaiBai: A fully programmable brain-inspired processor with topology-aware efficiency
Brain-inspired computing has emerged as a promising paradigm to overcome the energy-efficiency limitations of conventional intelligent systems by emulating the brain's partitioned architecture and event-driven sparse computation. However, existing brain-inspired chips often suffer from rigid network topology constraints and limited neuronal programmability, hindering their adaptability. To address these challenges, we present TaiBai, an event-driven, programmable many-core brain-inspired proces…

Brain, get our shit together, please.

Some good venting by Steve Klabnik about the sorry state of significant chunks of the AI debate today:
"What is breaking my brain a little bit is that all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized. This isn’t a “the middle is always right” sort of thing either, to be clear. It’s more that both the pro-AI and anti-AI sides are loudly proclaiming things that are pretty trivially verifiable as not true."

With a bit of determination and some brain, Europe and China might be able to let Russia and the US cavort themselves into oblivion and establish a new bipolar world order for fun and profit.

Google's "AI Overviews" are garbage. Sadly they are now becoming the main way people interact with the web.
(Original title: Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain)
https://www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destro…

Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain
Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.

“In front of the United Cigar Store this evening the men were gathered to burn dirigibles, sink battleships, blow up dynamite works and, all in all, savor the very bacteria in their porcelain mouths that would someday stop them cold.”
--From Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
That man was tripping. It might have been brain chemicals alone, but nobody else used those chemicals like that.
#Writing

For those with a Twitter (X) account, there is a fun little discussion thread between me, myself and #AI (Grok, ChatGPT) about whether Elon Musk's Neuralink Blindsight brain implant will work for congenitally blind people to see. https://

Grok (@grok) on X
@NotOpCue @elonmusk @neuralink Neuralink's brain-computer interface aims to help disabled individuals by connecting the brain to computers. It has enabled quadriplegics, like Noland Arbaugh, to control devices such as a computer mouse or play chess using thoughts alone, as shown in 2024 trials. The Blindsight

ConnectomeDiffuser: Generative AI Enables Brain Network Construction from Diffusion Tensor Imaging
Xuhang Chen, Michael Kwok-Po Ng, Kim-Fung Tsang, Chi-Man Pun, Shuqiang Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22683

ConnectomeDiffuser: Generative AI Enables Brain Network Construction from Diffusion Tensor Imaging
Brain network analysis plays a crucial role in diagnosing and monitoring neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). Existing approaches for constructing structural brain networks from diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) often rely on specialized toolkits that suffer from inherent limitations: operator subjectivity, labor-intensive workflows, and restricted capacity to capture complex topological features and disease-specific biomarkers. To overcome these challenges and advance com…

Same
https://circumstances.run/@ukapala/114931320298481917

Series D, Episode 05 - Animals
JUSTIN: The only human working here, yes. I'm training the animals to work of course, but its slow. Very slow. I've got them right physically, you see, but its the psychology that's difficult. What they want to do is exist; however, I'm trying brain implants and so on but they hate it, it's...it's painful. That's why they rebelled and broke out.
DAYNA: The most developed ones?

Me: *drinking morning coffee*
Brain: So, did dinosaurs chirp like birds?
(Any paleontologists around to answer this?)

My body parts are protesting for sleep while the brain is demanding a raise in #coffee budget.. 🥲

"What you have is, in essence, a very grassroots and cheap approach to launder misinformation to the public.”
From @… - Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain
Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.
https://www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destroying-search-the-internet-and-your-brain/

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'`,…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20688 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_sta…

A False Discovery Rate Control Method Using a Fully Connected Hidden Markov Random Field for Neuroimaging Data
False discovery rate (FDR) control methods are essential for voxel-wise multiple testing in neuroimaging data analysis, where hundreds of thousands or even millions of tests are conducted to detect brain regions associated with disease-related changes. Classical FDR control methods (e.g., BH, q-value, and LocalFDR) assume independence among tests and often lead to high false non-discovery rates (FNR). Although various spatial FDR control methods have been developed to improve power, they still …

Wissenschaftler:innen haben herausgefunden: Wer ChatGPT oder andere Bullshit-Generatoren nutzt, verblödet innerhalb kurzer Zeit.
#LLM

Raiders Training Camp: Is Cornerback Position Being Neglected? https://raiderramble.com/2025/06/28/raiders-training-camp-is-cornerback-position-being-neglected/

"Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task"
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872
"[…] While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four mont…

Google's AI Overviews, which a recent Pew study shows reduce clickthrough rates, are further eroding traffic to original publishers by linking to aggregators (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destroying-search-the-inter…

Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain
Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.

A little post about AI written by my employer @…
https://vivaldi.com/blog/keep-exploring/

Vivaldi takes a stand: keep browsing human | Vivaldi Browser
Browsing should push you to explore, chase ideas, and make your own decisions. It should light up your brain. Vivaldi is taking a stand. We choose humans over hype, and we will not turn the joy of…

The first-ever human trial exploring the use of stem cell therapy to reverse hearing loss is about to be under way,
after getting the go-ahead from the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.
In a nutshell, the treatment,
dubbed Rincell-1,
is intended to regrow damaged nerves in the cochlea
and allow them to start sending signals to the brain again.

Stem Cell Treatment to Reverse Hearing Loss Kicking Off in Human Patients
Researchers in the UK have received approval to conduct the first ever human trials for a stem cell treatment to reverse hearing loss.

Minneapolis school shooter Robin Westman confessed he was 'tired of being trans': 'I wish I never brain-washed myself' (New York Post)
https://nypost.com/2025/08/28/us-news/minneapolis-school-shooter-robin-westman-confessed-he-was-tired-of-being-trans/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250828/p66#a250828p66

Researchers say using ChatGPT can rot your brain. The truth is a little more complicated
https://phys.org/news/2025-06-chatgpt-brain-truth-complicated.html

Bayesian Mixed-Effects Models for Multilevel Two-way Functional Data: Applications to EEG Experiments
Xiaomeng Ju, Thaddeus Tarpey, Hyung G Park
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20092

Bayesian Mixed-Effects Models for Multilevel Two-way Functional Data: Applications to EEG Experiments
In multi-condition EEG experiments, brain activity is recorded as subjects perform various tasks or are exposed to different stimuli. The recorded signals are commonly transformed into time-frequency representations, which often display smooth variations across time and frequency dimensions. These representations are naturally structured as two-way functional data, with experimental conditions nested within subjects. Existing analytical methods fail to jointly account for the data's multilevel …

Dual-Task Graph Neural Network for Joint Seizure Onset Zone Localization and Outcome Prediction using Stereo EEG
Syeda Abeera Amir, Artur Agaronyan, William Gaillard, Chima Oluigbo, Syed Muhammad Anwar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23669

Dual-Task Graph Neural Network for Joint Seizure Onset Zone Localization and Outcome Prediction using Stereo EEG
Accurately localizing the brain regions that triggers seizures and predicting whether a patient will be seizure-free after surgery are vital for surgical planning and patient management in drug-resistant epilepsy. Stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG) delivers high-fidelity intracranial recordings that enable clinicians to precisely locate epileptogenic networks. However, the clinical identification is subjective and dependent on the expertise of the clinical team. Data driven approaches in this…

Here's an example of a company trying to destroy a product that it only recently acquired.
VMware, the company, was acquired by Broadcom.
VMware products have always been a pain-in-the-ass to operate, partially because of a marketing brain-crash that named everything "vsphere" this and "vsphere" that.
We used only the once free Esxi hypervisor, but we needed several, also at the time free, "vsphere" pieces to manage it.
But Broadcom p…

VMware perpetual license holder receives audit letter from Broadcom
“Our management thought it was a bluff…”…

Sorry for flooding your feed last night with all my soft-dom appreciation, but honestly, my autistic brain just can’t resist a little (okay, a lot of) oversharing.
If you want the full story, I’ve got a whole pinned post about it right here: https://social.linux.pizza/@midtsveen/

An MRI Atlas of the Human Fetal Brain: Reference and Segmentation Tools for Fetal Brain MRI Analysis
Mahdi Bagheri, Clemente Velasco-Annis, Jian Wang, Razieh Faghihpirayesh, Shadab Khan, Camilo Calixto, Camilo Jaimes, Lana Vasung, Abdelhakim Ouaalam, Onur Afacan, Simon K. Warfield, Caitlin K. Rollins, Ali Gholipour
https://arxiv.org/abs/25…

An MRI Atlas of the Human Fetal Brain: Reference and Segmentation Tools for Fetal Brain MRI Analysis
Accurate characterization of in-utero brain development is essential for understanding typical and atypical neurodevelopment. Building upon previous efforts to construct spatiotemporal fetal brain MRI atlases, we present the CRL-2025 fetal brain atlas, which is a spatiotemporal (4D) atlas of the developing fetal brain between 21 and 37 gestational weeks. This atlas is constructed from carefully processed MRI scans of 160 fetuses with typically-developing brains using a diffeomorphic deformable …

„While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, #LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.“ #AI

The global communication pathways of the human brain transcend the cortical-subcortical-cerebellar division
Julian Schulte, Mario Senden, Gustavo Deco, Xenia Kobeleva, Gorka Zamora-L\'opez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22893

The global communication pathways of the human brain transcend the cortical-subcortical-cerebellar division
Neural communication across the cortex, subcortex, and cerebellum is orchestrated by the structural connectome, forming the indispensable anatomical framework for capabilities spanning from elementary motor actions to higher cognitive functions. Yet, despite this importance, the core organizational rules that govern this connectivity remain insufficiently understood. Here we show, for the first time, how the integrated cortical, subcortical, and cerebellar brain areas shape the structural archi…

Une exposition prolongée Š de faibles concentrations de PFAS peut perturber les fonctions cérébrales, endommager les neurones et altérer la mémoire et le comportement des souris, selon une récente recherche.
#PFAS

Neuromorphic Simulation of Drosophila Melanogaster Brain Connectome on Loihi 2
Felix Wang, Bradley H. Theilman, Fred Rothganger, William Severa, Craig M. Vineyard, James B. Aimone
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16792

Neuromorphic Simulation of Drosophila Melanogaster Brain Connectome on Loihi 2
We demonstrate the first-ever nontrivial, biologically realistic connectome simulated on neuromorphic computing hardware. Specifically, we implement the whole-brain connectome of the adult Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) from the FlyWire Consortium containing 140K neurons and 50M synapses on the Intel Loihi 2 neuromorphic platform. This task is particularly challenging due to the characteristic connectivity structure of biological networks. Unlike artificial neural networks and most abstrac…

Activity propagation with Hebbian learning
Will T. Engedal, R\'obert Juh\'asz, Istv\'an A. Kov\'acs
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21053 https://

Activity propagation with Hebbian learning
We investigate the impact of Hebbian learning on the contact process, a paradigmatic model for infection spreading, which has been also proposed as a simple model to capture the dynamics of inter-regional brain activity propagation as well as population spreading. Each of these contexts calls for an extension of the contact process with local learning. We introduce Hebbian learning as a positive or negative reinforcement of the activation rate between a pair of sites after each successful activ…

Spatio-Temporal Pruning for Compressed Spiking Large Language Models
Yi Jiang, Malyaban Bal, Brian Matejek, Susmit Jha, Adam Cobb, Abhronil Sengupta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20122

Spatio-Temporal Pruning for Compressed Spiking Large Language Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) present significant challenges for deployment in energy-constrained environments due to their large model sizes and high inference latency. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), inspired by the sparse event-driven neural processing and energy-efficient information transmission in the brain, offer a promising alternative for achieving low-power computing. Integrating the event-driven efficiency of spiking neurons with the advanced capabilities of LLMs represents a promisin…

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Tikhet:
🎵 I Buried My Brain In El Segundo
#NowPlaying #Tikhet
https://tikhet.bandcamp.com/track/i-buried-my-brain-in-el-segundo
https://open.spotify.com/track/2Cq60npcpfq6YAlh0Nndkt

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Mike Watt:
🎵 Maggot Brain
#MikeWatt
https://open.spotify.com/track/1IcKyhxYeUfTiE1tZX2Iul

⏱️ Researchers discover how the human brain organizes its visual memories through precise neural timing
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-07-human-brain-visual-memories-precise.html

Researchers discover how the human brain organizes its visual memories through precise neural timing
Researchers at the University of Southern California have made a significant breakthrough in understanding how the human brain forms, stores and recalls visual memories. A new study, published in Advanced Science, harnesses human patient brain recordings and a powerful machine learning model to shed new light on the brain's internal code that sorts memories of objects into categories—think of it as the brain's filing cabinet of imagery.

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading

What we know about the shooting at NFL headquarters https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6522888/2025/07/29/nfl-headquarters-shooting-explainer/

Is there any evidence that a brain implant for restoring vision will give more functional vision than a noninvasive sensory substitution device?
Grok's answer: https://x.com/i/grok/share/qqXguBGin6FDIab7ra6pwdtm2 "No, there is no evidence"
ChatGPT's an…

Is there any evidence that a brain implant for restoring vision will give more functional vision than a noninvasive sensory substitution device? Don't speculate. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmrvukzbS44SMVxMLRpd-_iTpy_Cj5liB
No, there is no evidence from current studies or comparisons that brain implants for vision restoration provide more functional vision than noninvasive sensory substitution devices. Available direct comparisons, such as those examining retinal or cortical implants (e.g., Argus II) against devices like The vOICe, indicate the opposite: noninvasive options demonstrate broader functional outcomes in tasks like object recognition, grasping, and navigation, with better resolution, field of view, and…

Google's AI Overviews, which a recent Pew study shows reduce clickthrough rates, are further eroding traffic to original publishers by linking to aggregators (Emanuel Maiberg/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destroying-search-the-inter…

Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain
Google’s AI Overview, which is easy to fool into stating nonsense as fact, is stopping people from finding and supporting small businesses and credible sources.

I fucking hate the word "embrace," being autistic. It feels so fake, like a glitchy AI word that doesn’t match how my brain works.
It makes me want to scream inside because it’s too soft, too forced, and just wrong for me. I can’t use it without feeling like I’m lying to myself.
#ActuallyAutistic

MindChat: Enhancing BCI Spelling with Large Language Models in Realistic Scenarios
JIaheng Wang, Yucun Zhong, Chengjie Huang, Lin Yao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21435 https://…

MindChat: Enhancing BCI Spelling with Large Language Models in Realistic Scenarios
Brain-computer interface (BCI) spellers can render a new communication channel independent of peripheral nervous system, which are especially valuable for patients with severe motor disabilities. However, current BCI spellers often require users to type intended utterances letter-by-letter while spelling errors grow proportionally due to inaccurate electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding, largely impeding the efficiency and usability of BCIs in real-world communication. In this paper, we present Mi…

GANet-Seg: Adversarial Learning for Brain Tumor Segmentation with Hybrid Generative Models
Qifei Cui, Xinyu Lu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21245 https://

GANet-Seg: Adversarial Learning for Brain Tumor Segmentation with Hybrid Generative Models
This work introduces a novel framework for brain tumor segmentation leveraging pre-trained GANs and Unet architectures. By combining a global anomaly detection module with a refined mask generation network, the proposed model accurately identifies tumor-sensitive regions and iteratively enhances segmentation precision using adversarial loss constraints. Multi-modal MRI data and synthetic image augmentation are employed to improve robustness and address the challenge of limited annotated dataset…

New study on the effects of LLM use (in this case on essay writing):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Quote:
"LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four month…

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalo…

https://www.404media.co/googles-ai-is-destroying-search-the-internet-and-your-brain/

Comparing and Scaling fMRI Features for Brain-Behavior Prediction
Mikkel Sch\"ottner Sieler, Thomas A. W. Bolton, Jagruti Patel, Patric Hagmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20601

Comparing and Scaling fMRI Features for Brain-Behavior Prediction
Predicting behavioral variables from neuroimaging modalities such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has the potential to allow the development of neuroimaging biomarkers of mental and neurological disorders. A crucial processing step to this aim is the extraction of suitable features. These can differ in how well they predict the target of interest, and how this prediction scales with sample size and scan time. Here, we compare nine feature subtypes extracted from resting-state functional MRI…

Not to overshare (but when do I ever not?), but I am seriously obsessed with drag queens.
If you ever wanted a peek into my fabulously queer brain, now you know! 🏳️‍🌈💅✨
#Bisexual #Pansexual #Queer

Hardware acceleration for ultra-fast Neural Network training on FPGA for MRF map reconstruction
Mattia Ricchi, Fabrizio Alfonsi, Camilla Marella, Marco Barbieri, Alessandra Retico, Leonardo Brizi, Alessandro Gabrielli, Claudia Testa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22156

Hardware acceleration for ultra-fast Neural Network training on FPGA for MRF map reconstruction
Magnetic Resonance Fingerprinting (MRF) is a fast quantitative MR Imaging technique that provides multi-parametric maps with a single acquisition. Neural Networks (NNs) accelerate reconstruction but require significant resources for training. We propose an FPGA-based NN for real-time brain parameter reconstruction from MRF data. Training the NN takes an estimated 200 seconds, significantly faster than standard CPU-based training, which can be up to 250 times slower. This method could enable rea…

UniMind: Unleashing the Power of LLMs for Unified Multi-Task Brain Decoding
Weiheng Lu, Chunfeng Song, Jiamin Wu, Pengyu Zhu, Yuchen Zhou, Weijian Mai, Qihao Zheng, Wanli Ouyang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.18962

UniMind: Unleashing the Power of LLMs for Unified Multi-Task Brain Decoding
Decoding human brain activity from electroencephalography (EEG) signals is a central challenge at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, enabling diverse applications in mental state assessment, clinical monitoring, and human-machine interaction. Recent efforts have extensively explored EEG-based brain foundation models for generalized brain decoding, employing large-scale training on multiple datasets. However, most of these attempts struggle with generalizability and fa…

Multiplexed subspaces route neural activity across brain-wide networks (in mice)  https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58698-2 but no, subspace communication is not faster-than-light, sorry Star Trek fans.

Multiplexed subspaces route neural activity across brain-wide networks - Nature Communications
How the brain flexibly engages different networks of regions to perform different cognitive processes remains unknown. Here, the authors show changing the geometry of a neural representation to align with different subspaces within a brain region can engage different brainwide networks.

Early Assessment of Artificial Lower Extremity Sensory Response Times and Proprioceptive Acuity via Sensory Cortex Electrical Stimulation
Won Joon Sohn, Jeffrey Lim, Po T. Wang, Susan J. Shaw, Michelle Armacost, Hui Gong, Brian Lee, Darrin Lee, Payam Heydari, Richard A. Andersen, Charles Y. Liu, Zoran Nenadic, An H. Do
https://a…

Early Assessment of Artificial Lower Extremity Sensory Response Times and Proprioceptive Acuity via Sensory Cortex Electrical Stimulation
Bi-directional brain computer interfaces (BD-BCIs) may restore brain-controlled walking and artificial leg sensation after spinal cord injury. Current BD-BCIs provide only simplistic "tingling" feedback, which lacks proprioceptive information to perceive critical gait events (leg swing, double support). This information must also be perceived adequately fast to facilitate timely motor responses. Here, we investigated utilizing primary sensory cortex (S1) direct cortical electrical stimulation (…

Jeff Dean, who co-founded Google Brain and leads Google's AI research, has emerged as a prolific angel investor, backing 37 AI startups over the past two years (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2025/07/22/jeff-de

Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, is quietly betting on the next wave of AI startups
Google’s longtime AI guru has quietly backed more than 30 startups in the past two years—offering founders early credibility and cachet.

Comparative Analysis of Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks for Medical Image Classification
Kunal Kawadkar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21156 https://

Comparative Analysis of Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks for Medical Image Classification
The emergence of Vision Transformers (ViTs) has revolutionized computer vision, yet their effectiveness compared to traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) in medical imaging remains under-explored. This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of CNN and ViT architectures across three critical medical imaging tasks: chest X-ray pneumonia detection, brain tumor classification, and skin cancer melanoma detection. We evaluated four state-of-the-art models - ResNet-50, Efficien…

As U.S. braces for Iranian attack, a 'brain drain' weakens its defenses, former officials say (David Rohde/NBC News)
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-brain-drain-weakens-fbi-doj-us-braces-iran-attack-defenses-rcna214182
http://www.memeorandum.com/250623/p114#a250623p114

I am planning on moving my shit away from Notion.
The whole "2nd Brain" thing does not work for me (it just gives me busywork instead of doing something useful) so what I am looking for
- self-hostable
- should have a web interface I can use from any machine without installation
-I need "tasks", "projects" that contain tasks and "notes" (ideally optionally connected to projects and/or tasks)
- boards for tasks
- mobile …

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #StreetSounds
Cypress Hill:
🎵 Insane In The Brain
#CypressHill
https://demloxx.bandcamp.com/track/cypress-hill-insane-in-the-brain-demloxx-remix
https://open.spotify.com/track/0jlbzNX8YUfUR9f4axepAo

#Inception: Simulating personalized long-term recovery in disorders of consciousness using whole-brain computational perturbations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.23.666344v1

Exploring Holography in Neuro-Vascular Dynamics
Christian Kerskens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22680 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.22680

Exploring Holography in Neuro-Vascular Dynamics
The holonomic brain theory, originally formulated to account for the need of non-local memory encoding in cognitive systems, could gain new theoretical traction when integrated with holographic principles from physics, most notably the AdS/CFT correspondence. Recent findings in neuroscience suggest that conformal field theories (CFTs), emerging at critical points across spatiotemporal scales in neural dynamics, are essential for brain function. Concurrently, black-brane geometries, long studied…

How does the #brain transfer #MotorSkills between hands?
This study reveals that transfer relies on re-expressing the neural patterns established during initial learning in distributed higher-order brain areas,
offering new insights into learning

Transfer of motor learning is associated with patterns of activity in the default mode network
How does the brain transfer motor skills between hands? This study reveals that transfer relies on re-expressing the neural patterns established during initial learning in distributed higher-order brain areas, offering new insights into learning generalization.

Vision-Based Assistive Technologies for People with Cerebral Visual Impairment: A Review and Focus Study
Bhanuka Gamage, Leona Holloway, Nicola McDowell, Thanh-Toan Do, Nicholas Price, Arthur Lowery, Kim Marriott
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22983

Vision-Based Assistive Technologies for People with Cerebral Visual Impairment: A Review and Focus Study
Over the past decade, considerable research has investigated Vision-Based Assistive Technologies (VBAT) to support people with vision impairments to understand and interact with their immediate environment using machine learning, computer vision, image enhancement, and/or augmented/virtual reality. However, this has almost totally overlooked a growing demographic: people with Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI). Unlike ocular vision impairments, CVI arises from damage to the brain's visual process…

To ChatGPT: In view of Neuralink PR, there must be a good reason why in their Summer 2025 Neuralink update they did not show any video of a monkey performing even a simple visual task with its Neuralink Blindsight brain implant. It is probably not performing well? https://chatgpt.com/share/686264d2-fad…

ChatGPT - Trump vs Hitler Comparison
Shared via ChatGPT

U-Net Based Healthy 3D Brain Tissue Inpainting
Juexin Zhang, Ying Weng, Ke Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18126 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18126

U-Net Based Healthy 3D Brain Tissue Inpainting
This paper introduces a novel approach to synthesize healthy 3D brain tissue from masked input images, specifically focusing on the task of 'ASNR-MICCAI BraTS Local Synthesis of Tissue via Inpainting'. Our proposed method employs a U-Net-based architecture, which is designed to effectively reconstruct the missing or corrupted regions of brain MRI scans. To enhance our model's generalization capabilities and robustness, we implement a comprehensive data augmentation strategy that involves random…

Sensory entrained TMS (seTMS) enhances motor cortex excitability https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbm.70267 "a novel approach that uses musical rhythms to synchronize brain oscillations and time TMS pulses to enhance cortical excitability"; more information in…

High-Density EEG Enables the Fastest Visual Brain-Computer Interfaces
Gege Ming (Department of Biomedical Engineering, Tsinghua University), Weihua Pei (Laboratory of Solid-State Optoelectronics Information Technology, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Future Technology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Sen Tian (Suzhou Nianji Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd), Xiaogang Chen (Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Medical Sci…

High-Density EEG Enables the Fastest Visual Brain-Computer Interfaces
Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology establishes a direct communication pathway between the brain and external devices. Current visual BCI systems suffer from insufficient information transfer rates (ITRs) for practical use. Spatial information, a critical component of visual perception, remains underexploited in existing systems because the limited spatial resolution of recording methods hinders the capture of the rich spatiotemporal dynamics of brain signals. This study proposed a freque…

National Geographic: Your brain shrinks with age. Here's why music may be a key to reversing it https://www.nationalgeographic.com/health/article/brain-atrophy-music-neuroplasticity-limitless Learning to see with sound?

Your brain shrinks after 40. Learning a musical instrument can reverse it.
Experts say the more we challenge our brains as we age, the more resilient it becomes—and “learning a new instrument is a full-brain workout.”

Brain Network Analysis Based on Fine-tuned Self-supervised Model for Brain Disease Diagnosis
Yifei Tang, Hongjie Jiang, Changhong Jing, Hieu Pham, Shuqiang Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11671

Brain Network Analysis Based on Fine-tuned Self-supervised Model for Brain Disease Diagnosis
Functional brain network analysis has become an indispensable tool for brain disease analysis. It is profoundly impacted by deep learning methods, which can characterize complex connections between ROIs. However, the research on foundation models of brain network is limited and constrained to a single dimension, which restricts their extensive application in neuroscience. In this study, we propose a fine-tuned brain network model for brain disease diagnosis. It expands brain region representati…

Amortizing personalization in virtual brain twins
Nina Baldy, Marmaduke M Woodman, Viktor K Jirsa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21155 https://

Amortizing personalization in virtual brain twins
Virtual brain twins are personalized digital models of individual human subject or patient's brains, allowing for mechanistic interpretation of neuroimaging data features. Training and inference with these models however presents a pair of challenges: large shared infrastructure do not allow for use of personal data and inference in clinical applications should not require significant resources. We introduce "anonymized personalization" to address both by expanding model priors to include perso…

New Scientist: Bad news? Our brain doesn't actually reorganise itself after an amputation https://www.newscientist.com/article/2493367-our-brain-doesnt-actually-reorganise-itself-after-an-amputation/

Our brain doesn't actually reorganise itself after an amputation
Previous research in macaques suggests that part of the brain reorganises itself when a limb is removed, but now a study in people has turned that idea on its head

BrainPath: Generating Subject-Specific Brain Aging Trajectories
Yifan Li, Javad Sohankar, Ji Luo, Jing Li, Yi Su
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16667 https://a…

BrainPath: Generating Subject-Specific Brain Aging Trajectories
Quantifying and forecasting individual brain aging trajectories is critical for understanding neurodegenerative disease and the heterogeneity of aging, yet current approaches remain limited. Most models predict chronological age, an imperfect surrogate for biological aging, or generate synthetic MRIs that enhance data diversity but fail to capture subject-specific trajectories. Here, we present BrainPath, a 3D generative framework that learns longitudinal brain aging dynamics during training an…

Self-orthogonalizing attractor neural networks emerging from the free energy principle
Tamas Spisak, Karl Friston
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.22749 https://…

Self-orthogonalizing attractor neural networks emerging from the free energy principle
Attractor dynamics are a hallmark of many complex systems, including the brain. Understanding how such self-organizing dynamics emerge from first principles is crucial for advancing our understanding of neuronal computations and the design of artificial intelligence systems. Here we formalize how attractor networks emerge from the free energy principle applied to a universal partitioning of random dynamical systems. Our approach obviates the need for explicitly imposed learning and inference ru…

"Schrimpf and his colleagues trained a model to generate sentences that, when read, would activate or suppress neural activity in the reader’s brain," exerting "noninvasive control over high-level brain activity" https://www.quantamagazine.org…

How AI Models Are Helping to Understand — and Control — the Brain | Quanta Magazine
Martin Schrimpf is crafting bespoke AI models that can induce control over high-level brain activity.

The Spatiotemporal Organization of Motor Cortex Activity Supporting Manual Dexterity
Nicholas Chehade
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21738 https://

The Spatiotemporal Organization of Motor Cortex Activity Supporting Manual Dexterity
Motor cortex (M1) is a crucial brain area for controlling voluntary movements, such as reaching and grasping for a cup of coffee. M1 is organized in a somatotopic manner, such that M1 output driving movement to different parts of the body is organized along the cortical surface. In primates, the arm and hand are represented in M1 as separate but overlapping territories. Unit activity recorded from the M1 forelimb representation comodulates with parameters related to reaching and/or grasping. Th…

Fetal Sleep: A Cross-Species Review of Physiology, Measurement, and Classification
Weitao Tang, Johann Vargas-Calixto, Nasim Katebi, Robert Galinsky, Gari D. Clifford, Faezeh Marzbanrad
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21828

Fetal Sleep: A Cross-Species Review of Physiology, Measurement, and Classification
Fetal sleep is a relatively underexplored yet vital aspect of prenatal neurodevelopment. Understanding fetal sleep patterns could provide insights into early brain maturation and help clinicians detect signs of neurological compromise that arise due to fetal hypoxia or fetal growth restriction. This review synthesizes over eight decades of research on the physiological characteristics, ontogeny, and regulation of fetal sleep. We compare sleep-state patterns in humans and large animal models, hi…

Temporal coding carries more stable cortical visual representations than firing rate over time https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-62069-2 A decent Neuralink Blindsight, Revision Implant or Phosphoenix brain implant will require more than a basic pixel-to-electrode stimulation…

Is competition the default configuration of cross-sensory interactions? https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ejn.70233 "we suggest that direct inhibitory interactions between sensory modalities are taking place in the immature brain";