2026-03-02 19:30:30
🛑 Hesitation is costly in sports but essential to life – neuroscientists identified its brain circuitry
https://theconversation.com/hesitation-is-costly-in-sports-but-essential-to-life-neuroscientists-iden…
🛑 Hesitation is costly in sports but essential to life – neuroscientists identified its brain circuitry
https://theconversation.com/hesitation-is-costly-in-sports-but-essential-to-life-neuroscientists-iden…
The 'secret connections' of the brain: a connectomic reserve for neuroplasticity? #neuroscience
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/
🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Cypress Hill:
🎵 Insane In The Brain
#NowPlaying #CypressHill
https://demloxx.bandcamp.com/track/cypress-hill-insane-in-the-brain-demloxx-remix
https://open.spotify.com/track/6DtVPEJXQxDp7nn3Kp076o
Hm, Doom läuft inzwischen auf Zahnbürsten und nun lernen pythonprogrammierte Gehirnzellen das Spielen von Doom in einer Wochen. Hey, was soll schief gehen, Skynet hat auch mal klein angefangen ;) :D
Human brain cells on a chip learned to play Doom in a week: https://www.
Imagination is not just replaying what we see and hear https://www.sciencenews.org/article/imagination-perception-overlap-brain-neuroscience "Conjuring a nonspecific scene or sound pings brain networks that respond to more than one sense"
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'`,…
Saw somebody use the acronym "SAHM" to mean "stay at home mom" but my brain immediately goes "store AH into... memory?" (like a cousin of LAHF)
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…
"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
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…
Confirmation in the press that the US DoD and Palantir are using AI and machine learning software to produce and speed up target listing. https://www.thetimes.com/world/middle-east/article/palantir-ai-software-us-iran-war-lwld892z9
Canadians, do you think, like Canadaland's Stephen Marche, that Canadian nationalism is a 1960s - Waffle, I guess - phenomenon?
"I just don't think of that period [post-WWI] as being hyper-nationalistic. I think of nationalism as born in 1965 from Margaret Atwood's brain."
As a historian, I know that left nationalism in the 60s was an important phenomenon, but the notion that some might think that Canadian nationalism was born then hurts my brain.
Brain prioritizes "sound offsets" during hearing repair https://neurosciencenews.com/auditory-repair-noise-damage-30639/
Noise-induced reduction and early recovery of superior paraolivary nucleus sound-offset responses
🤯 Specific brain signals rapidly eliminate body fat in mice
#fat
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
The office yesterday afternoon... donated a gig to a fundraiser for a young father battling a rare type of brain cancer.
#ThingsThatDontHappenInAnyOtherDevelopedCountry
Study finds dangerous lead levels in children’s clothing #children
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…
I am currently discovering step by step the work of Mark Hallett :
https://www.thetransmitter.org/brain-stimulation/remembering-mark-hallett-leader-in-transcranial-magnetic-stimulation/
Quite a long journ…
A shoutout to the systems engineers that made Microsoft Windows so fragile, that a single file browser (explorer.exe) freezing causes my Edge downloads to pause, and closing the frozen file browser closes all my file browsers.
My ADHD brain needed those open file browsers so I could keep track of all my in-progress tasks. How do I resume now? Yeah, I suppose I could come up with a better system than that.
You try and help. You try and make things a little better in whatever small way you can. You think, “hey, maybe at least there will be some respite now… maybe things can start to get better” and, just as your foolish little brain starts to believe it, the fuckers who fuck everything up for everyone but themselves – and somehow are never held to account for any of it – go and fuck things up even further. It’s fucking depressing. I mean I don’t know how we’re not all just fucking depressed eve…
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'`,…
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://…
No brain today. Just be.
#Birds #birdwatching The reason for superiority: https://neurosciencenews.com/birdwatch
Q&A with Skild AI CEO Deepak Pathak on building a general-purpose brain for robots, standing out among big tech's robotics efforts, the path to AGI, and more (Alex Heath/Sources)
https://sources.news/p/skild-ai-ceo-robotics-brain-davos
reluctantly bidding adieu to albuquerque & the brilliant freaks of the grateful dead scholars' caucus, a just exactly perfect escape from consensus reality. mind & heart full, brain & body crisped. presentations described in alt text! #deadscholarsunite
how many times can an 8yo scream directly into your ear before your brain melts?
(study shortcomings include the tiny sample size of 1)
🎧 Earbuds can be used to monitor brain health
#sensors
(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?"
How to improve memory, mitigate dementia & reverse brain aging:
1️⃣ Take a multivitamin daily.
2️⃣ Increase choline intake. (Eggs)
3️⃣ Eat more blueberries. (1 cup/daily)
4️⃣ Aerobic exercise (60% of max heart rate)
▶️ The Fastest Way to Reverse Brain Aging (Science-backed)
https://
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'`,…
My brain just made a weak fart noise and shrunk a bit.
https://flipboard.com/@flipboarduk/middle-east-conflict-3kg6h2ttz/-/a-kXuPjSBXS7CKFvzDIGBZ9w:a:26228122-/0
Neurons receive precisely tailored teaching signals as we learn (well, as mice learn) https://mcgovern.mit.edu/2026/02/25/neurons-learn/ "the brain can deliver neuron-specific feedback during learning";
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
Deepinder Goyal, who stepped down as Zomato's CEO, raised $54M at a $190M valuation for Temple, which aims to make high-performance wearables for elite athletes (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/27/after-zoma…
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
“Brain Drain” or Temporary Wartime Realities? How the Number and Quality of Applicants to Ukrainian Higher Education Institutions Have Changed Since the Start of the Full-Scale Invasion: https://benborges.xyz/2026/02/19/brain-drain-or-temporary-wartime.html
Never put any important information in a pop-up. The thumb is trained to close the box before the brain has a chance to take it in.
Thx Paul for a very informative and inspired Brain Inspired.
#neuroscience
As I emerge uncertainly from another sustained period of #madness, I realise (again) that I largely use the #PostScarcitySoftware project as self-prescribed anti-suicide therapy. It's sufficiently hard that it has my foggy brain working at full stretch, and sufficiently huge that there&…
EPA Repeals Regulations for Mercury and Toxic Air Pollutants From Power Plants
Environmental and health groups said the change will make people sicker and supports a dying industry
https://www.thenewlede.org/2026/02/epa-rep…
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…
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…
[hype alert] Brain chip implant: visually impaired Korean YouTuber applies for Musk's clinical trial https://www.mk.co.kr/en/culture/11976079 Kim Hansol (OneshotHansol) on YouTube
"We're just going to run a physical simulation of a human brain to achieve AGI"
"Won't the brain die instantly if it's without a body and oxygen supply etc?"
"Well, we'll just also simulate a body."
"Won't the body die instantly if it's in a vacuum?
"Fine, we'll just simulate an atmosphere too."
"Won't the body die if it's without food and light and gravity and stimulation?"
"Fine, we'll just simulate all the physical processes on the Earth."
"Won't the Earth just freeze instantly without the Sun being there?"
"Fine, we'll just simulate the sun, too."
"Will the solar system work properly if there's only the sun? What about gravitational influences of other mass in the galaxy, what about cosmic rays?"
"Fine, we'll just simulate the whole universe, too."
Fascinating article in @…:
https://www.thetransmitter.org/defining-ce
🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Flea:
🎵 Maggot Brain
#NowPlaying #Flea
#newRelease 🆕 album
https://officialflea.bandcamp.com/track/maggot-brain
https://open.spotify.com/track/3poJZBl2yoeWbMMxX63YcE
A brain implant for depression is about to be tested in humans #BCI
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
🧠 Bioengineered neuronal 'circuit board' mimics conditions of the human brain
#brain
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
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…
The mature brain and the neuroscience of wisdom https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/best-practices-in-health/202603/the-mature-brain-and-the-neuroscience-of-wisdom by William Haseltine; "A late-maturing bra…
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://
Would getting a Neuralink Blindsight brain implant for restoring vision be worth it? #BCI
budapest_connectome: Budapest Reference Connectome 3.0
A parameterizable consensus brain graph, derived from connectomes of 477 people, each computed from MRI datasets of the Human Connectome Project. Nodes are brain regions, and edges are weighted by the number of "tracks" that run between two nodes, as well as fiber length, fractional anisotropy and the number of occurrences in each of the 477 individuals.
This network has 1015 nodes and 63448 edges.
Tags: Biolo…
💢 MRI scans reveal how the brain processes toxic workplace abuse
#mri
The unusual electronic and optical properties of #perovskites have long been touted as useful for improving solar cells and television screens,
but these materials have never quite hit the big time.
Existing approaches have hoovered up all the investment and attention, and perovskites remain confined to specialist applications.
Now researchers at Empa, ETH Zurich and the Politecnico…
ARVO Foundation: 2026 Oberdorfer awardee recognized for outstanding research in low vision rehabilitation https://www.arvo.org/news/2026-oberdorfer-awardee Gislin Dagnelie, Argus II retinal implant, ICVP brain implant (intracortical visual prosthesis)
Audio long read: Many people have no mental imagery. What’s going on in their brains? #aphantasia are offering brain scient…
How US schools' overreliance on YouTube for educational content encourages students to drift into endless video scrolling on school-issued devices (Shalini Ramachandran/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/youtube-…
#Ultrasound gives the brain a nudge in the right direction https://www.ru.nl/en/research/research-news/ultrasound-gives-the-brain-a-nudge-in-the-right-d…
💡 Our brains may learn more from rare events than from repetition
#brain
How Kosovo's tech industry, driven by local companies like business outsource provider SPEEEX, is helping cut youth unemployment and changing Pristina's skyline (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-30/…
fly_hemibrain: Fly hemibrain (2020)
A synaptic map of the hemibrain connectome of fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using EM reconstruction techniques. Neurons are labeled by their type. Edges are annotated by the connection strength between the neurons.
This network has 21739 nodes and 4259624 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted, Metadata
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;
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…
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'`,…
🤯 The brain region associated with moral inconsistency
#brain
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
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…
Seeing with the Brain (not the eyes) #LGN (lateral geniculate nucleus) over visual cortex for a visual prosthesis.
fly_hemibrain: Fly hemibrain (2020)
A synaptic map of the hemibrain connectome of fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Nodes are neurons, and edges are synaptic connections, traced individually from brain image sections using EM reconstruction techniques. Neurons are labeled by their type. Edges are annotated by the connection strength between the neurons.
This network has 21739 nodes and 4259624 edges.
Tags: Biological, Connectome, Weighted, Metadata
Sources: Dell, Lenovo, and other PC makers are working with Nvidia on laptops using the Arm-based Nvidia-MediaTek system-on-a-chip, which could come in H1 2026 (Yang Jie/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/nvidia-wants-to-be-the-brain-of-co…
(YouTube) China's government-backed BCI push could bring brain-computer tech to the masses within 3 to 5 years #BCI
Generalization and extinction of learned fear alter primary sensory input to the brain (of mice) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.25.708099v1
A study of ~1,500 US workers finds AI use can reduce burnout but also cause "AI brain fry", a mental fatigue from using AI tools beyond one's cognitive capacity (Harvard Business Review)
https://hbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry
(YouTube) Your brain is a dream machine | Anil Seth on the neuroscience of active inference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYUoS0GkGCs That's what sensory substitution for the blind is tapping into: we see with the brain, not the eyes (Paul Bach-y-Rita).
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…
Brain implants: What's standing in the way of pivotal trials, FDA approval #BCI
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";
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
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/
Designing implants that don't scar the brain https://neurosciencenews.com/flexible-brain-implants-polyimide-biocompatibility-30538/ "Surprisingly, making probes 'ultra-thin' or allowing them to 'float' wirelessly didn't…
Brain-computer interfaces in healthcare: building the picks and shovels company while the giants fight over gold #BCI
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
The vOICe vision BCI app for Android crossed the 600,000 cumulative installs mark from Google Play https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=vOICe.vOICe Compare this to the number of Neuralink Blindsight brain implants in humans to date (spoiler: zero).
Thus far about the only known advantage of a visual cortical prosthesis (brain implant for restoring vision) over visual-to-auditory sensory substitution is that you get to see blobs of light (phosphenes) if late-blind https://www.artificialvision.com/neuralink.htm
Max Hodak's Science Corp. is preparing to place its first sensor in a human brain https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/14/max-hodaks-science-corp-is-preparing-to-place-its-first-sensor-in-a-human-brain/ biohybrid