Articles about Jared Kushner's diplomatic role with Iran that mention Kushner has received billions from the Saudi government (2/28-4/19):

NYT: 5 of 58
WashPost: 1 of 43
WSJ: 0 of 40
AP: 0 of 26
CNN Wire: 0 of 18
NY Post: 0 of 17
Chicago Tribune: 0 of 4
LA Times: 0 of 4
Boston Globe: 0 of 2

Yup, agreed, I think the data is stacking up against it.

Yes - seems like REBUS is not supported. We argued for a top-down explanation of psychedelics a while back: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19475401/

2/2) Interestingly, this aligns very well with the ideas @colin-bredenberg.bsky.social put forward in our Oneirogen hypothesis paper, which proposed that psychedelics may operate in part by pushing cortex to a more top-down state, akin to dream-generation:

elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

1/2) Just out from @alexkwan.bsky.social's group, a study showing that psilocybin silences SST interneurons but activates PV interneurons:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#neuroscience 🧪

To understand decision-making, we need to truly challenge lab animals Complex, multidimensional tasks that unfold over time could reveal how different brain areas work together to support decisions.

By designing decision-making tasks that vary along multiple dimensions and truly challenge our animals, we might finally understand how multiple brain areas coordinate to drive decisions, writes @chandlab.bsky.social.

#neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/decision-mak...

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A's efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.

💯

Back into Plato's Cave: Examining Cross-modal Representational Convergence at Scale Back into Plato's Cave: Examining Cross-modal Representational Convergence at Scale

New paper: Back into Plato’s Cave

Are vision and language models converging to the same representation of reality? The Platonic Representation Hypothesis says yes. BUT we find the evidence for this is more fragile than it looks.

Project page: akoepke.github.io/cave_umwelten/

1/9

This very nice paper provides some useful pushback against PRH.

To me science is like a damped pendulum, where we need to swing back and forth a few times before converging on truth.

So don't worry PRH fans, I'll be trying to swing us back out of the cave again soon!

I wonder - my personal guess is the core computational principles are basically the same across all cortical regions.

All of the above!

There are likely mechanisms for context dependent error correction, so that you don't always need to follow previous statistics, and can change course when the context calls for it.

My guess: that involves thalamic inputs into cortex, and may involve interactions between L2/3, L5, and L6.

Ooof, the Onion is a shadow of itself from days of yore.

For the Canucks out there, I think the @thebeaverton.com is actually much closer to the classic Onion now than the Onion itself in terms of the quality/style of the content.

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering The visual cortex receives a stream of high-dimensional sensory input. The role of dense local, recurrent cortical connections in shaping responses to these inputs has been unclear. Here, we show that...

I think this is a super interesting paper from @markhisted.org and co:

www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

My personal bet is that the phenomenon seen here would be different for some types of inter-laminar recurrence.

#neuroscience 🧪

Here is a timeline of the medical appointments I had before I turned to AI to try to help me make those next appointments better:
1: dx with urgent implications. No availability for followup, even though it was a progressive dx w/clinical monitoring needed urgently. Doc said "msg me on mychart"

Yes, agreed. I actually think it would be good for our societies to be forced to find alternative economic models that don't rely on population growth.

PS - I think concern about fertility rates is super misplaced for the time being. We can worry about that once the Earth's population actually starts dropping! Most of the concern now is largely born of racism.

3/3) I don't really see any way of changing this, outside of a pretty radical change to how we raise kids, to make having >2 kids appealing for more people.

(I'm thinking here of more communal methods for child-rearing that don't leave parents feeling isolated and exhausted.)

2/3) I think we all intuitively know the real reason that wealth + access to contraception mean low fertility:

1. Many people will choose not to have children.

2. Most people who do want kids will choose to have ~2 kids.

Mathematically, that guarantees a fertility rate less than replacement.

1/3) So, at the risk of getting people mad at me, I think this usual progressive story about birth rates is wrong.

The evidence doesn't suggest money/time make a difference.

(Consider Scandinavian countries with generous parental leave, etc., who still have low fertility rates.)

Canada too, this is an obvious win. Do it!!!

Speaking of infrastructure, @mark-carney.bsky.social

Brilliant.

Why neural foundation models work, and what they might—and might not—teach us about the brain These models can partly generalize across species, brain regions and tasks, suggesting that a set of machine-learnable rules govern neural population activity. But will we be able to understand them?

These models can partly generalize across species, brain regions and tasks, suggesting that a set of machine-learnable rules govern neural population activity, writes @juangallego.bsky.social. But will we be able to understand them? #neuroskyence

www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/why-...

I didn't say the hard problem was solved. I said that I'm not concerned about consciousness in entities that don't exhibit the functions associated with consciousness.

Note re coma patients: they're interesting precisely because they sometimes *do* exhibit the functions associated to consciousness.

That's fair, if you think the hard problem is something that has relevance for science.

(I do not, I consider the hard problem to be, by definition, something that is irrelevant to the pursuit of objective, or at least inter-subjective, truths.)

We draw the line at entities that exhibit the functions associated with consciousness! (Which does not include organoids.)

Quite widespread - it is a natural conclusion from functionalism:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functio...

Consider the following analogy:

You throw together a bunch of wooden planks randomly, and say, "Gee, I wonder if this is a boat?"

It's not unreasonable to suggest:

1. Boats need more than wood thrown together.
2. None of our previous attempts at sailing with random wood seemed to do anything.