Category: Biology of Information
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regulation of motivated behavior
in “A unified theoretical framework underlying the regulation of motivated behavior“, Yu-Been Kim, Young Hee Lee, Shee-June Park and Hyung Jin Choi explain that multiple psychological components have evolved in order to orchestrate behaviors for survival. Despite several theories regarding behavior regulation, these theories do not clearly distinguish distinct components and do not explain the…
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Will We Ever Have Conscious Machines?
The question of whether artificial beings or machines could become self-aware or conscious has been a philosophical question for centuries. The main problem is that self-awareness cannot be observed from an outside perspective and the distinction of being really self-aware or merely a clever imitation cannot be answered without access to knowledge about the mechanism’s…
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Complex Systems Research in Psychology
Han L. J. van der Maas published August 31, 2024 this SFI book “Complex Systems Research in Psychology“, available as PDF for free. Prologue This book is intended for psychologists and social scientists interested in modeling psychological processes using the tools of complex-systems research. The book has three primary objectives. The first is to provide…
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Do we all see the same colours?
Patrick Mineault made a little app to test if we all see the same colours. https://ismy.blue He did the test, and in the end, yes, his wife has consistently different blue/green boundaries. It takes access to an adaptive optics ophthalmoscope to figure out if it’s a cone density difference or more of a Sapir-Whorf situation.…
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Insight –> selection of ideas
“Insight and the selection of ideas” describes the mechanisms underlying Eureka heuristic, explained within an active inference framework. Perhaps it is no accident that insight moments accompany some of humanity’s most important discoveries in science, medicine, and art. Here we propose that feelings of insight play a central role in (heuristically) selecting an idea from…
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music and aging | Bayesian inference
“Understanding music and aging through the lens of Bayesian inference“ Bayesian inference has recently gained momentum in explaining music perception and aging. A fundamental mechanism underlying Bayesian inference is the notion of prediction. This framework could explain how predictions pertaining to musical (melodic, rhythmic, harmonic) structures engender action, emotion, and learning, expanding related concepts of music…
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The Edge of Sentience
“The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI.” by Jonathan Birch Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimps, insects, or spiders? How do we tell whether a person unresponsive after severe brain injury might be suffering? When does a fetus in the womb start to have conscious experiences?…
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exploring One Health
The eco-epidemiology of zoonoses is often oversimplified to host-pathogen interactions while findings derived from global datasets are rarely directly transferable to smaller-scale contexts. Through a systematic literature search, we compiled a dataset of naturally occurring zoonotic interactions in Austria, spanning 1975–2022. We introduce the concept of zoonotic web to describe the complex relationships between zoonotic…
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Shifting attention
The Internal Dominance over External Attention (IDEA) hypothesis (I referred to earlier) asserts, contrary to the traditional view of attention as being primarily externally oriented, that attention is inherently biased toward internal information. A related work on attention switching has been published: “Shifting attention between perception and working memory“ Most everyday tasks require shifting the…
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energetic cost of allostasis and allostatic load – do not stress
Chronic psychosocial stress increases disease risk and mortality, but the underlying mechanisms remain largely unclear. This article in Psychoneuroendocrinology outlines an energy-based model for the transduction of chronic stress into disease over time. The energetic model of allostatic load (EMAL) emphasizes the energetic cost of allostasis and allostatic load, where the “load” is the additional…
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Fast walkers have higher IQ and larger brains than slow walkers.
These findings are from a 5-decade cohort study of 904 participants in New Zealand published in @JAMANetworkOpen which tested the hypothesis that slow gait speed reflects accelerated biological aging at midlife. Slow gait was associated with multiple indices of compromised structural brain integrity, including smaller total brain volume, global cortical thinning, and reduced total surface…
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Andy Clark “How the brain shapes reality”
Philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark challenges our conventional understanding of the mind’s interaction with the world. A great and entertaining lecture. I like the reflection with the reference to the weather forecast and how the forecast impacts “reality” perception. At the very least, understanding all those prediction-driven, precision-inflected, looping influences should bring us a…
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Why the simplest explanation isn’t always the best
Eva L. Dyer and Konrad Kording discuss in a commentary article “Why the simplest explanation isn’t always the best” an essential learning related to the article Phantom oscillations in principal component analysis (also available on BioRXiv) Dimensionality reduction simplifies high-dimensional data into a small number of representative patterns. One dimensionality reduction method, principal component analysis (PCA), often selects oscillatory…
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Novel beings, novel goals
Every now and then there is the opportunity to get the a clear overview on the actual state of research on biology, intelligence, the artificial and it’s overlap towards future capabilities. “Novel beings, novel goals: evolution & engineering of the agential material of life | Dr. Mike Levin‘ is available on youtube. Dr. Michael Levin…
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