Category: Biology of Information
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Enriched Environment helps decision
Inter-Individual Differences in Cognitive Tasks: Focusing on the Shaping of Decision-Making Strategies is a recent publication about the Mouse Gambling Task. It revealed about 30% of healthy mice displaying risk-averse choices while about 20-25% of mice make risk-prone choices. These strategies are accompanied by different brain network mobilization and individual levels of regional -prefrontal and…
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Active Inference – The book
Available, – Open Access – free to download – great reading … Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior By Thomas Parr, Giovanni Pezzulo, Karl J. Friston The first comprehensive treatment of active inference, an integrative perspective on brain, cognition, and behavior used across multiple disciplines. Active inference is a way of understanding…
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Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds
This post is a pointer to a great article from Michael Levin, just published in Frontiers in Systems Neurosciences All known cognitive agents are collective intelligences, because we are all made of parts; biological agents in particular are not just structurally modular, but made of parts that are themselves agents in important ways. There is…
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French Horn taught me everything I needed to Know – Arthur Brooks
‘From Strength to Strength:’ Follow this link, fill out the CAPTCHA and … Arthur Brooks discusses his new book. He discusses about a nice set of ideas on building a happy and interesting life. His book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life is a practical…
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Machine Learning Article deserves to have the best ‘Plain Language Summary’
I share the opinion that “all plain language summaries should aspire to the glorious heights of this piece of literary art.”I also like the conclusion presented 🙂
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Why Can the Brain (And Not a Computer) Make Sense of the Liar Paradox?
Ordinary computing machines prohibit self-reference because it leads to logical inconsistencies and undecidability. In contrast, the human mind can understand self-referential statements without necessitating physically impossible brain states. Why can the brain make sense of self-reference? This paper addresses this question by defining the Strange Loop Model, which features causal feedback between two brain modules,…
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Complex Data and Models lead to Ascendency Analysis
When making decisions, data might not be overlooked, nor the methodology to collect and interprete them. Especially in complex matteras as sustainability and circular economy, data, the collection and interpretation is key in helping our understanding and guiding our decisions. The EU JRC just published a great overview report on “Domestic Footprint of the EU…
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“Nocebo” calls for vaccination side effects.
Most of the side effects that people experience after a COVID-19 vaccination can be blamed on the ‘nocebo’ effect. The nocebo effect is like the evil twin of the placebo effect — for example, it heightens pain if a person anticipates that something will hurt. Researchers reviewed 12 randomized clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines and…
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“active learning conditions” stimulate common processes that become part of the representations
There is an emerging consensus on the virtues of active learning methods for improving student performance. Such learning methods can be any instruction or technique that requires students to actively engage in the learning process, as compared to more traditional, passive ways of learning.One form of active learning is retrieval practice (RP), where the activity…
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Binary “Space-Time decisions” accumulate
There was this great article in PNAS, recently: The geometry of decision-making in individuals and collectives. Luis M. Rocha posted a perfect summary on twitter: In biology, complex dynamics so often lead to binary (thresholded/critical) decision: “we predict that the brain repeatedly breaks multichoice decisions into a series of binary decisions in space–time”.
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World Model – “Free Energy” Selections of Perception & Policy
During their lives humans constantly interact with the physical environment, as well as with themselves and others.World model learning and inference are crucial concepts in brain and cognitive science, as well as in AI and robotics. The outstanding challenges of building a generalpurpose AI needs world modelling and probabilistic inference, needed to realise a brain-like…
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Designing for Human-AI interaction is hard. (So steal like an artist :-)
Following is and interesting article/blog , and just “stolen like an artist” from https://www.simonoregan.com/short-thoughts/the-design-difficulties-of-human-ai-interaction Designing for Human-AI interaction is hard. Here Yang et al. catalog where designers run into problems when applying the traditional 4Ds process to designing AI systems. These difficulties can be broadly attributed to two sources: This uncertainty and complexity combination then…
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VVUQ your model and twin – should we trust ?
The world is moving towards digital twins. I recently came across a insightfull article: A probabilistic graphical model foundation for enabling predictive digital twins at scale, available at Arxiv – & published Nature The digital twin is a set of coupled computational models that evolve over time to persistently represent the structure, behavior, and context…
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Learning: Brain vs xNN
The neural and cognitive architecture for learning from a small sample is a nice article I would like to recommend. It highlights how human learners avoid generalization issues found in machine learning, proposes a general model explaining how the brain may simplify complex problems. Synergy between cognitive functions and reinforcement learning allows simplification.Recurrent loops between…
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Less = More, “Lets Kill”
One of the great readings recently was the article from Adams, G.S., Converse, B.A., Hales, A.H. et al. in Nature: People systematically overlook subtractive changes. The summary video, clearly marks the point: Experiments show that people default to adding as a solution in various situations. It appears to be an uncommon insight. When solving problems, people prefer adding…
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Can we get human nature right?
For years, I have the pleasure to follow the great blog site of Deric Brownd. I would like to share with you this post on the recent perspective on ‘Can we get human nature right?‘. Iris Berent does an interesting Perspective artice in PNAS that considers the strong intuitions that laypeople hold about human nature. People’s attitudes…
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