Category: Neurobiology/psychology

• 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…

  walterstiers

  2024-05-24

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Creative Thinking, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• 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…

  walterstiers

  2024-05-07

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, healing, health, wellness

• 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…

  walterstiers

  2024-04-29

  #sense-making, Active Inference, AI, Biology of Information, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens

• Laughter – a signal

  Laughter may be the tool that nature gave to mankind to help it survive while traveling along the evolutionary path, claims Carlo V. Bellieni in “Laughter: A signal of ceased alarm toward a perceived incongruity between life and stiffness“ This feature of human behavior that precedes language development (infants as young as three months old are…

  walterstiers

  2024-04-23

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, health, humor, laughter

• 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…

  walterstiers

  2024-04-18

  Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, AI, artificial-intelligence, data-science, machine-learning, unsupervised-learning

• Every category is a simplification

  I like to refer to a great book and MIT Press Reader article from Gregory Murphy on the Psychology of Categories, an in-depth analysis of how humanity’s compulsion to categorize affects every aspect of our lived experience. “Every category is a simplification to some degree; it throws away information about the thing.” The minute we…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-11

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, categories

• Bad Therapy

  I just copied the review of this book – Bad Therapy by @AbigailShrier This is one of the most eye-opening books I’ve ever read. It’s a must read for any parent, any teacher, and should be required reading for any school administrator as well.The book dives into trying to figure out why kids are having…

  walterstiers

  2024-03-11

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Design Thinking, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, anxiety, children, depression, mental-health, parenting

• Bayesianism and Wishful Thinking are Compatible

  On the face of it, wishful thinking seems incompatible with the Bayesian brain hypothesis. This is why defenses of Bayesianism have taken an eliminative stance toward wishful thinking, showing that many apparent instances of wishful thinking are not wishful after all. This strategy has succeeded in defeating many challenges to the Bayesian brain hypothesis, with…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-26

  #Sensemaking, AI, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, bayes-theorem, bayesian-inference, machine-learning, philosophy, statistics

• The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness

  Thomas Metzinger’s latest book from MIT Press is focused on the experience of “pure awareness” as an investigation of the most basic fundamental nature of consciousness This specific experience, is the most important thing I have ever experienced in my life, as a personal attestation It is available for free here or also as pdf…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-26

  #sense-making, #Wicked, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, awareness, consciousness, god, meditation, spirituality

• Bayesian model: prior–cost

  Sohna and Jazayeri discuss in “Validating model-based Bayesian integration using prior–cost metamers” the two competing views on how humans make decisions under uncertainty. Bayesian decision theory (BDT) posits that humans optimize their behavior by establishing and integrating internal models of past sensory experiences (priors) and decision outcomes (cost functions). An alternative hypothesis posits that decisions…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-02

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Representation of priors and decisions

  The PLOS article by Marshall, Ruesseler, Hunt, O’Reilly “representation of priors and decisions in the human parietal cortex” discusses how both humans and animals actively sample the environment using their sensory organs, far from being passive recipients of sensory information. In rodents, active sampling processes include whisking and sniffing; in primates, the most important and…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-02

  #Sensemaking, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked, articles, memory, philosophy, Science

• Dynamic task-belief is an integral part of decision-making

  Natural decisions involve two seemingly separable processes: inferring the relevant task (task-belief) and performing the believed-relevant task. The assumed separability has led to the traditional practice of studying task-switching and perceptual decision-making individually. In this study, “Dynamic task-belief is an integral part of decision-making”, Xue, Kramer and Cohen used a novel paradigm to manipulate and…

  walterstiers

  2024-02-02

  #sense-making, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #DecisionIntelligence, #Neuroscience, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, aging, health, psychology, self-awareness

• Expert Predictions Fail …

  “When expert predictions fail“ examines the opportunities and challenges of expert judgment in the social sciences, scrutinizing the way social scientists make predictions. While social scientists show above-chance accuracy in predicting laboratory-based phenomena, they often struggle to predict real-world societal changes. Most causal models used in social sciences are oversimplified, confuse levels of analysis to which…

  walterstiers

  2024-01-05

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• The Emerging Science of Interacting Minds

  For over a century, psychology has focused on uncovering mental processes of a single individual. However, humans rarely navigate the world in isolation.The most important determinants of successful development, mental health, and our individual traits and preferences arise from interacting with other individuals. Social interaction underpins who we are, how we think, and how we…

  walterstiers

  2023-12-21

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Generating meaning – AI²: predicting wor(l)ds

  I would like to quote some of the great insights and statements from the opinion by G. Pezzulo, T. Parr, P. Cisek, A Clark, and K. Friston published in TICS: “Generating meaning: active inference and the scope and limits of passive AI“. Does ChatGPT ‘understand‘ what it talks about in the way we do, or…

  walterstiers

  2023-11-27

  #sense-making, Active Inference, AI, Biology of Information, Complexity, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #HumanAI, #TheInformationLens

• Interoception and Active Inference for mental health

  Interoception refers to the process by which the nervous system senses and integrates signals originating from within the body, providing a momentary mapping of the body’s internal landscape and its relationship to the outside world. Active inference is based on the premise that afferent sensory input to the brain is constantly shaped and modified by…

  walterstiers

  2023-11-17

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens, #Wicked

• Adult play – favoring collective decision making

  Adult play and the evolution of tolerant and cooperative societies Play is generally considered an immature affair. However, adult play is present in several mammal species living in complex social systems. This article considers the hypothesis that adult social play is favored by natural selection in those species characterized by high level of social tolerance…

  walterstiers

  2023-11-07

  #stakeholder economy, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Innovation Games, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #StakeholderEconomy

• EXplore-versus-EXploit problems

  Trade-offs between producing costly movements for gathering information (‘explore’) and using previously acquired information to achieve a goal (‘exploit’) arise in a wide variety of problems, including foraging, reinforcement learning and sensorimotor control. Determining the optimal balance between exploration and exploitation is computationally intractable, necessitating heuristic solutions. In “Mode switching in organisms for solving explore-versus-exploit…

  walterstiers

  2023-10-31

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #DecisionIntelligence, #EconomicBehavior, #emergence, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Conceptual Bootstrapping (human cognition)

  To tackle a hard problem, it is often wise to reuse and recombine existing knowledge. Such an ability to bootstrap enables us to grow rich mental concepts despite limited cognitive resources. This article presents a computational model of conceptual bootstrapping. This model uses a dynamic conceptual repertoire that can cache and later reuse elements of…

  walterstiers

  2023-10-31

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Information Technology, Neurobiology/psychology

  #ActiveInference, #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• Cognitive distortions in recent decades

  Cognitive distortions are thinking patterns that are strongly associated with internalizing disorders such as depression and anxiety. Historical traces of in millions of books published over the course of the last two centuries in English, Spanish, and German show a pronounced “hockey stick” pattern: Over the past two decades the textual analogs of cognitive distortions…

  walterstiers

  2023-10-30

  #Sensemaking, #Wicked, Complexity, Creative Thinking, Information Technology, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical

  #emergence, #TheInformationLens, #Uncertainty

• Puzzled …? – Consider the Bayesian brain hypothesis!

  Dysfunctional breathing disorder(s) (DBD) is an umbrella term for a set of poorly distinguishable clinical conditions including the most emblematic and anciently known hyperventilation syndrome. DBD affects in a variable proportion (between 5 and 35%) both adults and children, with a highly negative impact on health-related quality of life. DBD is consensually considered as a…

  walterstiers

  2023-10-30

  #Sensemaking, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Neurobiology/psychology, Science

  #ActiveInference, #HumanAI, #ProblemSolvingMind, #TheInformationLens

• A touch of intellectual humility

  Being open to the limitations of their knowledge can help researchers tofoster interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaborations. Intellectual humility involves “the owning of one’s cognitive limitations, a healthy recognition of one’s intellectual debts to others, and low concern for intellectual domination and certain kinds of social status”. That translates to recognizing the limitations of one’s beliefs…

  walterstiers

  2023-10-04

  #sense-making, Biology of Information, Decision Intelligence, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• Evolution of cognitive biases

  Peter S. Park published a very interesting research on decisions and inference: “The evolution of cognitive biases in human learning”. Some text snippets I like to share: Cognitive biases like underinference, the hard-easy effect, and recurrently non-monotonic confidence are evolutionarily puzzling when viewed as persistent flaws in how people learn from environmental feedback. To explain…

  walterstiers

  2023-09-04

  #sense-making, #Sensemaking, Active Inference, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Social-Technical

  #DecisionIntelligence, #TheInformationLens

• TAP – The Adjecent Possible

  From the astonishing evolutionary advances of the Cambrian explosion to our present-day computing revolution, the trend of dramatic growth after periods of stability can be explained through the theory of the “adjacent possible,” says theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman. Tracing the arc of human history through the tools and technologies we’ve invented, he explains the impact…

  walterstiers

  2023-08-29

  #Sensemaking, Biology of Information, Complexity, Life Ideas, Neurobiology/psychology, Science, Social-Technical, Sustainability

  #DecisionIntelligence, #emergence, #TheInformationLens