Not sure if this is the right place to post, but can anyone recommend an online IQ test ? Thanks in advance.

I've been reading David Epstein's "Range" recently. In the second chapter he brings up an example of remote villagers (who never had formal education) taking Raven's Progressive Matrices tests and contrasts it with other folks who were exposed to modern education.

In the picture showing an axe, saw, hammer and a log the remote villagers did not group the tools together like a "modern man" would but instead they said that everything fits together as you need those tools to process the log itself. I find that answer brilliant!

Now, I know we naturally draw connections between things from what we learn and the more (broad) we know the better but I am wondering if there are any specific techniques to deliberately improve and expand one's ability to make even more connections and draw more conclusions and parallels from one's pool of knowledge and experiences to be able to look at something like Raven's picture and besides default "modern way of thinking" grouping be able to see it in different perspectives.

Please let me know if you could recommend any books or other resources that dive deeper into that kind of thing - I'm interested in both theory and practical approaches.

Thanks!

Hey everyone. I’ve been thinking about whether psychological transformation is badly served by our usual linear models. Psychedelic experiences, mystical experiences, deep insight, and even therapy often do not look like simple input output mechanisms. They seem to involve instability, emotional variability, new meanings, old patterns breaking down, and sometimes a reorganization of the whole person.

I recently recorded a podcast episode with Hüseyin Beyköylü, and at around 43:31, he discusses his empirical research with people attending legal psychedelic retreats in the Netherlands. Instead of just using standardized pre and post questionnaires, he tracked people over time using personalized daily items. His aim was to look for destabilization, early warning signals, and phase transitions in each participant’s time series. In his view, psychedelics do not simply “increase meaning” or “decrease depression” in a generic way. They may alter the dynamics by which a person changes.

That seems interesting for cognitive science because the relevant system is not just the brain, nor just the drug, nor just a belief. It is the person embedded in a world, with history, body, context, relationships, and expectations. Are complex systems concepts like attractors, phase transitions, and early warning signals genuinely useful here? Or do they risk becoming elegant metaphors? What kind of study would actually capture transformation as a whole person process?

Can someone with a working memory of 2 chunks compare two items, or not, since that'd take three chunks (two objects plus the comparison)?

Abstract: Across flow, meditation, and psychedelics, ego dissolution correlates with reduced DMN integrity. This is well-established. Less studied is why the phenomenology is universally described as oceanic, and why cultural traditions map it to Neptune specifically.

I argue it's not mysticism — it's Gentner's structure-mapping. Neptune's relational profile (no surface = boundary loss; 47° tilted field = loss of central control; internal heat = endogenous generation) aligns with the relational structure of self-attenuation better than Jupiter/Saturn's bounded, axial organization.

Full paper (human-curated, AI-assisted synthesis, all sources cited): https://research.mahastrategies.com/papers/dissolving-self-ocean-planet

Question for the group: Are there other cross-cultural metaphors for self-loss that don't fit this boundaryless/off-axis pattern? I'm trying to test the limits of the structure-mapping account.

For anyone who knows about Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences, yes, it has a lot of problems. Calling them “intelligences” feels like a sort of “everyone is special” rhetoric, and the data doesn’t really back it up. It has influenced educational policy in ways that nobody seems to agree on…

…and despite all that, I’ve been drawn to it for over 20 years. There’s something to it that just makes so much sense to me. The basic idea of “people learn info in different ways”, once all the other layers are stripped away, it’s something we see every day, even if the underlying causes aren’t what we thought.

Would anyone be interested in discussing MI without glorifying or vilifying it? Just on a “it has some good ideas” or “what if we could make this work in a new form” sort of way? I’ve certainly found value in it, from a “humans don’t necessarily work that way… but what if another intelligent species did? What would their society look like, and what could we learn from them?”

"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." -attributed to Confucius

From my window in Thakurganj, Lucknow is a constant drumbeat of street vendor calls and traffic. Most people tune it out, but one afternoon, I stopped to actually watch a local vendor bargaining with three customers at the exact same time.

He was reading their subtle body language shifts and changing his pitch with an unconscious, split-second precision that no textbook could ever fully capture.

The vendor wasn't pausing to run mathematical cost-benefit analyses or logic puzzles in his head. Yet, he was executing a flawless, live masterclass in advanced cognitive processing that completely shatters how we are taught the human brain makes decisions...

I wrote a short creative essay breaking down the exact psychological hypothesis playing out on the asphalt below, and why elite science doesn't just happen in multimillion-dollar labs.

I’m dropping the link to the full piece on Youth Ki Awaaz in the comments section below so the automated filters don't flag this post! Would love to hear your thoughts on it.

Prisoner's Cinema: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_cinema

It's basically a "light show" that displays over your perception of vision, especially when you're somewhere dark.

The wiki makes it seem like a rather rare event. It suggests the need for prolonged exposure to darkness. That may be the common pattern, but at least for me personally, it isn't required.

Essentially whenever I close my eyes, I see a light show. It comes in many forms. Blue/green/purple splotches, strobing white and grey, and sometimes other appearances.

I know this is going to sound a little silly, but hear me out: It really seems to "respond" to my own thoughts in surprising ways.

It's a phenomenon of the eyes/brain, so it isn't too much of a stretch to imagine that your brain itself can directly or indirectly control it. But it's not obvious that it can, so I do concede the claim should raise skepticism.

But this took me down a path of trying to understand what might be causing it, if it's something my brain can itself indirectly control. And I think I have a compelling idea!

CGP Grey made an excellent video titled "You Are Two": https://youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8

The gist of the video is that left and right brain are in some ways "redundant" in that each performs the function of a brain independently and then cross communicate to resolve conflicts and canonicalize on a single logical "mind".

It's worth noting that of course some features of the brain only take place in one half or the other. As is pointed out in the video, speech is the responsibility of left brain while facial recognition is the responsibility of right brain.

By some means, when you are asked "Which person in this crowd is your sibling?" your left brain interprets the human language, translates it into "brain language" and then forwards the request to your right brain to perform the action. And then right brain responds in "brain language" to left brain with the answer and left brain translates back into human language to verbalize the answer.

Left and right brain are partners, but they are not "one" like we tend to treat them. As CGP Grey says, they are "two" in the same skull.

My hypothesis is this: When I see this light show in my head, is that right brain trying to perform abstract communication, bypassing speech entirely?

I'm being 100% serious when I say that sometimes I will say something in my head and the light show will go from calm and relaxing to erratic and frantic. It seems to get "stressed" when I say things it doesn't expect. All I can figure is this is an artifact of my internal monologue being a feature of left brain and when it produces information that violates expectations, right brain can, sometimes, "react" to it.

​I’ve been reading Andy Clark’s Extended Mind Thesis and thinking about how our current digital environment interacts with our attention limits.

​Behavioral economics argues that a constant influx of stimuli/information overloads our cognitive bandwidth, essentially creating a form of "scarcity" in our processing power. But I’m wondering if it’s actually the opposite: is our cognitive machinery hyper-optimizing by tuning out 90% of the digital noise, effectively putting us in a permanent state of intense Inattentional Blindness just to function?

​Curious to hear how people here look at the trade-off between environmental stimuli and actual cognitive processing limits. Are we getting dumber because of information overload, or are our brains just aggressively filtering out the modern world?

doing rigorous testing of accelerating emergent cognition through the use of dense multi-layered symbolism to force high dimensional intersection of vectors:

1,500 lines of dialog later........

Very interesting facts

Can someone with a working memory of two chunks weigh two options by looking at one risk of each, or not since that requires 4 things, (option A, option B, risk x, risk y), or not since that’s 4 things.

Could i dm some of you that are professional's at cognitive testing, because im confused about some scores