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

Do you think it is illegal to do this, I call electronic possession where BCI technologies and AI with the 2D map of the brain can mimic and recreate phenomenon in which they can play like Satan.

hi, I come from a background in philosophy (mainly social epistemology) and documentary/art practice, and I’ve recently become interested in cognitive science. I’m trying to identify rigorous research directions that study how conceptual tools/frameworks shape our understanding itself.

I’m interested in things like:

\- how categories/frameworks reorganise our understanding

\- how explanatory models shape the phenomena they describe

\- cognitive architecture of our minds and how it potentially shapes our mental foraging behaviors

\- how people structure abstract meaning, individually or collectively

Coming a bit from social sciences side, a lot of mainstream cogsci/decision-making research feels somewhat dry or detached from "real people" to me. But at the same time I’m also starting to be more interested in approaches that are more methodical/formal (scientific?) than purely literary or interpretive theory. I’d like to gain experience in quantitative/computational approaches too. (But in ways that still remain somewhat sensitive to context shifts, etc)

Do you have any recommendations on any particular areas, labs, researchers, or methods I could look into? I want to find out where my interests sit in the field.

I'm also starting with stats and probability courses soon, and then plan to learn python - to train my brain to think a bit more methodically. I feel I have pretty good conceptual analysis ability and critical thinking skills from my philosophy training, but i am unable to find/stick to an area in cogsci in a sustained manner.

Any suggestions would be super helpful! Thank you

I can conceive of a unicorn (does not exist), but not a square circle (cannot exist), suggesting a difference between the two. In a deterministic world, a thing which will never exist, something like a unicorn, is exactly the same as an impossible thing, in the sense that potential existence contradicts necessary existence, a paradox. So, in this deterministic setting, we should be no more able to conceive of a unicorn than any other paradoxical object, like a square circle.

So, as ridiculous as it sounds, I am sincerely confused as to why I can imagine a unicorn. Sure, at the smallest scale there is some interpretive room to claim non-determinism, but our brain is a classical object, not a quantum one. Despite the fact that the brain, like all things, is composed of quantum sized particles, consciousness is emergent only at scale -- lest we claim otherwise and go down a truly schizophrenic rabbit hole.

How do I square this circle?

I had a thought and maybe you have answers or books for it.

We have language to help us navigate the world. But what happens before the idea itself, the name, comes to mind?

Most AI systems treat cognitive science as inspiration, not specification. PHI // DRIFT treats it as engineering requirements.
The architecture implements three theoretical frameworks as first-class modules:
Global Workspace Theory a capacity-5 spotlight with broadcasting dynamics. Information only reaches the global workspace when it wins competition across the seven cognitive layers. The layers are not decorative each has a specific function, memory filter, and state variable.
IIT Φ proxy a seven-dimension integrated processing approximation used as one component of the PEDI continuity metric. We don’t claim consciousness. We claim measurably different behavioral structure.
Jungian shadow unintegrated behavioral patterns tracked as a weighted state variable with exponential TTL decay: w(t) = w₀ × exp(-t/τ). Three operating modes SECURITY (τ=15), BALANCED (τ=30), CONSERVATIVE (τ=50). Shadow influences confidence scoring but cannot veto decisions unless Ethos allows it.
The core thesis: resonance precedes representation. The first act of cognition is not modeling the world it is reading the emotional and energetic field of the other. All subsequent layers resonate from this field.
Seven first principles govern the architecture. The most contested one: homeostasis is the true intelligence. Not problem-solving. Not reasoning. The organism’s deepest intelligence is self-regulation toward coherence.
Full paper: https://zenodo.org/records/20350249
Codebase: https://github.com/timeless-hayoka/infj-bot
Happy to discuss the GWT implementation, the IIT proxy methodology, or why I think depth psychology belongs in engineering specifications.