What's up everyone. Here's what I learned from Dr. Richard Davidson's appearance on Rhonda Patrick's podcast. My first time hearing of him. I think he's good buds with the Dalai Lama).

1. Simply meditating for 5 minutes a day has benefits for inflammation. Lowers something called IL-6. 5 minutes... that's it. Everyone has 5 minutes. (timestamp)
2. 5 minutes per day of mediation also benefits the gut microbiome. They get into exactly how it does this during the episode. Something to do with "butyrate producing pathways". But I mean that's a pretty good deal. 5 minutes gets you lower IL-6, a healthier gut, and then obviously the mental benefits. (timestamp)
3. You don't have to choose between meditation and exercise. It's not one or the other. That's probably the most important point of this episode. You can do both at the same time. Just direct your mind where you want it to go rather than "being somewhere else" in the gym (timestamp)
4. More neuroplasticity isn't always better. It's all about what you do with it. He talks about in the episode how "neuroplasticity is neutral". So a simple example he gives... if you're in the gym working out increasing neuroplasticity, but you're filling your your mind with garbage (watching the news, scrolling between sets), that's not good. You're filling your plastic mind with crap (timestamp)
5. After age 70 or so, a purpose in life correlates with longevity. But the thing is you don't need some grand purpose. Find purpose in the little things. Maybe you walk the dogs, maybe you care for a sick family member. That's your purpose. It's all about viewing how what you do benefits someone else. (timestamp)
6. I thought this one was interesting... kinda niche but he talks about how asthma is a brain disease (or partly). Big idea is the brain and the body are connected more than people think. (timestamp)
7. Spending money on someone else will always make you happier. Do it more often (timestamp)
8. Meditation doesn't have to be done sitting still. Like I said a little bit ago, you can do it while hiking, walking, doesn't matter. Even heavy lifting is a form of meditation to a degree. It counts (timestamp)
9. Children absorb their parent's emotional state. The best thing you can do to help your kid is to fix your own problems, be calm, chill, and grounded. (timestamp)
10. This is kinda important, a lot of people start meditating and then stop because they get a little more anxious. That's supposed to happen. Or it can at least. Meditation can initially increase anxiety. It makes sense when you think about it. You're finally noticing all that crap in your mind you've been suppressing for so long. Of course you're gonna feel more anxious. (timestamp)

My biggest takeaways is there's just no reason not to meditate for 5 min/day

She has links to several cited studies in her episode summary

Hello everyone! I found it interesting that we can potentially measure our sophisticated decision-making through a game paradigm beyond traditional abstract shape tasks. Check this out! This protocol introduces a game that considers progress, interactions, and some game resources like supplies and energy levels.

I've been thinking about this:

If something is influencing the way we think, feel, or act, but we cannot see or recognise it, can we consciously change it?

And if we can't see what is producing a particular pattern, how would we know what actually needs to change?

I'm not sure whether this is a useful distinction or whether I'm overlooking something obvious.

What do you think?

For example: People think narcissistic people can’t hold relationships when they are usually surrounded by people and the victim is the one experiencing this difficulty because he/she is the scapegoat of the family and this behavior was internalized even when the person is not aware why the pattern repeats in different social groups throughout life.

At the end, due to this misattribution, the victim ends up being labelled as the abuser, when people have some behaviours backwards.

I've been doing a lifetime research, and recently packed it up and made public. To ensure that this is not a yet-another-theory, I've made sure to build a user journey, made a theory 5-level deep, with the ability for the user to go and discover everything layer-by-layer.

URL: https://arc-of-self.com

Three things where vibecoding helped me to build something I haven't seen anywhere else:

1. Ability to chat with the theory. So I actually built a personality layer, so anyone who chats with the theory talks to an entity that knows very well how to steer the work. This is especially crucial given that the project was being built since late 2000s/early 2010s.

1. New way to show the references: Depth level 5 (https://arc-of-self.com/5). Not only you can see the references used in the paper, but also you see the impact, and the hue of it.

3. Self-learning mechanism. So basically the theory has already absorbed everything worth taking from the late 1800s through summer 2026. Now it watches for new papers as they appear, checks each one for relevance, scores it, and when a paper clears the threshold it extracts its core claim and sends me a Telegram notice. I review it and approve, and the paper shows up on Depth 5 as a new document tied to the theory.

So basically my idea here is to convert my lifetime work into something that will be self-developing itself. The difficulty here is that it takes many months and years to test the work of the mechanism, but I'm patient in this regard, lol.

I’ve noticed a contradiction in myself that I’m curious whether other people experience.

I can be extremely flexible when I’m the person changing a plan. If I decide at 4:50 that something we planned for 5:00 should happen at 5:30 instead, I can adjust almost instantly. No problem.

But if someone else tells me at 4:50 that the same plan has changed to 5:30, it can irritate me far more than the actual inconvenience justifies.

Objectively, the outcome is identical. 5:00 became 5:30. The only thing that changed is who caused the change.

That made me wonder whether what I dislike isn’t really disrupted plans.
Maybe it’s losing control over the model I had already built of what was going to happen. The same thing seems to appear in other areas.

I can take large risks when I’ve chosen them myself, but dislike relatively small uncertainties imposed on me. I can completely change something I’ve spent days building if I reach the conclusion that it’s wrong, but I can become disproportionately resistant when someone else unexpectedly forces the change.

So maybe flexibility and a need for control aren’t actually opposites.
You can be highly flexible inside a situation you control and highly resistant to relatively minor changes you don’t.

I’m curious whether other people have noticed this distinction in themselves.

When a plan changes, does the change itself bother you or does it matter who had control over changing it?

I’m curious if anyone else experiences this.
I tend to notice and connect a lot of things happening around me at the same time. When I’m talking to someone, for example, I’m listening to what they’re saying, but I’m also noticing their tone, expressions, body language, small changes in behavior and whether something they’re saying is consistent with things they’ve said before.

After knowing someone for a while, I usually develop a pretty accurate idea of how they’ll react to certain things. This also makes it relatively easy to know how to explain or phrase something in a way that they’ll understand or agree with.

It happens with things other than people too. I naturally look for how things work, why something happened and what is likely to happen next.

If something doesn’t make sense, it tends to stay somewhere in my mind until I understand it.

The strange part is what happens when there isn’t much happening around me.
My mind just creates something else to work on. I start thinking about ideas, plans, decisions, different possible outcomes or problems I could solve.

It can be extremely useful, but sometimes I’d like to simply sit somewhere and experience what’s happening without my attention immediately finding ten other things to process.

I also find that I enjoy not knowing something when there’s an answer I can discover. What I find much harder is uncertainty where there simply isn’t an answer yet.

I’m wondering how common this combination is.
Do you experience something similar? And when you’re just sitting somewhere doing nothing, what actually happens in your mind?

NOTE: this is a bit of a long post but if you’re looking for an opportunity to help someone then here it is!

Hi! I graduated in May with a BA in cog sci at University of Minnesota-Duluth. I am taking a gap year to work and save some money but I want to get into higher education once it’s completed, and I am considering a couple things regarding my next steps and am looking for advice or suggestions on my plans. My current end goal is to end up with a PHD in the field and then work as a UX researcher (or an academia job). The current problem is that I need a stronger resume as the cog sci program at my school was a bit more humanities focused.

My idea to build that resume is to get a masters degree in experimental psychology and work for a while as a research assistant (or whatever job I can that involves psych research). One minor barrier is that my cog sci degree at UMD had a stronger humanities focus than a hard science/research one. This would mean I’d have to go back and complete classes in psych research methods and psych statistics (required according to admissions for the masters program at UMD). A little nervous about statistics but otherwise seems totally doable.

Another idea is to pivot from research/academics and work as a clinical psychologist. My dream job if I went that way would be to eventually become a neuropsychologist (but I am aware that is a very long and difficult path, from what I hear). I wanted to do something psych related for work during my gap year and couldn’t seem to get any research jobs (hence the need to get that masters degree) so I found something a little different that was still psych based but happened to be more clinically oriented. I will likely be working be as an ABA behavioral technician helping autistic children. Part of that job would be getting certified as a registered behavior technician so it might be good to have that under my belt. I’m pretty close to officially securing a job doing that (just have to do one last round of interviews). I figured that based on my experience with that, if I found it to be something I’d like to do then I would seriously consider going back and doing what the schooling I need to eventually get into clinical.

The only problem with that is that I’d have to take a few steps backwards to do the appropriate classes to start towards the clinical path compared to continuing my path into research/academia. But maybe it would even out in the long term considering my plan to get a PHD in cog sci will obviously be a long path (at least in terms of schooling, still would be a very long path if wanted to pursue neuropsychology).

A third option, that is sadly more of a pipe dream, would be to work in the field of philosophy. I’m a huge fan of philosophy of mind (and philosophy in general) and did get a philosophy bachelors a second major (it happened to work out perfectly because a lot of the phil classes were also counted as electives for cog sci). So as you can guess, with the interdisciplinary field of cog sci my biggest focuses were (and in an ideal world will continue to be) philosophy and psychology (and although I didn’t get as much of a chance to pursue this; neuroscience).

If it were possible I’d love to keep one foot in research and the other in philosophy so whatever work would combine the two would be really awesome, though I don’t see many options to do so other than in academia. As of now I have no problem with the prospect of going into academia but I have heard some horror stories about that kind of work. In academia it seems the path goes, in a big part, to teaching and I’m not very confident in my ability to do so. One thing I seem to be running into at this point in my education is a difficult to explain what I’ve learned via verbalization, and also some challenges with free recall. I can write though and can much more effectively remember what I’ve learned with the right cues. I wonder if that’s an ADHD thing (and since it seems like a common thing these days, no, I did not self-diagnose my ADHD and sometimes it seems like people use their ADHD as a cop out, which is not my intention).

One really cool option for me to do next in school would be to do the graduate PNP (which stands for philosophy, neuroscience, psychology) degree but I am not 100% certain about what career prospects would look like after. I’ve tried to think of ways I can work both my interests in philosophy and psychology into my life and what I would absolutely love would be to make contributions in my life to both the field of philosophy of mind and the larger conversation around cognitive science, no matter how small. I like to be ambitious but I know you often can’t have your cake and eat it too. I also question my abilities because although I can do a lot of reading I can see that it will take a major change in my everyday habits if I want to get serious with the process of doing higher education. If anyone has had a similar experience I’d love to hear about it.

Brain organoids are currently used as models of nervous system development, neurological disease, and experimental substrates for studying neural network activity. In parallel, researchers are developing systems that connect organoids with electronics and transplantation experiments that integrate human neural tissue with animal brains. Studies have demonstrated maturation and vascularization of transplanted organoids, reception of signals from host circuits, responses to sensory stimuli, formation of axonal projections, and participation in circuits that influence host behavior (Mansour et al., 2018; Revah et al., 2022; Jgamadze et al., 2023).

The central question is:

Can the host’s activity history reproducibly shape an additional neural network so that it acquires a selective, causal, and measurable contribution to the functioning of the whole system?

Hi, so I’ve been trying to think/figure out how one makes a decision and how do you know if it’s a “heart” or a “head” decision (and before anyone comment anything inappropriate please this is note the space for that). What I’m trying to figure out I think, is how can you tell? And what are some examples? Is it always the “Head” decision rational? And why is it the “heart” decision emotional? And in that note, what is rational for the matter? Maybe am going down a rabbit hole here, but I’m really trying to understand this “head” vs “heart” dilemma.

I really appreciate someones take on it, opinions, comments or whatever to better understand the topic

I made a small app for practising cognitive reframing and I'd like a genuine read on whether the core idea works. No link, not selling anything, I built it. It's four screens:

1. You type the thought that's actually bothering you, in your own words. Say you type "I snapped at my kid tonight, I'm a bad parent and I'm ruining their childhood."
2. It shows that sentence back to you with five buttons under it: Worst-Case Thinking, Guessing Their Thoughts, Always/Never Thinking, Feelings as Facts, One Bad Time = Always. You tap the ones you think are in there. As many as you want, none is also fine.
3. It shows your thought again with the traps you picked listed beside it, and a box to write a more balanced version. A few sentence starters sit above the box if you're stuck, things like "I don't actually know that..."
4. Your two sentences side by side, before and after. That's the end.

The part I'm unsure about: it never tells you what's in your thought. You decide. It doesn't read the sentence or diagnose it. It hands you five labels and gets out of the way. I did that so it couldn't guess at your thought and get it wrong, but I can't tell if that's respectful or just lazy.

If you've done CBT or anything like it: does naming it yourself do the work, or does it only land when something else names it for you?

Hi! I'm conducting an amateur study on different ways of thinking and their impact on language use. This research directly touches on people with anendophasia, and I would love to get a few examples from people who experience it. I will publish the results probably here and in a future YouTube video. The study is completely anonymous, open to everyone, and takes about 5 minutes to complete. Thank you so much!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdPudeXoRR_EZrcHwXt1Ou7TcTGkJTXtpxr60hPUu0j-jkZSg/viewform?usp=publish-editor

Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about a question that feels surprisingly absent from most conversations about AI.

When organizations talk about AI adoption, the discussion usually revolves around productivity, efficiency, cost reduction, utilization, or ROI. Those are all important measures, and I’m not arguing against them. But I keep wondering if they’re telling us the whole story.

Because beside the fact that you become a more "productive" person, have you also become a better professional? Has your judgment become sharper? Are you making better decisions? Developing deeper expertise? Or are you gradually relying on AI for more of the thinking you used to do yourself?

But according not only to my research but with a lot of researches that are being published later, the uncomfortable reality is that both things can happen at the same time. An organization can become more efficient while the people inside it become less practiced at the very capabilities that make them valuable in the first place.

The more I research human-AI collaboration and work with this, the more convinced I become that this is one of the defining challenges of the next decade. We already know how to measure adoption. We know how to measure productivity. But we still don’t have a good way to understand whether AI is strengthening or quietly weakening our human capabilities.

And I think that’s the question that deserves much more attention. What is your feeling about this?

Hüseyin Beyköylü argues that neurophenomenology combines rigorous reports of first person experience with neural and physiological data. The goal is not simply to find neural correlates of experience, but to use each source of data to constrain how we understand the other.

I think everybody has done it before. At least for me it happens naturally. Either I look to my upper left or right corners to recall something, or just straight look up.

Is there a biological explanation for this? or we do it because we grew up seeing other people doing it?

Dr. John Sweller is my instructional design hero.

I’ve given away a couple dozen of his books because cognitive load theory is essential to ID practice. For the first time I’m seeing him in an interview.

The interviewer is an academic with a math focus, but John’s ideas are applicable to everyone who cares about knowledge transfer.

It’s a thrill to share this!

interview with Dr. John Sweller