hkl @hkl@social.cleverlibre.org

Structural and functional integration of human forebrain organoids with the injured adult rat visual system https://www.cell.com/cell-stem-cell/fulltext/S1934-5909(23)00004-8 "Human brain organoids integrate with the injured visual cortex of adult rats", "Organoid neurons respond to host visual stimulation and adopt feature selectivity"; #neuroscience

Sparse, small, but diverse neural connections help make perception reliable, efficient https://news.mit.edu/2023/sparse-small-diverse-neural-connections-help-make-perception-reliable-efficient-0202 Distributed representation of visual information in thalamic inputs to visual cortex; #neuroscience

Wonderful, potentially very helpful #neuroscience discovery about #pain and #painReceptors involving #capsaicin

#medicine #research #medicalResearch

https://neurosciencenews.com/chicken-pain-22430/

The theory of stupidity

We have far more to fear from stupidity than evil.
Evil is easy to identify and fight against; not so with stupidity.

When we know something or someone is evil, we can take steps to fight it. With stupidity, it's much more difficult. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that stupidity is worse than evil because stupidity can be manipulated and used by evil

🔗 https://bigthink.com/thinking/bonhoeffers-theory-stupidity-evil/

#psychology #Philosophy #stupidity #evil @philosophy #DietrichBonhoeffer #philosopher

OpenAI released a tool which purports to detect AI-generated text. At the highest end of detection, it labels text "possibly" or "likely" AI-generated. 21% of human-written text falls under "possibly" and 9% of "likely" does. That's 3 in 10 students being defamed and/or harmed.

Just like other providers of academic surveillance software, OpenAI states that their detector "should not be used as a primary decision-making tool".

It will be, though. And harm will follow.

https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-written-text/

anyone else find that the standard ‘plot’ for scientific paper abstracts is a lot like standard movie plots:

- set the scene, everything’s fine
- OH SHIT, that was an unexpected thing
- characters realise they are going to have to get off their asses and DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS
- bunch of significant things happen
- sunny outlook… until next time

Children killed annually by mass education of Black history: 0

Children killed annually by mass book reading: 0

Children killed annually by drag shows: 0

Children killed annually by mass shootings & firearms: 4400

GOP: The only way to protect our kids is ban history, ban books, ban drag, and arm more kids with guns.

@Andrew_Hardaway doesn’t that just end up causing an endless bureaucracy feedback loop that is guaranteed to bring on the apocalypse?

Blocking the activity of neurons in a region of the brain involved in memory leads to cell death, which could help explain the spatiotemporal disorientation observed in Alzheimer’s disease. https://elifesciences.org/articles/85437?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=organic_insights

Distinct early and late neural mechanisms regulate feature-specific sensory adaptation in the human visual system https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2216192120 fatigue and sharpening "at different points in the sensory processing cascade, likely reflecting distinct #feedforward and #feedback interactions"; #neuroscience

Learning with all our senses and movement – behaviour, brain, and computation. Pressrelease on our review paper in TicS is now available.

https://tu-dresden.de/tu-dresden/newsportal/news/mit-allen-sinnen-lernen-multimodales-enrichment-als-optimale-lernstrategie-der-zukunft?set_language=en

#neuroscience #learning #multisensory

Journal Club: The peacock’s tail and other flashy animal ornamentation doesn’t have to come at a cost. http://ow.ly/rZ6A50MFtF3

How Expectations and Conditioning Shape Our Response to Placebos.

There is considerable experimental evidence that expectations drive our experience of treatment regardless of whether the treatment is a drug or placebo.

🔗 https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-expectations-and-conditioning-shape-our-response-to-placebos/

#drug #placebo #treatment #treatments #psychology #psycologists #trials #sociology @sociology #experience #expectations #conditioning #Pavlov #neuroscientis #neuroscience @neuro

By now you know that #ChatGPT will make up nonsense, presented with confidence.

Useful framework by AI and Data Policy lawyer:

Florida wants to restrict Black history to an approved list of facts and dates with no analysis or critical thought involved.

History without context isn’t actually history. It’s trivia.

Cross-modal correspondence enhances elevation localization in visual-to-auditory sensory substitution https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1079998/full "Participants were more accurate to localize elevation with pitch-based encodings than with the spatialization-based only method"; #SensorySubstitution #SSD #auditory #neuroscience

Click beetles inspired these robots in the family Elateridae, which jump impressive distances by bending and snapping their bodies. In PNAS: http://ow.ly/IOqG50MyllQ

Awwwww yeah! Faces on Mars are a thing again! 😀
(image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona)

'Birdsong neuroscience and the evolutionary substrates of learned vocalization'

by Matthew H. Davenport & Erich D. Jarvis @erichjarvis

Free (1-month) featured article, February 2023 issue of
@TrendsNeuro

https://www.cell.com/trends/neurosciences/fulltext/S0166-2236(22)00236-3#%20

It's going to get scary.

[Credit to the TLDR newsletter]

"Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University were able to create full-body images of subjects using simple Wi-Fi routers. The technology could revolutionize healthcare, security, gaming, imaging, and many other industries. However, it could present many privacy issues as the technology can monitor people's movements through walls without their knowledge or consent. The technique involves analyzing the amplitude and phase of Wi-Fi signals to find interference and then using AI algorithms to produce an image."