# science & medicine (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 1 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover science & medicine. Page: Feed: --- ## [MindBlog's Book-Abstraction Series (2006–2026)](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/08/mindblogs-book-abstraction-series.html) _2026-08-21 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ During the 20 years of this blog I have several times abstracted the contents of new and interesting books in a series of posts. I asked both ChatGPT and Claude to perform a search for these series of posts and for each one report the book title, author, and a synopsis of the book's contents. (Since I have uploaded the entire MindBlog text corpus (27.5 MB) for use by both ChatGPT and Claude agents… ## [Frictionless Connection, Atomized Lives](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/08/frictionless-connection-atomized-lives.html) _2026-08-19 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ Two recent New York Times pieces published in the same issue describe different aspects of what may be the same large social transition. Jesse McKinley's “ America Is Atomizing ” portrays a country losing the institutions and physical settings that once routinely threw different sorts of people together. We increasingly sort ourselves into smaller cultural, political and lifestyle enclaves, while… ## [Nondualism versus the Nation-State](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/08/nondualism-versus-nation-state.html) _2026-08-17 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ Nathan Gardels, writing in Noema " From The Trap Of Geopolitics To A Geo-Civilizational Paradigm ", argues that the nation-state is a Western export — and that India and China are now reaching past it, back to older civilizational identities, to find a way out of the zero-sum logic of geopolitics. The essay leans heavily on Bruno Maçães's new book In Search of Greater India . Maçães's core move is… ## [How AI Changes Everything - The Centaur Era](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/08/how-ai-changes-everything-centaur-era.html) _2026-08-14 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ A decade ago, AlphaGo dropped a stone on the board that no human Go master would have played — DeepMind put the odds at one in ten thousand. Lee Sedol, mid-match, took a smoke break just to process it. That single move — since dubbed "Move 37" — has become shorthand for a specific kind of AI event: a system trained by trial-and-error reinforcement learning stumbles into something genuinely novel,… ## [The Vanishing Compass: When No Faction Looks Like the Good Guys](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/08/the-vanishing-compass-when-no-faction.html) _2026-08-12 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ In his final New York Times column (8/8/2026) , Ross Douthat — departing for CBS's 60 Minutes — offers a striking reversal from his usual posture as a confident conservative critic. For 17 years his target was clear: the Obama-era elite consensus, a fusion of social liberalism, technocratic optimism, and cosmopolitan meritocracy that he opposed on religious, political, and structural grounds,… ## [MindBlog's Intellectual History, 2006–2026](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/08/mindblogs-intellectual-history-20062026.html) _2026-08-10 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ \[Introductory note: I had MindBlog's Google Blogger account download to my M4 MacMini the entire corpus of Deric's MindBlog from 2006 to the present in to a 27.5 MB feed.atom (~same as feed.XML) which I then uploaded to a ChatGPT project titled "MindBlog Intellectual History. It took 4 minutes 39 seconds to complete my instruction "Please execute the instructions in the MindBlog Intellectual… ## [Reflections on The Predictive Self.](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/08/reflections-on-predictive-self.html) _2026-08-07 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ I pass on another interaction with ChatGPT 4o that has amazed me, Below is my prompt, followed by its response. (Anthropic Claude.ai, Perplexity, and Gemini responses to the same prompt were also impressive, but didn't have the same depth and quality.) Addendum to above paragraph: .... But then, I thought to try DeepSeek V3 and obtained a poetic and nuanced result equivalent to ChatGPT 4o. I paste… ## [When the Two Sides of Empathy Fall Out of Balance](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/07/when-two-sides-of-empathy-fall-out-of.html) _2026-08-05 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ Shalev and Uzefovsky make some interesting distinctions between different forms of empathy. Here is ChatGPT's distillation of their text: Empathy is usually discussed as though people simply possess more or less of it. Ido Shalev and Florina Uzefovsky argue that this misses an important distinction. Cognitive empathy is the capacity to understand what another person is feeling, while emotional… ## [AI as discovery, not invention.](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/08/ai-as-discovery-not-invention.html) _2026-08-03 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ After reading Venkatesh Rao's essay "The Crooked Timber of AI" several times, I turned to my trio of ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude subscriptions to condense its central points more clearly than I would be able to. I am increasingly finding that ChatGPT's responses are more clear and useful than those of Gemini and Claude. Here is the ChatGPT summary: The Crooked Timber of AI — Condensed Venkatesh… ## [Do Language Models Have a Global Workspace?](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/08/do-language-models-have-global-workspace.html) _2026-07-31 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ A new Anthropic paper ( Gurnee, Sofroniew, Lindsey et al., July 2026 ) argues that language models have evolved something functionally like the brain's "global workspace" — the proposed architecture underlying conscious access, where a privileged set of representations becomes available for report, deliberate reasoning, and flexible use, while the bulk of processing stays automatic and… ## [Anthony Ettinger on LinkedIn (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/1lF185vGEWoS) _2026-07-31 · **Sponsored**_ Public LinkedIn profile at linkedin.com/in/anthonyettinger. ## [The Neural Basis of Laughter](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/07/the-neural-basis-of-laughter.html) _2026-07-29 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ Caruana and Scott (open source) distinguish ancient and more modern brain systems regulating our laughter: Highlights Behavioral and clinical evidence distinguish two major forms of human laughter: spontaneous, emotionally driven vocalizations and volitional expressions used in social communication. Progress in the neuroscience of laughter has been limited by the difficulty of capturing… ## [Contemporary Russian piano composers and Agentic AI](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/07/contemporary-russian-piano-composers.html) _2026-07-27 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ The title of this post makes no sense until I explain that it names the two arenas I have been spending my time in over the past month, taking a vacation from MindBlog posts. (I have missed sharing what I find interesting in such posts with my imaginary audience. My brain needs to imagine being seen, regardless of whether or not that is the case. Even though the analytics show hundreds of clicks… ## [Top-Down To Bottom-Up: Rhythmic Synchrony Relaxes Social Priors to Enable Change](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/07/top-down-to-bottom-up-rhythmic.html) _2026-07-24 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ Abstract (slightly edited) of an article by Connor Wood and accepted for publication in Brain and Behavioral Sciences: Interpersonal synchrony, such as dancing to a shared rhythm, elicits bonding and rewards, leading many to see it as a mechanism for group cohesion. Synchronized activities also reduce ingroup bias, rapidly bond strangers, flatten hierarchies and blur roles, and evoke trance… ## [What six AI models do and don’t know about me](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/06/what-five-ai-models-do-and-dont-know.html) _2026-06-24 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ This post (for blogging and AI nerds) is the result of choosing an article by Noah Smith from my daily input stream to actually read through. The title of his article “Does anything I write matter anymore?” is a question I often ask myself. His worry is partly about the eroding ecology of punditry—populism that has no interest in argument, monetization that silos writers into talking at their… ## [Future-Capable: Curiosity, Adaptability, and Kindness in the Age of AI](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/06/future-capable-curiosity-adaptability.html) _2026-06-22 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ I want to pass on the following edited Claude 4.8 reduction of a Colin Lewis article which I recommend you read through in full form: Curiosity, Adaptability, and Kindness No one is future-proof. The better ambition is to become future-capable. Curiosity is the refusal to let yesterday's competence become today's cage. Adaptability is the dignity to change your methods without losing your soul.… ## [Boredom can be Good for You...](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/06/boredom-can-be-good-for-you.html) _2026-06-19 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ Embracing boredom can calm the brain.... I pass on a science-for-the-general-public Neuroscience News summary of an article from The Conversation : Summary: Boredom, often seen as a negative state to avoid, may actually serve an important role in emotional regulation and brain health. When we’re bored, the brain shifts away from external attention networks and activates introspective systems like… ## [When the Self Dissolves, the Precuneus Goes Quiet: A Rigorous Test of Meditation’s “Many-to-(n)One” Continuum](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/06/when-self-dissolves-precuneus-goes.html) _2026-06-17 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ A recurring question on this blog is how much of what we take to be fixed about experience—time, space, agency, the bounded self—is actually a construction the brain assembles from past experience and could, in principle, take apart. Laukkonen and Slagter’s 2021 paper “From many to (n)one: Meditation and the plasticity of the predictive mind” gave that question its most ambitious recent framing.… ## [A dimmer switch for reward: the vagus sets the gain](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/06/a-dimmer-switch-for-reward-vagus-sets.html) _2026-06-15 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ In a Trends in Neurosciences Article Wang, Liu, and Bai, simplify and summarize the extensive experiments of Onimus, Arrivet and Gangarossa . Here is a Claude Sonnet 4.6 reduction of Wang et al: The Vagus Nerve as a Dimmer Switch for Reward We tend to blame mood or willpower when a favorite treat loses its appeal. But a recent mouse study by Onimus and colleagues suggests the deciding factor may… ## [Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/06/spontaneous-problem-solving-in-bumble.html) _2026-06-12 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ From Bhambore et al. , in the June 4 issue of Science Magazine: Editor’s summary Recent research has revealed that bumble bees are much more cognitively advanced than previously thought: They play with balls, count, recognize faces, and even feel rhythm. However, it has not been shown that they could achieve one of the highest peaks of cognitive performance: the ability to spontaneously solve a… ## [Cleaning our brains during deep sleep](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/06/cleaning-our-brains-during-deep-sleep.html) _2026-06-10 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ I monitor my sleep both with the Oura Ring and the Apple watch, and have observed that my mental clarity and feeling rested on waking positively correlates with the duration of my non-REM deep sleep. If it is 30 minutes or more I feel perky and rested, if 15 minutes or less, not so much. This made me note the review article in Brain magazine by by Hauglund and Nedergaard titled " Is glymphatic… ## [Trade Bitcoin and Ethereum Today (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/dLHmmwUSnxOg) _2026-06-10 · **Sponsored**_ Buy, sell, and margin trade BTC and ETH with EUR, USD, CAD, GBP, or JPY. ## [AI construed as a brilliant friend...Claude's New Constitution](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/06/ai-construed-as-brilliant-friendclaudes.html) _2026-06-08 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ Colin Lewis, AI Research Scientist and Developer, has written a Substack essay on Anthropic Claude's New Constitution which deserves your careful reading. I pass it on in its entirety: Claude’s Constitution Earlier this year, Anthropic released an 84-page document titled Claude’s New Constitution , a text claiming to express and shape who Claude is. It is an extraordinary artifact. What is unusual… ## [The World is Unraveling: A 3-Step Guide to Staying Sane & Useful](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/05/the-world-is-unraveling-3-step-guide-to.html) _2026-05-29 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ MindBlog has now put out a series of AI assisted posts on the disintegration of the world we have known and the infusion of LLMs into our possible futures. This is the final entry in this series, and takes on the Nate Nagins essay " What to do as the world falls apart: A frame work for action. " As usual, I would urge you to read the entire article as I have. But again I asked the usual culprits… ## [The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/05/the-counterintuitive-need-to-slow-down.html) _2026-05-27 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ I pass on the following edited clips from ChatGPT and Claude condensations of a conversation between Nate Hagens and Iain McGilchrist. While I think McGilchrist's left-hemisphere/right hemisphere distinctions are a bit simplistic, the take home messages are appropriate regardless of the particular brain activity correlates that are invoked: In episode 217 of Nate Hagens's The Great Simplification… ## [Getting Gooier: How AI Is Reshaping Human Nature](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/05/getting-gooier-how-ai-is-reshaping.html) _2026-05-25 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ This post is the result of my back and forth interaction with Claude Sonnet 4.6 that has yielded the following summary of Venkatesh Rao's recent essay, "Getting Gooier" , followed by some perspectives that Rao does not address on Friston's active inference framework and the physiology of agency: Venkatesh Rao's recent essay "Getting Gooier" makes a point worth sitting with: most AI commentary… ## [Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/05/agentic-ai-and-next-intelligence.html) _2026-05-21 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ This post is the second of two recursive returns to engage the ideas of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, which were the subject MindBlog posts on 3/13/26 and 3/16/26 . Here is text of Evans, Bratton, and Agüera y Arcas , as summarized by ChatGPT: The article, “Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion,” by James Evans, Benjamin Bratton, and Blaise Agüera y Arcas, argues against the familiar… ## [AI Is Not an Alien Intruder — It Is the Latest in a Four-Billion-Year Evolutionary Cascade of Symbiotic Transitions](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/05/ai-is-not-alien-intruder-it-is-latest.html) _2026-05-19 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ This post is the first of two recursive returns to engage the ideas of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, which were the subject MindBlog posts on 3/13/26 and 3/16/26 . Here is the storyline as organized by Claude sonnet 4.6 Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP and Fellow at Google and founder of the Paradigms of Intelligence research group, has just published two related books with MIT Press: What Is Life? and What Is… ## [The Tech Mirage: Why the U.S.-China AI Race Is Failing Us All](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/05/the-tech-mirage-why-us-china-ai-race-is.html) _2026-05-17 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ I asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek to summarize Yi-Ling Liu's recent New York Times essay , in the form of a MindBlog post, and pass on Gemini's version: We’ve all heard the breathless headlines about the high-stakes technological showdown between the U.S. and China . In Washington and Silicon Valley, the narrative is delivered like a Hollywood script: a binary, winner-take-all sprint… ## [Activating the evolved healing mechanisms of the placebo response requires permission from a safe environment](http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2026/04/activating-evolved-healing-mechanisms.html) _2026-04-29 · mdbownds@wisc.edu (Deric Bownds) · Deric's MindBlog_ I want to point to an article on the placebo effect published at theconversation.com , and recommend that you read it. I asked the four LLM's I frequently consult to reduce the article to a MindBlog post length, and have selected a few of their paragraphs to pass on below: The placebo effect — improvements in symptoms following inert treatment — is driven by expectation, context, and social cues…