Hey! I’m doing a short anonymous school research survey on how short-form content (TikTok/Reels/Shorts) affects attention span and study habits in students.
It takes less than 5 mins so I would really appreciate your response so much 🙏
Link: https://forms.gle/wQRfW21Tp422vfEw7
Thank you!!
If metacognition is perceived as the highest level of intelligence (thinking about thinking), is there something higher? If so, what thoughts are there?
I've been pulling together what's been published in the last 18 months on cognitive effects of AI use and digital consumption patterns. The aggregate picture is more concerning than I expected.
Some of the studies I've worked through:
Gerlich 2025 (666 participants, mixed methods) - Critical thinking score decline correlated with frequent AI use. Younger participants (17-25) showed steepest decline and highest dependence. Higher education served as a protective buffer but only delayed, didn't prevent, the decline.
Yale 2025 (longitudinal, 4.5M adults over 10 years) - Self-reported cognitive disability in adults 18-34 went from 5.1% to 9.7%. Younger cohort drove the population-level increase. First time we have a generation whose cognitive function is measurably declining during their twenties instead of strengthening.
APA 2025 review (71 studies) - Short-form video consumption directly linked to reduced memory, weakened critical thinking, diminished cognitive function. Findings replicate across cultures.
MIT Media Lab 2025 (EEG, 54 subjects, 32 brain regions) - Subjects writing SAT-style essays were split into ChatGPT, Google search, and unassisted groups. AI users showed the lowest neural engagement and worst performance on linguistic and behavioral measures.
The mechanism that seems most consistent across studies is cognitive offloading - the more we delegate thinking, the less capable we become of thinking ourselves. This isn't controversial in the literature anymore. The question is what the remediation looks like.
Two questions I'd love informed input on:
Knowing about a cognitive bias — really understanding it, being able to explain it — does almost nothing to reduce its actual influence on your decisions. You can have written a paper on confirmation bias and still exhibit it fully in your next important choice.
What seems to work is structural, not psychological: pre-mortems, devil's advocates, decision frameworks that force you to consider the opposite case before committing.
But here's what gets me: the bias blind spot research shows that people who score highest on cognitive sophistication are often better at rationalizing biased conclusions — because they're more skilled at constructing plausible justifications. Intelligence can amplify bias, not reduce it.
Has anyone actually found a practice — something concrete and repeatable — that's shifted their decision quality over time? Not just reading about biases, but changing how you actually decide things?
In 1986, John White, Eileen Southgate, Nichol Thomson, and Sydney Brenner published The Structure of the Nervous System of the Nematode Caenorhabditis elegans [article here on pubmed]— the first complete connectome of any organism. 302 neurons. Roughly 7,000 synapses. Every connection, mapped. The paper was the founding document of modern connectomics, and it was supposed to make the worm's behavior a solved problem within a decade.
Forty years later, we still don't have a working simulation. The OpenWorm project has been running since 2011 — distributed, open-source, well-funded by the standards of the field, with the full connectome and a detailed biomechanical model of the worm's body — and it has not produced a digital C. elegans that crawls toward food the way the real animal does. The behavior won't come out of the wiring diagram. The wiring diagram is necessary and not sufficient, and after four decades of trying we should probably take that seriously.
This is the argument I've been turning over since recording a long conversation last week with Joscha Bach, the cognitive scientist who runs the California Institute for Machine Consciousness in San Francisco. Bach has been building cognitive architectures for twenty years...starting with his PhD at Osnabrück in 2006 produced MicroPsi — and his framing of the connectome problem is the cleanest I've heard. The reason the C. elegans simulation hasn't worked, on his account, is that we've been mapping the wrong layer of the brain. Neurons, he argues, may not be the computational units. They may be closer to the wires running between the computational units — the telegraph cables, not the telegraph offices. The actual computation may be happening inside each cell, in the cytoskeletal and biochemical machinery, and the connectome is essentially a circuit diagram for a system whose chips are somewhere we haven't looked.
If you find that too speculative, notice what it explains. It explains why the OpenWorm simulation produces movement that is qualitatively wrong despite getting the synaptic graph correct. It explains why Eve Marder's stomatogastric ganglion work at Brandeis — three decades of it — shows that the same 30-neuron circuit, with the same connectivity, can produce wildly different outputs depending on neuromodulatory state. The connectome is invariant. The behavior is not. Something below the connectome is doing the work.
The steelman of the standard view is real and I want to put it clearly. The connectome is unambiguously necessary information for understanding a nervous system. The Human Connectome Project, the MICrONS cubic-millimeter mouse cortex reconstruction released by the Allen Institute in 2024, and the full Drosophila connectome from the FlyWire consortium in 2024 are extraordinary achievements that almost certainly will pay off. The fact that we haven't yet simulated C. elegans may reflect engineering immaturity — incomplete dynamics, missing extrasynaptic signaling, unmodeled gap junctions — rather than the failure of the connectomic paradigm. Bach's "neurons are the wires" reframe is a strong empirical claim and the burden of proof sits on him, not on the consortia.
But here's where I disagree with the strong version of Bach's position. I'm not convinced the work inside the cell is doing the heavy lifting he wants it to do. Christof Koch and the Allen Institute team have been characterizing single-neuron computation for two decades, and the picture that's emerged is one of enrichment — neurons doing more than the integrate-and-fire caricature suggests — rather than replacement of the network-level story. Dendritic computation matters. Active conductances matter. But the leap from "neurons compute more than we thought" to "the connectome is the wrong layer" is large, and the evidence cited for the leap is mostly the absence of a working C. elegans model, which is also explainable by mundane modeling failure. I'd want to see at least one organism where we have the full connectome, full single-cell electrophysiology, full neuromodulatory state, and still can't reproduce behavior, before I conclude the chips are intracellular.
What I think the conversation actually moved the needle on is the falsifiability question. Bach was specific about what would change his mind: a clean simulation of C. elegans from the connectome alone, with biomechanically faithful behavior, would falsify the "neurons are the wires" hypothesis. That's a real empirical commitment, made on camera, and it's the move I respect most. The default position in this debate — on both sides — is usually one where no observation could resolve it. Bach named the observation.
The open question I'm left with isn't whether Bach is right. It's whether the C. elegans gap is forty years of bad modeling or forty years of looking at the wrong scale. Either answer has consequences. If it's bad modeling, the trillion-dollar Human Connectome bet eventually pays off. If it's the wrong scale, neuroscience has spent a generation building a beautifully detailed circuit diagram for a machine whose actual logic lives one level down — and we have to start over with tools that don't yet exist.
I spent ninety minutes pressing him on this. Full conversation, including the parts where I push back harder than I do here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bqdPHLIY8w
Hi everyone,
I applied for the MSc Cognitive Science program at RPTU on 29 April, one day before the deadline for international applicants.
My application status has been showing “in evaluation” since 5 May.
I wanted to ask if anyone who applied earlier has already received an admission decision or any update regarding the selection process.
Does RPTU send decisions in batches? If yes, around when did you apply and when did you receive your result?
TLDR: According to Joscha, neuroscience is discovering more and more ways intelligence could be "stored" inside a network, and the electric signals sent between neurons could only be one part of the story. Recent evidence? Glial cells.
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➤The Current Understanding
In this day and age, the fundamental structure of the brain is very well known. There are neurons, exchanging information through synaptic signals, and the whole system is known as a network.
Each neuron picks up on patterns of reality, and shares them with the other ones in order to allow us to build a complete model of the world, which is then constantly updated in accordance with new information provided by our senses.
As our model of the world changes in real time, the invariants i.e. the knowledge that remains constant get crystallized and baked into the connections between neurons (known as "weights"). This is long-term memory.
➤Are We Too Obsessed With Neurons?
Here is the problem: most contributions to the field have always centered around either the immediate information exchange (the firing patterns) or the more durable long-term neural connections. The other fundamental parts of the brain have largely been ignored.
But what if there was more to intelligence than those electric signals exchanged between neurons? Or if traditional neurons themselves were only one part of the story?
➤The Evidence
Joscha Bach bases his claim on 4 reasons:
1- Neuroscience has recently discovered new roles for glial cells, which unlike what was previously assumed, do play an important part in information processing
2- Recent studies have suggested that RNA could be an overlooked support for memory
3- We essentially recreated a worm brain in a computer and we still don't get anything close to worm-like behaviour
4- While transforming into a butterfly, the caterpillar’s nervous system is almost completely dissolved and totally reorganized in a way that the structure of the network (the neurons, firing patterns, and interconnections) seems largely destroyed. Yet the butterfly still remembers many learned behaviors from its childhood as a caterpillar.
It is hard to see how its memory or intelligence could come entirely from the traditional view of neural nets when such a network has essentially been wiped out.
➤How Big Such a Hypothesis Could Be
Joscha Bach compares the electric signals exchanged between our neurons to the antennas used by our civilization: they help us share information over long distances but intercepting those signals wouldn't allow an alien to understand human civilization. They would be missing the real source of information: nature and actual humans, which is far more significant.
What do you think?
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OPINION
I think Joscha points out something truly fascinating here: the possibility that we may not have even fully mapped out all the important components of the brain yet. If intelligence is also hidden inside the neural cells, then all bets are off. But I personally remain skeptical that the things happening outside of the traditional network, or even inside (through the RNA) are that essential (Adam Marblestone explains why here)
Btw this would contradict Adam and his connectome project (to map out all the neural circuits of the human brain) so I kinda hope Joscha is wrong lol
SOURCE
Here is the first in a series of substack articles that will analyze the human built environment through the lens of cognitive science, ecology and thermodynamics, felt experience, and enclosure of the commons. In this article I discuss the experience of the contemporary suburban baseball complex versus the archetypal neighborhood field or sandlot. The transition is largely driven by the same capitalist logic that attempts to enclose and commodify most experience.
I've always had a different attitude than others. When I was three years old and my uncle came to visit us, I stood in the doorway. My mother must have read my emotion as fear because she said, "She's afraid of you."
But was I really?
I quickly started to get bored in conversations. I noticed that my tone of voice changed. Or the teachers at kindergarten looked at me differently than the other children.
I remember being dragged to play with them. Modeling. But I felt the resistance inside me. It was something that had to be done.
And the more I grew, the more I saw lies. How people look smiling on the outside but when it's quiet they suddenly seem sad. They told me I was quiet which touched me because I learned that others They see silence as absence.
Impartiality.
Ignorance.
But I also saw how the same person then, in the company of guys, was also silent and pretended not to be there.
So in my head I created and named what I saw. "People behave and are perceived differently."
So I consciously started testing it. In high school, I started talking to people. And suddenly I was perceived as an extrovert. People would come up to me. They would talk to me more. Before I was really big company.
So I decided I wanted something smaller. I found a girl who knew a lot in class and that's why I met her. I pretended to be helpless so she naturally started helping me out.
But I didn't know that something like that, if it lasts a long time, could turn against me. After a while, she started to reflect my words back to me.
,, You're helpless."
,, Everyone needs to help you."
And subconsciously I started to believe it. I had a feeling and thoughts that they were right.
But after a while, I discovered this mechanism through a video focused on cognitive processes. Then it clicked inside me and I found the root of why I have them.
That gave me back control and I remembered that I had created this whole thing. The others just strummed along.
I discovered another realization:
"A lie repeated over and over again becomes the truth."
And that day I saw why.
*Atypical dominance in the sense of having preference for non-dominant side. Typical dominance here is right handed, right eyes, right legged, right eared.
This, atypical dominance means having atleast one of the following conditions:
Left (or mixed) handed
Left eyed
Left footed
Left eared.
I’m curious to see if there are people who genuinely enjoy deep discussions about cognition, psychology, science, social dynamics, paradoxes, cosmology, etc. I’m curious about almost everything, so I naturally love analyzing systems, exploring concepts and unusual ideas, and theorizing, but most people around me seem to prefer lighter conversations.
If someone’s interested ✋
This might be a slightly unusual post lol, but I’m looking for someone who’s into research and genuinely enjoys discussing ideas deeply.
I often end up going down rabbit holes related to cognitive science, neuroscience, cognition, consciousness, eeg research, etc., and I’d really love having a mentor-like friend (or even a research buddy) I can reach out to when I’m stuck on something, brainstorming a topic, overthinking a mechanism, interpreting papers, or trying to shape research ideas.
Not looking for formal supervision or anything more like intellectually curious people who enjoy discussing research, theories, methods, experimental ideas, and random “wait but what if…” questions at 2 am.
Would be amazing if you’re from a cognitive science/neuroscience/research background, but honestly curiosity matters more.
If this sounds like your thing, feel free to DM me :)
Built an open-source experiment called Animus: testing whether stable AI identity can emerge through sustained interaction rather than being explicitly programmed.
The idea came from reading Carl Jung specifically active imagination, where repeated dialogue with autonomous inner figures gradually changes the structure of the psyche. I wanted to see if there’s a computational analog.
So I built a framework where multiple instances of the same base model interact over thousands of turns, each initialized with distinct archetypal cognitive biases (starting with skeptic vs synthesizer). The goal is to test whether prolonged relational encounter causes measurable, persistent divergence in behavior and internal representations.
Current features:
The core question:
Can identity emerge from relational experience alone, even when the underlying model is identical?
Repo:
github.com/theoldsouldev/Animus
Would love contributions, criticism, or ideas, especially around better ways to measure whether the divergence is genuinely structural rather than just prompt-conditioning.
Modern philosophy finds it difficult to give a satisfactory picture of the place of minds in the world. In Mind and World, based on the 1991 John Locke Lectures, one of the most distinguished philosophers writing today offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. In doing so, he delivers the most complete and ambitious statement to date of his own views, a statement that no one concerned with the future of philosophy can afford to ignore.
John McDowell amply illustrates a major problem of modern philosophy—the insidious persistence of dualism—in his discussion of empirical thought. Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and McDowell exposes these traps by exploiting the work of contemporary philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson. These difficulties, he contends, reflect an understandable—but surmountable—failure to see how we might integrate what Sellars calls the “logical space of reasons” into the natural world. What underlies this impasse is a conception of nature that has certain attractions for the modern age, a conception that McDowell proposes to put aside, thus circumventing these philosophical difficulties. By returning to a pre-modern conception of nature but retaining the intellectual advance of modernity that has mistakenly been viewed as dislodging it, he makes room for a fully satisfying conception of experience as a rational openness to independent reality. This approach also overcomes other obstacles that impede a generally satisfying understanding of how we are placed in the world.
Hi everyone, welcome to the next reading group presented by Philip. John McDowell is widely considered to be the most important living philosopher; and "Mind and World" is widely considered to be the most important philosophy book published in the last 40 years. Strong claims! I am not sure I agree with either of these statements; and I am also not sure that it is even a good idea to ask a question like "who is the most important living philosopher". But nevertheless, the fact remains that this is an important book by a very important philosopher.
To join the 1st meeting, taking place on Friday May 22 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.
Meetings will be held every other week on Friday. Sign up for subsequent meetings through our calendar (link).
Here is the reading schedule for the first few sessions:
For the first session (May 22):
For the second session:
For the third session:
Check the group calendar (link) for future updates. A pdf of reading materials will be provided to registrants.
I would encourage people who are new to philosophy to give this meetup a try. I will do the best I can to make "Mind and World" (hereafter M+W) accessible and interesting. I honestly believe that the best way to "introduce" yourself to philosophy is to start with the most challenging stuff and struggle with it. As Peter Strawson once said: "In philosophy, there is no shallow end of the pool".
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MORE ABOUT THIS DISCUSSION GROUP
McDowell's philosophy can be compared to several other better known philosophies, and each of these better known philosophies can be used as an entry or gateway into McDowell. It can be helpful to compare McDowell to Wittgenstein. The Thornton book emphasizes this connection between McDowell and Wittgenstein.
It can also be helpful to compare McDowell to Hegel. After all, his philosophy is sometimes identified as a part of "Pittsburgh Hegelianism". There are several good books and articles emphasizing the complex relations between McDowell and Hegel. I will recommend some as the meetup progresses.
It can also be helpful to compare McDowell to Aristotle. I myself tend to emphasize this particular gateway into an understanding of McDowell.
However in this meetup I will ask everyone to read "Kant's Empirical Realism" by Paul Abela (even though we will probably not talk about this book as much as it deserves). There are many excellent Kant meetups at the Toronto Philosophy Meetup and so we can reasonably expect that many participants in this McDowell meetup will be well versed in Kant. By reading the Paul Abela book, we will be in a good position to use our collective knowledge of Kant as an entry into McDowell.
The format will be our usual "accelerated live read" format. What this means is that each participant will be expected to read roughly 10-12 pages from each book before each session. Each participant will have the option of picking a few paragraphs they especially want to focus on. We will then do a live read on the paragraphs that the participants found most interesting when they did the assigned reading.
People who have not done the reading are welcome to attend this meetup. However if you want to TALK during the meetup it is essential that you do the reading. We mean it! It is essential that the direction of the conversation be influenced only by people who have actually done the reading (and this includes the Paul Abela book). In other words, if you want to talk in this meetup, you have to read "Mind and World" by McDowell as well as the Tim Thornton book and the Paul Abela book. It seems to me that we should either do McDowell properly or not do him at all; I just do not think there is any point in doing McDowell in a half-hearted way. You may think you are so brilliant and wonderful that you can come up with great points even if you do not read all three of the books this meetup is based on. You probably are brilliant and wonderful — no argument there! But you still have to do the reading in all three books if you want to talk in this meetup. REALLY.
Please note that this is a "raise hands" meetup and has a highly structured format, not an anarchy-based one. This is mostly for philosophical reasons: I want to discourage a simple-minded rapid fire "gotcha!" approach to philosophy.
This is a 3 hour meetup. For the first two hours we will discuss "Mind and World". For the last hour we will discuss Tim Thornton's book about McDowell. Every once in a while we will devote a session to discussing Abela's "Kant's Empirical Realism". As a rough approximation maybe every second month we will devote a session to reading and discussing passages from Abela and using them to illuminate our understanding of McDowell. An unusual way to proceed I know, but I think it will work out well.
So I fell into a Wikipedia hole and ended up reading about impossible colors. Your visual system literally won't let you see reddish-green. There's opponent channels, red vs green and blue vs yellow, and your brain blocks both sides of a pair from firing at once. It's a hardware limit, not a software one.
But here's the crazy part. If you stare at something red long enough to tire out those cone cells and then switch to green, you can briefly see a chimerical color. A green that's greener than any green you've ever seen. It should not exist but your exhausted cones just let it slide through for a second.
And then there's olo. In April 2025 researchers used a steerable laser to stimulate ONLY the M-cones in the retina and produced a color with more saturation than anything that exists in nature. They called it olo. Nobody in the history of the species had ever seen this color before because natural light always hits multiple cone types at once. It took a precision laser to uncork it.
I do IT for a living and I cannot stop thinking about this in hardware terms. It's like finding out your monitor has a wider color gamut than the firmware allows, and someone figured out you can flash it and unlock a whole range that was always physically there but blocked. Except the monitor is your eyeball and the firmware is your optic nerve.
What's got me is the broader question. If color perception has hard limits we can find workarounds for, what else are we just sitting behind? What perceptual walls are we living inside of because nobody's figured out how to fatigue the receptor or build the laser that bypasses it?
My first topic is about curiosity because this entire community is built for people who are curious about everything. So it only makes sense to start by understanding how curiosity actually works in the brain.
Dopamine — often called the “feel-good chemical” — does a lot more than create pleasure. It plays a major role in driving curiosity. Whenever you see something new, surprising, or interesting, your brain releases dopamine. That little boost is what encourages you to explore, learn, and ask questions.
It’s the spark behind the thought: “How does this work?”
Even uncertainty can increase curiosity, because your brain loves closing information gaps. That sense of “I need to know more” is dopamine pushing you forward.
So in the end, dopamine doesn’t just reward you with pleasure — it rewards you with the desire to understand, discover, and learn.
I hope this is helpfull for you all !!
Try this right now. Pick up something near you. Anything, a pen, a phone, a cup.
Notice what your attention was doing in that moment. It wasn't selecting an object that already existed in your awareness. It was concentrating on an act that didn't exist yet. The movement wasn't there until your focus made it happen. Your awareness wasn't directed at the reach, it was directed into the creation of it.
That's not the same operation as focusing on this text.
When you read, attention selects. There's already something in your consciousness like these words on a screen, and you're directing awareness toward it. Classic selective attention. The whole history of attention research, from Helmholtz through James through every cognitive science model, is essentially about this mode. You have a field of existing stimuli and focus picks among them.
But when you move, create, speak a sentence you haven't finished forming, in those cases focus isn't selecting anything. It's concentrating awareness on an act of creation itself. The object of focus is a potentiality, not an actuality. I'd call this generative deployment of focus, as opposed to selective deployment.
The distinction seems obvious once you notice it, but I can't find it cleanly made anywhere., either in cog sci research or in philosophy. Merleau-Ponty gets close with motor intentionality, describing the body's forward-directed awareness in skilled movement, but he's doing embodiment, not attention architecture. Predictive processing gestures toward it. Nobody has placed it structurally within a theory of attention itself.
Why does it matter?
Because if focus has two genuinely distinct deployment modes, then attention is not fundamentally a selection mechanism operating on existing content — which is the baseline assumption across basically all of cognitive science. It's something more generative. The implications run into philosophy of action, phenomenology of creativity, voluntary movement, and further into what free will actually looks like from the inside — not a binary moment of choice but an ongoing act of bringing the next moment into existence.
I've been building a unified model of attention that tries to account for both modes within a single architecture starting from focus as being defined as concentrated awareness, powered by what I call focal energy, from which the full structure unfolds.
The full model is here if anyone wants to look at it
But I'm genuinely curious if anyone seen the selective/generative distinction made explicitly anywhere? And does the movement example land for you the way it does for me, or do you read that differently?
