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!!
I’m a psychiatry registrar (resident equiv) and this essay grew out of a question I keep encountering clinically: what do we do with forms of suffering that are real, profound, and clinically consequential, but not reducible to pathology?
The ideas behind this essay have come about from 8 years of being a doctor and over a decade of meditative practice and study of Buddhism.
I argue that medicine lacks a satisfying mechanism for this kind of suffering; that the Buddhist account of dukkha names something important here; and that the predictive processing account of mind, may offer a way to understand this suffering mechanistically, through a serious conversation with contemporary cognitive science, contemplative wisdom and clinical care.
I’d be particularly interested in critique of the core mechanistic claim and whether the bridge I’m making between dukkha and predictive processing holds.
This is really a follow up, to an essay I posted a couple of months ago here, that sparked some interesting discussion. This piece is much less metaphysical, and deeply grounded in human suffering and how we approach it in medicine in a practical sense. Whilst I relate it to medicine, I think the core idea here is relevant to all humans.
The full essay can be found here: https://open.substack.com/pub/liambaker677130/p/the-suffering-medicine-cannot-name?r=6tdtsz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
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I am a rising college junior working on my neuroscience bachelor’s degree. I truly love the subject, am passionate about it, and do well in school, but am not quite sure what I want to do with it.
I don’t think I want to go to med school, but I am open to other medical related career options. I am not sure how I feel about a career as an academic/professor, or researcher. I suppose I am just looking for other “non traditional” career options or specific careers within “research” that may be options. I am open to getting a masters/doctorate too if it opens up more options. Please share your niche careers or experience working in any of these jobs!
Hi! I am currently studying genetics and bioengineering in Turkey. I want to study neuroscience, preferably neurodegenerative diseases. Unfortunately my GPA is 2.77 right now and I think it won’t be more than 2.8 :(
Do you have any suggestions to increase my acceptance possibility
Or any school or country suggestions
For example, if we are disciplined with timing in our professional lives, then do we tend to be disciplined with timing in our personal lives as well? Is this true or is it incorrect? I am curious because as far as I understand our minds tend to repeat established patterns. And if that is the case then why not these things?
Follow up question : In case it is correct, then is that the reason why we evolved to have the Halo effect? For example, if someone is competent in one area of their life then we tend to perceive they are competent in other areas as well.
Says in India, Art Deco is architecture of the common man (as compared to displays of power in America) vs. neo-Gothic/neo-Classical structures
Also says that the rise of gated communities, the lack of integration with Navi Mumbai is hurting Mumbai's growth. Explains why it's impossible for India to create it's own national architectural style
Thoughts?
I’m asking for guidance because I know how unreliable chatbots are.
I’ve been talking with Gemini and it says that there is a brain function of permanently isolating and guarding a specific thought so it can never be consciously recalled. It says this only happens with specific memories that present an immediate threat to a person's sanity, survival, or psychological stability. “We know the brain reserves this severe "lockdown" treatment exclusively for high-stakes, threat-related memories because ordinary memories do not trigger the biological panic buttons required to alter the brain's physical architecture.”
Is Gemini right here? Is it impossible for ordinary memories to get this kind of treatment? How do we know the brain won’t alter its physical architecture for an ordinary thought?
I am working with self-recorded motor imagery EEG data and am currently trying to observe Event-Related Desynchronization (ERD) patterns over the sensorimotor cortex using the C3 and C4 electrodes.
The expected behavior is a decrease in mu/beta band power at C3 relative to C4 during imagined right-hand movement, and conversely a decrease at C4 relative to C3 during imagined left-hand movement, due to contralateral motor cortex activation.
However, despite applying preprocessing and power analysis techniques, I have not been able to consistently demonstrate both ERD patterns simultaneously. Typically, only one of the expected conditions appears clearly in the data while the other does not.
I’ve been thinking about synaptic pruning and the idea of “use it or lose it.”
Let’s say someone was very intelligent at around age 12, but then falls into a long depression in adolescence. From that point on (let’s say until around age 20), they don’t go to school regularly, don’t have much social contact, and generally don’t use the cognitive and social abilities that helped shape their intelligence before.
My question is:
Could this long-term lack of stimulation cause irreversible damage through synaptic pruning, meaning the brain actually loses the connections that made the person highly intelligent in the first place?
And more generally:
Is there a biological “wall” or limit where certain cognitive abilities or intelligence levels simply can’t be reached anymore after a certain age (like after 20 or 30)? Or is it more that everything that was possible in childhood and adolescence is still possible later in life, just harder to reach, but the maximal potential stays the same?
I’m trying to understand whether long-term depression in adolescence can actually lower someone’s cognitive potential permanently, or if the brain remains recoverable if conditions improve later.
Also, for anyone knowledgeable about this topic: if in both depression and schizophrenia there can be significant loss of synaptic connections and network integrity in the brain, what exactly is the key difference that makes the changes in schizophrenia much less reversible compared to depression? Is it just the degree of loss, or is the underlying mechanism of network disruption fundamentally different even if the end result (reduced connectivity) can look similar at a structural level?
Does Neuroscience Training Change Social Perception and Emotional Regulation?
I’m curious about whether studying neuroscience significantly changes the way people interpret human behavior and social interaction.
For example, does deeper knowledge of cognition, emotion, and neural processing improve someone’s ability to recognize deception, discomfort, emotional suppression, or nonverbal communication patterns?
I’m also interested in whether neuroscience training influences self-regulation. Do people in the field generally become more aware of their own cognitive biases, emotional reactions, and behavioral patterns, or does having scientific knowledge of the brain not necessarily translate into greater emotional control in everyday life?
So a new paper that was just published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience proposes that self-referential thinking, which can be thought of as the ego, functions as the biological switch between System 1 and System 2 in the brain which it proposes are quantum and classical modes.
It proposes that the brain operates under a tight metabolic budget and that the DMN's process of sustaining boundaries through self-referential activity consumes a substantial portion of that budget which is the connection to Carhart-Harris' entropic brain hypothesis work.
So it describes that when the ego runs hot, the energy needed for energy pumping to maintain quantum coherence in microtubule tryptophan networks is unavailable and the brain falls back into classical sequential computation (System 2), then when the ego quiets, metabolic resources free up for energy pumping like a laser does to sustain coherence, and the brain enters the parallel processing mode (System 1) which it connects to flow states and insights. Then it points to significant implications this has for consciousness. It poses itself as an alternative to Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff's Orch Or theory
Paper here: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2026.1783138/full
I wrote this paper that combats Jung's approach to the jester, I believe that the Jester is the mind's symbol of in-between and transition and attached is my final paper.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vb7X8EfmVbN42x9gX7sY7jkxuK2hoO-e/view?usp=drivesdk
Hey everyone,
I’m a biology undergrad and I’ve recently become really interested in neurotech (BCIs, neural decoding, neuroAI-type work). I’m trying to figure out what the actual path into this field looks like and whether it’s realistic for someone like me.
A few things I’m confused about:
Can people from biology/neuroscience backgrounds realistically break into neurotech, or is it mostly CS/EE students?
What do neuroscience trained people typically end up doing in industry roles?
How is the neurotech industry actually right now. Is it growing, stable, or still very niche?And realistically, what does the pay range look like at different levels (entry-level to senior roles)?
What skills matter most early on if I want to move in this direction (Python, ML, math, research experience, etc.)?
Right now I’m planning to start learning Python and try to join a lab that works with neural data, but I’m not fully sure if that’s the right direction or just one of several possible paths.
Would really appreciate honest perspectives from people actually in the field especially how they transitioned and what they’d do differently.