Author: robert.adlington

Dreams are an invaluable way for another world to bolster the waking world. Freud famously interpreted them as a window into the unconscious mind, but recent research suggests that dreams are something more tangible than this, a way of re-enforcing your kinaesthetic memory, the memory that makes you reach for the branch in the right…

In some ways, he’ll always remain an observer of the group and never a true participant. But he is a full participant in his own life: deeply satisfied in the things he chooses to do and the people he chooses to be with. In a world designed for joiners, this is the otrovert’s ideal path.…

Social media was level one of this challenge, and it absolutely fucking cooked society. AI is level two in this maze—the three-headed sphinx whispering promises and threats simultaneously. Many who surrendered their focus in round one will surrender their critical thinking in round two. Scarcity drives value. Focused thought is becoming scarce. — Read on…

The rocks left behind by these ancient lava flows are known as the Siberian Traps. Today, the Traps produce spectacular river gorges and plateaux of black rock in the middle of Russia’s boreal nowhere. The eruptions that produced them, and that once covered Siberia in 2m square miles of steaming basalt, are in a rare…

You’ve probably seen hospital documentaries that have featured an “awake craniotomy”, the macabre procedure that keeps a patient with a sawn-open skull conscious, so the effect of the scalpel’s cuts can be monitored in real time. Marsh, along with his longterm colleague, anaesthetist Judith Dinsmore, pioneered that. He performed numerous other exceptionally advanced operations with…

Another rule: look for formulations like “it’s not just X, but also Y” or “rather than A, we should focus on B.” This structure is a form of computational hedging. Because an LLM only knows the relationships between words, not between words and the world, it wants to avoid falsifiable claims. (I’m saying want here…

And yes, I know it’s simple, but it makes me think that we have consider our “theory of mind” of all of our devices. And also a kind of proxemics… like, a cursor that comes right up close will appear to be way more certain than one that dances away. All the new devices will…

This kind of hyper-chaotic media serves as both entertainment and an ambient worldview for young men raised online. Their minds normalize prank-as-expression. In this context, throwing a dildo on to the court during a WNBA game isn’t just an act of crude rebellion. It sadly mirrors the Skibidi Toilet ethos: low-effort disruption cloaked in irony,…

These standardized scripts, and departures from them, influence how and how well we remember specific instances of these event types, his lab has found. And recently, in a paper published in Current Biology in fall 2024, they showed that individuals can select a dominant script (opens a new tab) for a complex, real-world event —…

If an intracellular mechanism for memory exists in brainless, unicellular organisms, then it’s possible we inherited some form of it, given the advantages it presents. All eukaryotic cells, including our own, trace their evolutionary origins to a free-living ancestor. That legacy echoes in our every cell, yoking our fates to the vast unicellular realm, where…