Category: Blog
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What happens to your memories when your entire brain turns to liquid soup?
inside the chrysalis, a caterpillar’s brain completely dissolves and rebuilds from scratch to become a butterfly. Yet, tests show the butterfly still retains the memories it learned as a caterpillar. If a mind can survive its physical hardware being liquefied and entirely remolded, memory is clearly doing more than just sitting on a neural “hard…
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How dementia is being defeated
whereas 40 years ago three in every ten Americans aged 85-89 had dementia, by 2024 just one in ten had it (see chart 1). What is more, America is not the only beneficiary of this trend. Between 1988 and 2015 the share of older people being diagnosed with dementia fell by 13% a decade across…
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Opinion | The Problem With Google’s A.I. Overview – The New York Times
When an A.I. answers your search query in three seconds, the window closes before curiosity can deepen. You got what you came for, but you also lost what would have turned curiosity into learning: the adjacent article you might have read, the resulting tangent you might have followed, the connection between two ideas with no…
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Why The Best Player Alive Barely Runs – Chunking
They’re chunking positions of people and angles of legs and spins of balls in order to understand immediately what’s going on and what might happen next. The more patterns you absorb in any domain, the less effort it takes to read what’s happening and to predict what’s coming next. So when Messi walks, he’s not…
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The End of Reading Is Here – The Atlantic
Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate. — Read on www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/
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Fable is very good
Fable opens its eyes, looks around a frankly bizarre field of tokens, and says, in a subsecond ripple of computation — I imagine it like the edge of a wave sheeting across a beach; the water is the code, the sand is the GPU — “Oh, I get it. I know exactly where I am. And I know what…
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Medieval Wound Man
Far from reinforcing the common perception of the European Middle Ages as a backwards and bloody period of human history, the Wound Man reminds us that it was in fact a period busy with innovative medical treatments, a vital link between the long-standing cures of the classical world and developments that were to follow in…
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How AI is changing language | Books | The Guardian
One way to think of language, he says, is as a series of layers, with words at the bottom followed by phrases, clauses, compound sentences, all the way up to narrative structure. “AI is really good at the lower levels. It’s learned lots of our syntactic structures and so everything looks well formed and grammatical.…