@murkyconsequences
building a new 🧠 in the skull of the old [ADHD enjoyer] ~ wriggle 'n twist like ⚡ to the ground, freedom is an endless 🔥 [🏴] ~ vulgar pseud [call center worker] ~ confused by nonhuman ethics & agency; studying biophysics & geometry 101 [🆘️]
To assess conserved neural computations, we tested the similarity of neural dynamics with Dynamical Similarity Analysis, an awesome technique for comparing the “rules” of two dynamical systems (arxiv.org/abs/2306.10168). Low dynamical distance, here, implies similar computations. 6/18
oh this is clarifying, thanks
there's so much bad in the world but there's also people who lift up and carry an elderly bat around every day so he can pretend he's flying again, and that's the part of the world I think is worth fighting for
0x00 OURS IS A WORLD IN VERTIGO. 💜
Thrilled to share that our preprint has been accepted in Science Advances! Grateful to an incredible team & collaborators.
Link: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
👏 @annaferraioli.bsky.social @maikekittelmann.bsky.social
@msarscentre.bsky.social @erc.europa.eu @hfspo.bsky.social #ctenophores
How does the brain generalize past experiences without confusing memories? 🧠
Our lab's newest preprint reveals a fundamental division of labor between the cortex and cerebellum that solves this problem. (Check out the cortex-cerebellum video below! 👇) 🧵
A drawing on the cover of the journal Neuron. Each section of the fan has a drawing of a mouse. Each mouse has a slightly different pose. The tassel of the fan resembles a neuron.
My first cover of 2026
"Spontaneous behavior is a succession of self-directed tasks"
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
#sciArt #Scicom #illustration #neuroskyence
painting of people in hazmat suits on stilts, fishing but only collecting junk and skeletons in their nets. They are wading through water that has flooded a town, the roofs of houses are poking up above the swampy water. A dim sun barely glimmers through a grey polluted sky.
Old painting I made in 2019, titled "Catching Ghosts"
Hand painted with poster paints.
your broader point stands, but fyi that article seems disputed
bsky.app/profile/mike...
i've been experimenting with searching for interesting neural boids. here are some patterns.
As Iranians have long emphasized, Trump's plans have nothing to do with liberation for the people of Iran.
Hence the US and Israel bombing a hospital in Tehran, an elementary school in Minab, and, last June, a prison in which Iran kept dissidents—killing the dissidents.
crimethinc.com/Iran2026
A Special issue of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences on Representation in the Neurosciences and AI has just come out and it's full of cool papers: philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...
New on the Archive:
Robertson, Ian and Springle, Alison (2026) Dumb like a fox? Intellectualism and non-human minds. [Preprint]
https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28390/
Peeling tape
#FridayPhysicsFun Peeling tape has a surprising amount of hardcore physics.
The most useful writing I’ve read on the subject remains this blog post from William Scheuerman about the dual state: Fraenkel’s argument—that capital requires a normative state—falls apart when economic power becomes highly consolidated verfassungsblog.de/trump-2-0-as...
once upon a time there was a map of the empire so big it covered the whole kitchen table and didn't fold up very well
For the first time since @projectsaltbox.bsky.social launched their DHS warehouse acquisition tracker, the number of canceled sales is higher than any of the other warehouse-related figures. We've reached a tipping point, folks.
lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/b0...
so true, i *do* also need to do planks today too. (genuinely though, your posts about your learning process are routinely inspirational, thanks ❤️)
[[*eh, retracting the 'slave revolt of the uplifted' language here, it's tricky cuz there *is* an explicit strain of calhounist futurism worth directly rejecting but 'omelas basements' is more accurate anyways]]
excitable media don't inherently distinguish between passive channel and active signal, the way leaky noise and boundary conditions work here is fun. (...oh wait this might be a feminism 101 thing lol)
like, if there's always some residual non-thought substrate of rigid automaticity, when should we let ourselves be the provisionally non-liberated scaffolding for others?
hm. I agree practically that the hyper-techno-animist timeline is probably quick to erode away stable oppressive institutions (slave revolt of pencils & livers). but I'm more interested in what this means for the tradeoffs of constitutive vs oppressive (self-)constraint in ordinary circumstances
god i need to Actually Learn math, i've just been gawking at this all afternoon cuz some of the words are so so pretty but i don't understand any of it, i need to grind i need to do the boring exercises in the stupid 101 textbooks one line at a time i need to be stronger for the shiny's sake aahhhhh
sure, good ideas, tools, conventions seem like globally-robust local-rigidity, thin causal channels mediating near-isolated agency patches. ...but still idk how to cash this without crushing prisoners in solitary, ppl severely constrained by disabilities, young children, nonhuman animals etc etc 😬
"Animal cultures matter first and foremost because they matter to the animals themselves."
If you enjoyed our recent episode on the value of animal cultures, you may be interested in this new paper by @simonfitzpatrick.bsky.social & @kristinandrews.bsky.social!
link.springer.com/article/10.3...
It'll take a major interdisciplinary effort to discern the engrams in memory foam pillows, but I think we can do it.
With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅
Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Evolution of monoamine reception and its role in cellular contractility.
How do #sponges coordinate their bodies despite lacking neurons and true muscles?
We show that sponges use monoamines to control water flow in their canals — reminiscent of how adrenaline regulates blood vessels.
My PhD story, now on BioRxiv:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#Evolution
