Thomas F. Varley
@ThosVarley
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Dual PhD: Complex Systems & Neuroscience. Postdoc @ the University of Vermont. Information theory, synergy, and brains. Connoisseur of collapse phenomena.
Burlington, VT
Joined March 2019
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New preprint!
This is the last chapter for my PhD dissertation to see the light of day: I wrote it to be an accessible introduction to information theory explicitly written for the aspiring complex systems scientist. 1/n
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I've gotten quite a few cold emails from students who found this long review I wrote useful and I'd like to do...something with it. It's way too long to submit as a stand-alone paper to, say, Entrop tho. Does anyone publish big tutorial reviews like this?
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@PoRiverJamBand
@IwriteOK
The word "apocalypse" comes from a Green word meaning "revelation" or "revealing of unknown things", so in a sense this is an apocalypse, in that millions of Americans are realizing truths about the country they had been blinded to before.
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My problem with information-based approaches to consciousness is that informational quantities require an external observer. The entropy of X is *your uncertainty* about the state of X.
Information isn't a property of a system, it's a relation between a system and an observer.
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@tipado
These are remarkable - many of them seem like there must be a decent amount of capital behind them (high quality designs, packaging, graphics, etc).
Do you know anything about this market? Has enforcement just dropped to 0?
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People (esp. blue checks) get *really weird* about IQ. Post even a mild critique how IQ is discussed and guys will come out of the woodwork with long rebuttals, as if they are personally offended by the suggestion that IQ might not be the end-all-be-all measure of cognition.
The perception of IQ as a seemingly objective measure of intelligence is frequently used to promote racist pseudoscience on social media.
For this reason, I think it's extremely important for people to know some relevant facts about IQ:
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🚨 New preprint! 🚨
"Partial entropy decomposition reveals higher-order structures in human brain activity"
What information is in the brain that we've been missing by focusing just on FC networks?
There's a lot happening in this one, so strap in. A 🧵
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As the situation in the US continues to devolve I've been feeling very disaffected with neuroscience lately. I feel like big things are happening, but I'm getting paid to solve puzzles all that that I'm increasingly skeptical will help anyone.
Anyone else empathize?
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@findboundary
@GeorgeMonbiot
Speaking as a fellow neuroscientist - how does the "psychosomatic" model account for measurable physiological changes in the CPET-2 test? Or that you can take blood from ME/CFS patients, add it to healthy cells in vitro, and those cells will start showing signs of illness?
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I am now Dr. Varley!
I am forever grateful to
@spornslab
and all of my many colleagues, friends, and collaborators who worked with me over the last five years. It's been quite an adventure.
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Hot off the presses at Chaos -
"Evolving higher-order synergies reveals a trade-off between stability and information-integration capacity in complex systems" w/
@DoctorJosh
1/n
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Hot take: the apparent radical success of basic physical sciences in the 19th and 20th centuries has left scientists with an unfounded cultural expectation that reality is fundamentally comprehensible to humans. I suspect this is untrue. 1/n
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This needs to stop - another un-blinded, no-placebo study of micro-dosers (recruited from psychedelic events(!) found that (surprise surprise) micro-dosing is awesome...
Just ignore that incredibly long ethics/competing interest declaration at the end...
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I am a little frustrated with this pre-print. I'm all for pushing forward network neuroscience, but it feels like this paper is written as if it's making some groundbreaking new proposal: combining network science and neuroscience.
Come on...
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The critique that antidepressants essentially serve to band-aid the emotional suffering caused by our economic system is so common as to be cliche.
But I rarely hear people argue that
#psychedelics
will almost certainly be deployed in the exact same way.
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@mandyekeroth
I did not think that "Hitler couldn't be bad because we share the same signs" was a take I would ever see, but here we are.
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Going through
@jlizier
's new YouTube videos covering Information Theory in Complex Systems and really impressed with the breadth and depth of the material. Will definitely be sharing widely.
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People complain that resting state isn't "ecologically valid."
My brother in Christ, you are putting people in a gigantic, shrieking, magnetic tube. Having them play solitaire is not doing much to improve "ecological validity." It's all cursed.
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New preprint! The first one from my postdoc with
@DoctorJosh
and
@uvmcomplexity
.
What happens to the dynamics of complex systems when you force higher-order/emergent information structures on them with evolutionary optimization? 1/n
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I am on the job market! I'll be graduating this May with a double PhD in Complex Systems and Computational Neuroscience.
If you're interested in complexity, information theory, emergence, and/or "computation" in complex systems, please hit me up!
#ScienceTwitter
#AcademicChatter
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Hot take: If MAPS (sorry, "Lykos") had set out from the beginning to do good science, rather than treating the whole process as an exercise in red tape to confirm what they "already knew in their hearts", we wouldn't be in this mess today.
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🚨 New preprint! 🚨
"A scalable, synergy-first backbone decomposition of higher-order structures in complex systems"
Strap in, because there's a lot happening in this one.
Tl;dr - synergy: but not PID, not O-information, but a secret, third thing. 1/n
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@michaelharriot
If anyone is interested in reading further, there's a paper by Dr. Tim Turner detailing some of the technical/scientific details of all of this.
This story should be more widely known.
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IIT is an easy target because consciousness gets people's attention, but let's be honest, it's hardly unique among theoretical neuro/cog-sci models in being vague, untestable, and formally problematic.
Does the field *really* want to open that particular can of worms?
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@tipado
So I guess the logic is "do black market R&D now to have viable products to launch as soon as legalization passes?"
Probably risky, but might have big payoffs.
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Getting people to pay you $500 to spend an hour watching you placebo yourself into thinking a microdose is expanding your mind is a *fantastic* grift.
10/10, no notes from me.
Prices for mushroom sessions at the first legal, licensed psilocybin clinic in the United States.
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🚨Now published in
@PLOSONE
: 🚨
My paper on generalizing the partial information decomposition and partial entropy decomposition to the Kullback-Leibler divergence (the "generalized information decomposition")! 1/n
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Hot take: there's actually no such thing as "The Psychedelic Community." There are psychedelic communiTIES (plural) that co-exist within the broader space of people interested in psychedelics, but simply sharing a particular interest, or experience, doesn't make us a Community...
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@Dervine7
@burritotheif
Ngl, I really wish this was our cultural default. We don't really *need* to indicate gender when referring to people outside of a few contexts (where it's easy to do it in other ways).
Turkish gets along fine with no gendered pronouns - we could too. Just use "they" for everyone.
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I do not remotely believe that DMT hyperspace is "real", or that if you put two DMTx psychonauts in different rooms, that they will be able to "make contact" in hyperspace.
But I really, really, want to be wrong about that.
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I was not prepared for the psychological/cognitive dimension of COVID. The physical symptoms have been pretty mind, but apparently "brain-fog" actually means: "terrifying depersonalization/derealization."
I feel like someone's been putting ketamine in my Cheerios for a week.
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Our paper on higher-order information-sharing in fMRI is out in Nature Communications Biology!
"Multivariate information theory uncovers synergistic subsystems of the human cerebral cortex"
W/ co-first author
@MariaEPope1
,
@joshfasky
, and
@spornslab
1/n
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One of the most interesting aspects of watching psychedelic mainstreaming unfold is seeing how the need for intellectual property in pharma drives absolutely pointless innovation. We don't need "pro-drugs" - go eat some mushrooms. The problem is, you can't patent that.
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@findboundary
@GeorgeMonbiot
If that's true, then whey are ME/CFS patients *so much more* disabled by their "psychosomatic" illness compared to, say, MDD? Clearly some people have a biological difference that makes their physiology more reactive to their psychological state.
That points back to biology.
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It's weird to watch the
#psychedelic
industry try to sell itself as revolutionary, while working to bring psychs. into the existing power structure.
"We will re-integrate humanity with the natural cycles of life! That's why you'll get such a great ROI if you buy our IPO!"
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🚨New preprint!🚨
This is a shorter piece that came out of a side-project I've been working on off and on on the link between information theory and emergence. 1/N
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Here's a question: why can the brain perceive chronic pain but not chronic pleasure? We quickly grow tolerant to pretty much any hedonic reward, but can exist in states of (sometimes crippling) chronic pain indefinitely?
(This Tweet brought to you by day 5 of this migraine).
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This exchange is instructive for anyone naive enough to believe that merely taking a lot of psychedelics is enough to turn us into a happy rainbow collective made of love.
The Daily Shroom spouting absolutely transphobic nonsense.
I want to make it clear: I support trans people.
One of the 1st things that psychedelics taught me is that society has a lot of bullshit rules-including gender roles. I'm CIS myself but stand with my trans brothers & sisters.
If you disagree or want to spread hate, unfollow me.
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New Preprint! I'm making a foray back into
#psychedelic
science on this one: and combining it with information theory!
"The serotonergic psychedelic N,N-dipropyltryptamine alters information-processing dynamics in cortical neural circuits" 1/n
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@coldbrewedtool
You are literally my only source of news on this (and I live in Indiana, not too far away, even). Where is the coverage?
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@stevenstrogatz
@joboaler
I would say that probability and statistics are probably the most important mathematical skills to develop. Also, foundational maths like set theory and proof writing, instead of rote-memorization.
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@findboundary
@GeorgeMonbiot
If you have evidence of CBT (or literally any other psychotherapy) improving performance on, say, a CPET-2 test in ME/CFS suffers, I'd be happy to see it. But I can find a number of studies show that doesn't really work. And can make things worse.
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I have a postdoc! I'll be joining the Bongard Lab at UVM (in Vermont) to continue exploring how information theory can help us understand self-organization and behavior in (non-neural) biology and robotics! 1/n
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🎵New preprint!🎶
We're breaking into the higher-order space with a pretty cool project using the O-Information to explore redundant and synergy-dominated subsystems in the human brain.
W/
@spornslab
,
@joshfasky
, and my co-first author
@MariaEPope1
1/n
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🚨New pre-print!🚨
Can we generalize the partial information decomposition in a way that relaxes the requirement to partition a system into "inputs" and "targets" while still retaining the intuitions about information?
Yes! 1/N
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@findboundary
@GeorgeMonbiot
If some people's biologies are a catastrophically vulnerable to a psychosomatic disorder...then we should focus on making their biologies more robust. With biomedical research.
It's clear that the CBT approaches just don't work. So all that's really left is the bio one.
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@PhilosophyTube
Hot take: QAnon is far-and-away the scariest thing to come out of the last 4 years of the US's on-ging political crisis.
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Apparently, our review paper on using partial information decomposition and synergy to quantify "computation" in neural networks has won an Editor's Choice award from Entropy.
Idk if it means anything, but validation is always nice.
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I'm pleased to announce that our paper on information dynamics and motor activity in behaving macaques is finally out in PNAS!
A great collaboration between
@spornslab
@dann_benjamin
@SSchaffelhofer
and
@HansScherberger
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The DEA is intends to add psychedelic phenethylamines DOI and DOC to Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act.
With other psychedelic criminalized, DOI and DOC have been key compounds for biologists and neuroscientists investigating the 5-HT2Ar.
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🚨 New paper in press! 🚨
After a grueling peer review process, I'm proud to finally see this in print! (1/n)
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This is wild - this study gave 27 anxiety patients an SSRI but told half the subjects they were only getting an active placebo. Despite ingesting the same drug, the correctly informed patients did 4x better and had altered dopamine binding in PET scans
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🚨New preprint!🚨
This was one of the few things that kept me (somewhat) grounded during the worst months of the pandemic winter. An excellent collaboration between myself,
@spornslab
,
@dann_benjamin
and
@HansScherberger
. Details below 1/n
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Weird thread on logic gates:
We all know and love the XOR gate. Synergy! But here's a weird link to the AND gate.
Let's create a "meta gate" that describes whether we can compute the correct answer for the XOR gate given the inputs... 1/N
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🚨New preprint!🚨
Presenting a fantastic collaboration between
@AntonTokariev
,
@spornslab
, myself and others: tracking the emergence of global synergy in the brains of infants using O-information and EEG (and what it all means for later cognition). 1/n
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@ContraPoints
Swap out the hypothalamus for the pineal gland and you're in literal 17th century proto-phrenology territory.
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If you come back from a visionary psychedelic experience thinking "I should invest in Bitcoin to help save humanity" you are doing it fundamentally, astonishingly, wrong. I don't care if the Archangel Michael appeared to you and said it - something got very lost in translation.
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Fascinating study, with lots of possible hypotheses to explore.
Is ketamine more placebo than we thought? Are anaesthetics possible antidepressants? Maybe the specific drug is irrelevant and what matters is the disruption of consciousness? Or just being cared for?
SPIKED: Stanford Placebo vs Intraop Ketamine Evaluated for Depression. We masked ketamine with surgical anesthesia in depressed patients. Full details now published, peer review pending. Huge antidepressant response in both groups.
@TheresaLii
1st auth
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@ravenscimaven
@Sixxwitch1
Same - COVID left me with bilateral tinnitus that never shuts up. 🤬
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I have a new paper - a great collaboration with
@spornslab
,
@aina_puce
, and John Beggs. Looking at how changes in
#consciousness
alter signs of critical dynamics and information-theoretic complexity.
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So many neurosci papers have titles that sound like: "A Fundamental Truth about the Structure of the Brain and Mind" and then you read it and it's just: "sometimes this subset of wiggles is just a bit wiggler than other times (for a given value of wiggle, subset, and time)"
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My paper on local information theory and
#emergence
is now published in MDPI Entropy! A 🧵 1/n
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New newsletter post!
This one is a bit longer, but I've been thinking deeply about this since I got COVID in November and began my own journey of post-COVID BS. 1/n
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🚨 New Preprint! 🚨
What does the field of multivariate information theory need? Maybe: another redundancy function?
Plot twist: this isn't just another I∩ function for single-target PID - here I'm proposing a temporal redundancy function for ΦID! 🧵1/n
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This is one of the most interesting psychedelic science papers I have read in a very long time. There's a lot of interesting results to pick through, but the dissociation between resting state complexity and causally-perturbed complexity is fascinating.
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@nomanautomata
@lordofgummies33
This just isn't true in my experience. I was a C student in high school who spent all my time doing theater and art. I went on to get a double PhD in computational neuroscience and complexity theory - not because I'm super smart (I'm not) but mostly because of luck and interests.
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A good future for academia would be one with vastly fewer PhD students, but those PhD students are paid very well and have both reasonable workloads *and* job prospects.
Instead of our current ponzi-scheme-like setup.
What unpopular academia opinion would get you in this situation?
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Our paper on applying partial entropy decomposition to the question of higher-order structures in human brain activity is now live in PNAS!
Big thanks to
@MariaEPope1
,
@mgpuxeddu
,
@joshfasky
, and
@spornslab
for making this project possible. 1/n
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It's really hard not to notice the different levels of press/popular coverage a "pro-microdosing" study gets vs. an equally well (or even better) designed study showing no effect of microdosing.
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Academia is weird in that it's basically a cult that takes over your entire self concept, but then turns around and makes it impossible to actually stay in the cult.
Which kind of feels like the worst of both worlds?
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I've spent a big chunk of today making figures for a pretty cool paper on
#psychedelic
drugs + information dynamics, and my partner just pointed out that I had inadvertently chosen a Powerpuff Girls-themed aesthetic.
Wondering if I should lean into it.
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This is amazing: despite multiple weeks of strikes, despite constant threats from administration against our educations and careers, despite the gaslighting and propaganda, MORE people voted to keep the strike alive now then in any previous vote.
#IUonStrike22
@IndianaGrads
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Honestly, the most complex system I've had to deal with during the course of my PhD in complex systems science is the IU bureaucracy. It seems to exist in some quantum superposition of being both very strict but also no one actually knows how it all works.
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Putting on my tinfoil hat: how much of the interest in treating ME/CFS, long COVID, and fibro as "functional"/somatoform disorders is rooted in the fact that disability for mental health conditions runs out after 2 years but is perpetual for physical conditions?
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"Our new drug is a break-through on par with another drug that we routinely malign to make our new drug seem extra appealing!"
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A double-blind, placebo-controlled, pre-registered study of microdosing psilocybin: about as close to gold-standard as you can possibly get.
The results: nothing. No significant effect on anxiety, depression, or emotional processing.
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New pre-print alert! "Differential Effects of Propofol & Ketamine on Critical Brain Dynamics." Details below.
Thanks to my excellent collaborators,
@spornslab
,
@aina_puce
, and John Beggs (who is wise enough to not have a Twitter account).
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Apparently the complexity of BOLD activity in smokers is higher than non-smokers (sample entropy).
Given that smokers are not generally tripping 24/7, this seems like more evidence that the link between "complexity" and "consciousness" is more complex than it first appeared. 1/3
New paper in Imaging Neuroscience
@mitpress
by Timothy Jordan, Nicole Petersen, et al:
Unraveling neural complexity: Exploring brain entropy to yield mechanistic insight in neuromodulation therapies for tobacco use disorder
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Every time I see a CV from a prospective faculty, they have a laundry list of awards going back to college. Is this standard?
I think I'm doing pretty well for myself (NRT fellowship, publications, etc), academically, but I've never won...anything, really.
How common is this?
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Twitter, Medium, and Substack are dopamine-production machines for people who get high on the feeling of insight.
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This is the paper I've been looking for for years
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@BadMedicalTakes
No idea what this is an image of, but I'm tickled that by the idea that, even pre-booster, the brain was just one giant tumor to begin with.
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What a perfect representation of modern tech: relentless, destructive homogenization of all things interesting and unique into yet another consumable product that will be obsolete in a year.
It's a terrible ad, but as a kind of corporate Freudian slip, it's incredibly profound.
Meet the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created, the most advanced display we’ve ever produced, with the incredible power of the M4 chip. Just imagine all the things it’ll be used to create.
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@WSJ
The interesting thing about the comments are all the parents detailing all the ways their kids are identically special (great grades, extracurriculars, etc).
With helicopter parenting the new cultural norm, there are now thousands of kids with resumes that were once amazing.
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I don't usually Tweet about this, but when not doing science, I apprentice at a local glassblowing studio (I'm not very good - yet). This is one of the first things I've made I'm really proud of. It's a drop-neck wine decanter and it even pours with a little spout!
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It's finally published! Using partial information decomposition to explore intersectionality in quantitative data!
After 6(!) rounds of reviews over 3 different journals, I'm so happy to see this out. A 🧵1/n
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It is absurd that the
@IUBloomington
Board of Trustees would use the rhetoric of protecting "shared governance" to justify rejecting the overwhelming will of the University faculty out of hand (i.e. grossly violating the principle of shared governance.)
For immediate release: Statement on IU Board of Trustees rejection of faculty vote and undermining of shared governance at Indiana University, alt text in following Tweet.
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There are a *bunch* of these projects springing up (and not just for long COVID, the
#MECFS
community has also been on the forefront of this).
Some of these projects are even more ambitious, like the
@remissionbiome
project... 9/n
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🚨Updated pre-print!🚨
New Tweetprint for an awesome project I've been working on with
@spornslab
,
@dann_benjamin
,
@SSchaffelhofer
, and
@HansScherberger
.
How does information theory give us insights linking neural "computation" and behavior? [1/n]
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@findboundary
@GeorgeMonbiot
Idk, the "it's-all-in-your-head" crew has had for floor for 40 years with nothing to show for it. In the 4 years since long-COVID became a thing, there's been an explosion of promising biomedical research.
Who knows if it'll pan out, but I know which horse I'd put my money on.
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On March 29, I'll be joining
@InferenceActive
to talk about my recent work on generalizing the partial information decomposition to the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and discussing what this might mean for active inference and the free-energy principle.
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@EricTopol
@JAMAInternalMed
Imo it's worth noting that folks have been trying antivirals for for other post-viral conditions for years (notably Valacyclovir for reactivated EBV in ME/CFS) and it never hit the ball out of the park the way you'd expect if viral persistence was the root of post-viral illness.
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Perhaps it may have been a bad idea to tackle a fundamentally political question (psychedelic legalization) with a scientific process involving human experimentation (clinical trials).
If the goal is to use science to justify your preset goals, then can you ever do good science?
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Maybe psychedelics just press the "profoundity" button in your brain in the same way that opioids press the "reward" button. Maybe there's nothing there but the qualia of "wow."
This is one of the most fascinating pieces of drug-literature I've ever red.
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@neuralreckoning
I often wonder if the electric field generated by action potentials (esp. groups of synchronized ones) is strong enough to alter the polarization/firing of neighboring (but physically disconnected) neurons.
Could there be field-based integration between neurons?
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Hot take: there's no such thing as "computation." There's just dynamics and we label a subset of dynamics as "meaningful", "interesting", or "purposeful."
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Becoming quite interested in the Qualia Research Institute (
@QualiaRI
). I'm pretty agnostic to the specific models they propose, but they seem to occupy a really interesting place in the broader computational neuroscience landscape. 1/n
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@kareem_carr
I think you're editorializing a little by by adding "just things."
The idea that cognition (or consciousness) might be substrate independent doesn't imply that those things lose moral standing.
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Hey that's me! 👋
"Information Theory for Complex Systems Scientists" (by Thomas F. Varley):
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