The Curious Engineer

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Deric's MindBlog

mindblog.dericbownds.net

This blog reports new ideas and work on mind, brain, behavior, psychology, and politics - as well as random curious stuff. (Try the Dynamic Views at top of right column.)

Science

’10’15’20’25
Posts
5,846 from 8 Feb 2006 to 12 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (102 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mindblog

Latest

October 2026

  1. Casino culture meets the predictive brain
  2. Artificial symbiotic intelligence - a future of Agents, AGI and the orchestration of many minds
  3. Future-Capable: Curiosity, Adaptability, and Kindness in the Age of AI
  4. It's a Bitter, Bitter Lesson
  5. Aging as a Continuation of development
  6. Who Broke the World? Who are the villains?...Where do we not want to be?

September 2026

  1. "Responsibilism" - Collectivism isn't warmth, it's obligation
  2. The depth and quality of deep sleep correlates with resilience to stress.
  3. The cortex helps organize its own disappearnce from waking consciousness
  4. Slow breathing modulates brain function and risk behavior
  5. Deeper meditation is associated with more reproducible sensory responses
  6. The agentic self: The brain learns whether action matters before deciding what to learn
  7. Regulating our subjective well being - our brain's axes of arousal, valence, and agency
  8. The deluge of articles on what consciousness is...
  9. Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards
  10. Categorization is ‘baked’ into the brain
  11. MindBlog's AI playground - a new piano piece: Nocturne in a Minor Key
  12. Analog cognition and consciousness
  13. The moral weight of Human - AI interactions
  14. A Theory of Cuteness as Developmental Investment
  15. Transcranial focused ultrasound for identifying the neural substrate of conscious perception
  16. Gennady Lukinykh Reflection
  17. Gennady Lukinykh Romance
  18. Nikolai Sheiko Miniatures "Instant"
  19. Nikolai Sheiko Prelude Op. 9

August 2026

  1. Deric, MindBlog, and exiting the miasma of AI integration
  2. Can nondual awareness become a civic technology?
  3. Curiosity shapes brain-like architectures and functions
  4. An AI tool that claims to pick the top 1% of the most original and valid preprints
  5. MindBlog's Book-Abstraction Series (2006–2026)
  6. Frictionless Connection, Atomized Lives
  7. Nondualism versus the Nation-State
  8. How AI Changes Everything - The Centaur Era
  9. The Vanishing Compass: When No Faction Looks Like the Good Guys
  10. MindBlog's Intellectual History, 2006–2026
  11. Reflections on The Predictive Self.
  12. When the Two Sides of Empathy Fall Out of Balance
  13. AI as discovery, not invention.

July 2026

  1. Do Language Models Have a Global Workspace?
  2. The Neural Basis of Laughter
  3. Contemporary Russian piano composers and Agentic AI
  4. Top-Down To Bottom-Up: Rhythmic Synchrony Relaxes Social Priors to Enable Change

June 2026

  1. What six AI models do and don’t know about me
  2. Future-Capable: Curiosity, Adaptability, and Kindness in the Age of AI
  3. Boredom can be Good for You...
  4. When the Self Dissolves, the Precuneus Goes Quiet: A Rigorous Test of Meditation’s “Many-to-(n)One” Continuum
  5. A dimmer switch for reward: the vagus sets the gain
  6. Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees
  7. Cleaning our brains during deep sleep
  8. AI construed as a brilliant friend...Claude's New Constitution

May 2026

  1. The World is Unraveling: A 3-Step Guide to Staying Sane & Useful
  2. The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness
  3. Getting Gooier: How AI Is Reshaping Human Nature
  4. Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion
  5. AI Is Not an Alien Intruder — It Is the Latest in a Four-Billion-Year Evolutionary Cascade of Symbiotic Transitions
  6. The Tech Mirage: Why the U.S.-China AI Race Is Failing Us All

April 2026

  1. Activating the evolved healing mechanisms of the placebo response requires permission from a safe environment
  2. When Execution Gets Cheap, What Remains Scarce? - The last biological moat.
  3. The Refusal to Dehumanize - Rewilding Creativity
  4. The Physiology of Agency in the Age of AI
  5. What a self is.
  6. From Animal to Humans - Multimodality as a safeguard of honesty in communication and language
  7. Executive Function: Universal Capacity or Schooled Skill?
  8. The Default Mode Network as a Bidirectional Interface Between World and Mind
  9. AI, Agency, and the Quiet Hollowing of Mind
  10. Memes Before Machines: The Real Cognitive Risk of the AI Age

March 2026

  1. AI use can compromise our serendipity, creativity, autonomy, and sense of agency.
  2. One terminal chats with another to start vibe coding a new dericbownds.net
  3. The polyvagal theory is dead - and HRV isn't a simple indicator of arousal
  4. The nature of intelligence and selves.
  5. A seismic shift in our understanding of intelligence
  6. AI Makes Workloads Worse, Not Better
  7. Empathy as a Brain Rhythm: Orexin, Theta Oscillations, and Prosocial Behavior
  8. A MindBlog-ready ChatGPT synthesis
  9. Will Deric’s Mind Blog be firing Deric soon? Is AI is doing his job better?

February 2026

  1. The geometries of change and the value of being human
  2. Changing our systems of governance
  3. New Ferality - Seeking new ways of being wild in new nature
  4. Buying Futures, Renting the Past: How Speculation and Nostalgia Became the Economy
  5. MindBlog is now 20 years old.
  6. Against the Machine
  7. I am not my problem
  8. The Future of Being Human

January 2026

  1. The Mythology of Conscious AI
  2. The Case for Being Human
  3. Do we have an appetite for transcendence?
  4. Venkatesh Rao's 'World Machines'

December 2025

  1. The Institutional Stance - an evolved intuitive theory?
  2. What our brains are doing as we experience musical pleasure.
  3. What are humans for? - AI Forces a Question We’ve Been Dodging
  4. The Modernity Machine
  5. Human Machines and AI Machines
  6. Time, space, memory and brain–body rhythms
  7. Changes in human brain organization at age ~83 (as well as ages ~9, 32, and 66)
  8. Bigger AI models are failing faster - The future evolution of AI is into the 4D world
  9. Focused attention mindfulness meditation changes our cerebrospinal fluid dynamics
  10. “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving

November 2025

  1. From today's Wall Street Journal: how the top 0.1% can live.
  2. Dangerous Ideas.......
  3. Welcome to the Polycene
  4. How nature nurtures
  5. Inequality and hierarchy are features of all natural systems

October 2025

  1. Is AI Pushing Us Back to a Pre-Gutenberg Culture? - A Rethink of Creativity in the AI Age
  2. Claude Goes to Therapy
  3. The Age of De-Skilling
  4. I am not my problem
  5. Is the current AI frenzy a bubble certain to crash? - a check in with disagreebot.bom
  6. The illusion of judgment in LLMs
  7. The 2025 Ig Nobel prizewinners in full
  8. Large-scale cortical functional networks are organized in structured cycles
  9. Why depolarization is hard: Evaluating attempts to decrease partisan animosity in America

September 2025

  1. Platforms like X and TikTok are destroying our culture.
  2. Evolved mental errors that underlie our current cultural and political malaise
  3. Could humans and AI become a new evolutionary individual?
  4. Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - non-dual awareness as the opiate of the thinking classes.
  5. Value, Purpose, Meaning, Futures
  6. How Humans Work - an integrated model
  7. The brain fires up immune cells when sick people are nearby
  8. Chants across seven traditions share acoustic traits that enhance subjective relaxation
  9. A Materialist's Credo
  10. Rethinking how our brains work.
  11. The case against reality
  12. Resetting my brain…
  13. Selected MindBlog posts on defining what our human self or "I" is.

August 2025

  1. Why You Are Probably An NPC (Non playing character)
  2. AI is a Mass-Delusion Event - and - Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress
  3. Gaze patterns can serve as a sensitive marker of cognitive decline
  4. Predictability and the pleasure of music
  5. A brain-computer interface that reads inner thoughts.
  6. Polarization may be inherent in social media
  7. Points on having a self and free will.
  8. The number of fake scientific journal articles is doubling every year and a half.
  9. A 25 year study of what distingiushes 'Super-Agers'
  10. Face (e)motion and the third visual pathway.
  11. Why we put off things we enjoy doing.
  12. The coming societal collapse
  13. Everything we experience comes from inside us

July 2025

  1. Is liberal democracy still viable in our complex world?
  2. An epilogue from Glaude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) at 90 years of age
  3. The optimistic brain - fMRI reveals shared thought patterns.
  4. Losing Loneliness
  5. The cultural construction of “executive function”
  6. How the attention economy is devouring us. - A conversation between Ezra Klein and Kyla Scanlon
  7. Stagnation, disruption, and the future - A conversation between Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel
  8. Tokens of Sanity
  9. AI sees you in ways you can’t see yourself.
  10. Promises and Perils of AI: A Mid-2025 Reading Roundup
  11. The Monster Inside ChatGPT
  12. Emotional synchrony among sports fans.(Will Elon Musk's android army be able to do this?)
  13. Why is jogging an antidepressant?

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