"I left Google to study neuroscience, and what I found in the research literature helps explain why the A.I. summary poses a danger to learning."

"Curiosity, it turns out, is not just an individual’s desire to find out discrete facts; it’s also a feature of our biology designed to help us learn more broadly. And it requires a specific condition: a gap between what you want to know and what you find out. Researchers have found that people in a state of curiosity, while waiting for an answer to an intriguing question, remember unrelated information they encounter during that time far better than they otherwise would. In that same study, the researchers also placed those people in brain scanners. They found that waiting for an answer activates reward circuits in the brain and readies the hippocampus to help form new memories.... Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board.... Our technology is increasingly treating the territory between the query and the answer as dead space to be eliminated, when that territory is where most of the learning actually happens. The danger is not that people will stop asking questions. It is that questions will become endpoints...."

Writes Anne-Laure Le Cunff, "a neuroscientist who studies curiosity," in "We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask" (NYT).

Intriguing questions that popped up for me: 1. What kind of name is "Le Cunff"? 2. "The danger is not.../It is..." seems to be one of those things — like em dashes and the word "delve" — that A.I. tends to write, so did Le Cunff use A.I. to write this essay?

Answers: 1. It means "the gentle," "the affable," or "the debonnaire." 2. It's a rhetorical device that A.I. has learned from real human writers, and real human writers don't need to avoid it, they just, as always, need to use it well, which, in this case, Le Cunff did. 

"In an open schoolyard... the researchers instructed participants to roam at will.... Within seconds, 80 percent of people were moving in a counterclockwise direction."

"'It’s not a gradual drift but rather a bias that emerges almost immediately,' Dr. Echeverría-Huarte said. Dr. Echeverría-Huarte and his colleagues wondered if the behavior might be emerging collectively, similar to how pedestrians split into two opposite-moving lanes on crowded sidewalks. But when they tested participants alone, 75 percent still moved counterclockwise, suggesting that the tendency is individual."

From "Nearly Everyone, Everywhere, Veers Left When Walking/Researchers are at a loss for why people across cultures and ages, regardless of their dominant hand, have a natural bias toward wandering in a counterclockwise direction" (NYT).

The words "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" suggest that clockwise is the more natural tendency. "Counterclockwise" sounds like going backward. But the clock had to go to the right when it was a sundial (in the northern hemisphere), and that established the tradition. 

The words "clockwise" and "counterclockwise" did not emerge until the 19th century. What did people say before that? I think they used the strange word "deasil" (or "deiseal"), which the OED traces back to 1771 and defines as: "Righthandwise, towards the right; motion with continuous turning to the right, as in going round an object with the right hand towards it, or in the same direction as the hands of a clock, or the apparent course of the sun (a practice held auspicious by the Celts)."

If it is indeed auspicious to circle to the right, then why do we naturally circle left? One thinks of the etymology of "sinister."

"Every chatbot has a dial. Engineers call it 'temperature,' a parameter that controls how predictable or surprising the system’s outputs will be."

"Set it too low, and the chatbot becomes a boring echo; set it too high, and it produces useless noise. The sweet spot places the output just beyond what you could have anticipated — familiar enough to seem plausible, unexpected enough to seem insightful. That gap between what you expected and what the system produced is where something remarkable happens: You supply the meaning. "

From "The real secret to palm reading? These ‘companions’ know it. Artificial intelligence doesn’t understand humans. It reflects them back to themselves" (WaPo)(gift link).

This reminds me: We don't all think the same way. Some of us hear a voice speaking full sentences in our head. That's not me. I've been trying to observe what I have instead of that, and it's almost impossible. Any effort to look at the form of my thoughts causes them to retreat into some backroom of the mind that denies my conscious thinking mind access. I write to see what I think. That's why I blog — not to convince readers to agree with me, but to get my thoughts into language form. And my use of A.I. is similar. I'm getting my own thoughts into dialogue form. It externalizes a debate I could have in my head in a very amorphous and multilayered blob, but working it out in writing and seeing it in writing is extremely helpful to me.

ADDED: After writing that last paragraph, I went and had a conversation with Grok about it. Learned the word anendophasia. 

"GLP-1 drugs may be rewiring circuits involved not only in appetite but in emotion, desire and beyond."

WaPo reports. Gift link. Excerpt:

Tens of millions of people are now taking the medications worldwide, turning what began as an obesity and diabetes treatment into what could be modern medicine’s largest unplanned neuroscience experiments. Scientists are studying GLP-1 drugs — medications that mimic the hormones involved in appetite, blood sugar and digestion — for how they affect not only eating behavior, but also addiction, cognition, neurodegeneration and even motivation and pleasure....

On social media and at doctor’s offices, some users have reported a type of brain fog and others something broader and harder to define: a strange emotional flattening. People describe less pleasure, less motivation, diminished interest in hobbies and even reduced sexual desire. Those accounts are beginning to raise deeper questions about what, exactly, these drugs are changing. If GLP-1s alter the brain systems involved in reward, craving and motivation, researchers wonder, where is the line between quieting a person’s destructive impulses and reshaping personality itself?...

"In the story, two interplanetary visitors are shocked to find that humans can use their meaty brains to think."

"'Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!' one says to another. 'Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat!' the other alien responds, adding: 'The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?'"

From "To A.I. Executives, We’re All Just 'Meat Computers'/A term first used in philosophy and cognitive science circles has lately taken on a more ominous cast. Moo" (NYT).

The article is about the use of the term "meat computers" to refer to human beings. The story that's quoted, from 1991, by Terry Bisson, is "They’re Made Out of Meat."

"Bitching about a season of TV that's not even written yet....gotta love the internet."

Says one comment in a Reddit thread about the HBO series "Rooster," after a line of dialogue in the first season finale episode that suggested a new narrative for one of the secondary characters.

Somebody else says: "Wouldn’t be the first time a studio monitored fan reactions on Reddit and took them into consideration while working on future seasons."

What were the other times? Well, back in 2017, there was "Reddit users correctly guess ‘Westworld’ season 2 plot twist/Westworld creator Jonathan Nolan says he's had to re-write the script" (NME). Nolan said: "It’s annoying sometimes when people guess the twists and then blog about it, but the engagement is gratifying, on one level, because if someone guesses your twist, it means you’ve done an adequate job.... You can’t complain when people are that engaged. It’s very gratifying — but stop doing it, please."

Stop doing it? Ridiculous! If there's one thing people instinctively do with any new material that comes their way, it's try to predict the future. If we weren't designed to do that, we wouldn't be drawn into stories with plots in the first place. 

Here's a neuroscientist talking to Joe Rogan about her study of the capacity of the human mind to predict the future, which she seems to believe in:

Jordan Peterson and akathisia.

We figured out that dad has a psych med induced neurological injury, and has been suffering from akathisia. It’s been 6 years since any psych medications. Last summer his symptoms started, after a flare up likely induced by mold (CIRS) and stress. It was complicated by pneumonia… pic.twitter.com/wPjAz4XsLT

— Mikhaila Peterson (@MikhailaFuller) April 18, 2026

"Everyone seemed to agree that the patients were self-aware — that they could feel, that they had a grounding sense of being a someone who feels."

"But nobody knew exactly how much they retained of themselves: whether they knew themselves as a particular someone, or the someone they once were. It was impossible to know. In the view of these researchers, covertly conscious patients occupied a phenomenological gray space that was inaccessible to scientific probing and even to the human imagination. But some researchers believed that at least some of the patients were largely intellectually intact.... Tabitha learned that once a patient was diagnosed as 'vegetative' and then admitted into a nursing home, it was almost impossible for family members to get a second opinion and a new diagnosis and then, maybe, though only maybe, a new insurance-company authorization and entry into a rehabilitation program. Instead, when a family member, sitting at the bedside, reported the early flickerings of consciousness in a loved one, she was usually dismissed as seeing what she wished to see...."

From "Vegetative Patients May Be More Aware Than We Knew/New research is upending what we thought about the consciousness of patients, leaving families with agonizing choices" (NYT)(gift link, because there's a lot more material at the link, very well presented, including much about the Terri Schiavo case, the recent research about covertly conscious patients, and the vigilance of one wife at her husband's bedside). 

"You are skeptical that A.I. can achieve consciousness. Why?"

That's a question asked of Michael Pollan, in "The Interview/Michael Pollan Says Humanity Is About to Undergo a Revolutionary Change" (NYT).

Pollan answers: "I’m convinced by some of the researchers, including Antonio Damasio and Mark Solms, who made a really compelling case that the origin of consciousness is with feelings, not thoughts. Feelings are the language in which the body talks to the brain. We forget that brains exist to keep bodies alive, and the way the body gets the brain’s attention is with feelings. So if you think feelings are at the center of consciousness, it’s very hard to imagine how a machine could rise to that level to have feelings. The other reason I think we’re not close to it is that everything that machines know, the data set on which they’re trained, is information on the internet. They don’t have friction with nature. They don’t have friction with us. Some of the most important things we know are about person-to-person contact, about contact with nature — this friction that really makes us human."

Pollan's new book is "A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness" (commission earned).

"To Those I've Hurt/By Ye Formerly known as Kanye West."

"Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the frontal lobe of my brain. At the time, the focus was on the visible damage - the fracture, the swelling, and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed...."

Writes Kanye West, in what is a paid advertisement in The Wall Street Journal.

It wasn't properly diagnosed until 2023. That medical oversight caused serious damage to my mental health and led to my bipolar type-1 diagnosis. Bipolar disorder comes with its own defense system. Denial. When you're manic, you don't think you're sick. You think everyone else is overreacting. You feel like you're seeing the world more clearly than ever, when in reality you're losing your grip entirely.

"Most people just don’t have a human who wants to cuddle them twice a day and force them on walks."

But if you do, you might not need a dog to preserve your brain volume.

Time only seems to go faster when you’re older because of the way your memory works. Does that mean you should seek out novelty?

Interesting: Here is the reason that as you get older, entire years feel like a week: 🙇‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/V6spUNMrFT

— AlphaFox (@alphafox) January 4, 2026

Assuming he's right about that, I don't jump to agree that one ought to seek out novelty. I'm thinking:

1. There is no problem to be solved. You experience your life in the present in real time. It only looks compressed in your memory. You're not being deprived of time in which to live. You're just freed from detailed memory.

2. Even though novelties would cause your memory to seem to contain more time spent doing the things you have done, you can always find more detail within your familiar activities.

"Why did The New Yorker, which perpetuates the myth that they employ an army of meticulous fact-checkers, pollute our understanding of mind and brain by publishing these fabrications for decades?"

Asks Steven Pinker, on X, as he reads the New Yorker article "Oliver Sacks Put Himself Into His Case Studies. What Was the Cost?"

Pinker answers his own question like this: "Because their primary commitment is to a belletristic, literarist, romantic promotion of elite cultural sensibilities over the tough-minded analyses of philistine scientists and technologists, their rival elite.... A common denominator behind Sacks's fabrications was that ineffable, refined intuition can surmount cerebral analysis, which is limited and cramped. It's a theme that runs through some of their other blunders, such as... [t]he many articles by Malcolm Gladwell (like Sacks, a fine essayist) which mixed good reporting with dubious statistical reasoning and misleading claims (e.g., that only practice, not talent, is necessary for achievement, or that IQ above 120 doesn't matter)."

From the New Yorker article, which is by Rachel Aviv: 

"I did not like to think about it just as later I would not like to think about the worm in his brain that other people found so funny."

"I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. 'Baby, don’t worry,' he said. 'It’s not a worm.'... I worry about evil.... Was it ever a question, that where there was a cloak there would be a dagger? A friend told me once, 'Never trust anyone wearing a lapel pin.' This politician did not wear one of those.... I mean to tell you that, as it relates to monsters, little can be assured beyond their ceaseless want.... I mean to tell you that as I studied them, I was sometimes fooled.... I mean to tell you that this is more meaningful and more meaningless than you might think. I mean to tell you that, before I was consumed by it, I could not have told you what it was.... I am talking, of course, about how it happened between me and the Politician. I am talking, of course, about how it happened between the country and the president... I mean to tell you now as best I can."

Writes Olivia Nuzzi, in "Olivia Nuzzi's American Canto: Read the Exclusive Excerpt/She flamed out and she faded away. Vanity Fair’s West Coast Editor returns to the written word to survey scorched earth" (Vanity Fair).

If you are a connoisseur of purple prose, don't miss this one. There are also some lovely pictures of Ms. Nuzzi, who seems to be quite beautiful.

Oh, A.I., make a charming argument for why purple prose should be celebrated when it is written by a beautiful woman. Answer: "A beautiful woman’s purple prose should be celebrated because her extravagant words are merely the audible shimmer of her own radiance spilling onto the page, and only a fool would demand a diamond dim its fire to spare the darkness."

AND: I had another prompt for A.I.: What do you think of the title "American Canto" for a purple prose account of a beautiful woman's love affair with a politician (specifically Olivia Nuzzi's book about RFK Jr., a married man)? I'll just give the conventional warning,  "Abandon all hope, all ye who enter here."

"[President John Quincy] Adams had very little to do save work. He had decided to follow Monroe’s example of accepting no social invitations..."

"... lest he give offense to whomever he refused. Nor did he attend political events or even harmless functions. Declining an invitation by the Maryland Department of Agriculture to attend a cattle show, Adams reflected that he ought not 'set a precedent for being claimed as an article of exhibit for all the cattle-shows throughout the nation.' Occasionally he attended lectures, such as one on 'the organ of amativeness' —the penis—which he found 'more indelicate than philosophical.' But Adams’ life was confined almost entirely to the White House; his daily round was much more dull and routine than it had been when he was secretary of state."

I'm reading "John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit" by James Traub (page 320)(commission earned).

I see (with the help of Grok) that John Quincy Adams wrote this in his diary for June 8, 1825:

"Terry Long, football gave me CTE and it caused me to drink a gallon of antifreeze.... Please study brain for CTE. I’m sorry. The league knowingly concealed the dangers to our brains to maximize profits. They failed us.”

Wrote Shane Tamura, quoted in "NYC mass shooter Shane Tamura found with note blaming NFL for giving him CTE — even though he never played pro football" (NY Post).

Terry Long, was a "former Pittsburgh Steelers player who was diagnosed with CTE after downing antifreeze to kill himself 20 years ago."

Tamura apparently intended "to shoot up the NFL HQ — but 'mistakenly went up the wrong elevator banks' and ended up on a higher floor."

Was Tamura influenced by Luigi Mangione?

By the way, "CNN’s Erin Burnett is being skewered for reporting that the gunman who opened fire in a Midtown skyscraper — killing an NYPD cop and three others — was 'possibly white' after viewing the initial security footage released immediately after Shane Tamura’s deadly rampage" (NY Post).

"'I thought it was a great photo opportunity.' But the shutter-worthy sight quickly turned tragic when one of the bison stepped into a small part of the basin..."

"... then tried hopping out. Within a matter of seconds, the beast began teetering at the edge of the Grand Prismatic Spring — the largest hot spring in the entire park — and then fell in."

From "Bison boils to death in Yellowstone hot spring in front of tourists" (NY Post).

Also in the NY. Post: "A 14-year-old California boy walked off a 120-foot cliff in front of his horrified father — telling him he saw 'snowmen and Kermit the frog' while hallucinating from altitude sickness."

"So, but [Jolly] West himself said, oh, I never experimented on a human being, just the elephant. He would even make jokes about the elephant..."

".... because it was the one thing people knew. And he would say, oh yeah, it, it would sort of, it was his calling card and he used it as kind of a jokey thing. But he always denied any connection to this CIA.... You know, even in the Church Committee, you could see the connection because they revealed that the University of Oklahoma had been receiving CIA money. And West had a special office for him built there. He was hired there mysteriously when they wanted to move at what he wanted to build what he called this free zone of experiment, where he could give LSD, hypnosis, and sleep deprivation in combined doses, you know, in whatever increments he wanted to adjust. He was gonna build that out at the Air Force base. And he was all set to go. And I even had receipts and papers and a lot of correspondence in his files about this...."

Great episode. Full transcript here. 

You can buy Rebecca Lemov's book "The Instability of Truth: Brainwashing, Mind Control, and Hyper-Persuasion" at Amazon (commission earned). The audiobook is free at Spotify Premium.

"If you’re looking for a theory to explain how our brains give rise to subjective, inner experiences, you can check out Adaptive Resonance Theory. Or..."

"... consider Dynamic Core Theory. Don’t forget First Order Representational Theory, not to mention semantic pointer competition theory. The list goes on: A 2021 survey identified 29 different theories of consciousness...."

From "Two Theories of Consciousness Faced Off. The Ref Took a Beating/What makes humans conscious? Scientists disagree, strongly, as one group of peacemakers discovered the hard way" (NYT).

"To get answers, one neuroscientist, Harvey J. Grill of the University of Pennsylvania, turned to rats and asked what would happen if he removed all of their brains except their brainstems."

I'm reading "What Nearly Brainless Rodents Know About Weight Loss and Hunger/Studies in neuroscience with applications to humans offer clues about what makes us start eating, and when we stop" (NYT).

Do we really have free will when it comes to eating? It’s a vexing question that is at the heart of why so many people find it so difficult to stick to a diet.... The brainstem controls basic functions like heart rate and breathing. But the animals could not smell, could not see, could not remember. Would they know when they had consumed enough calories? To find out, Dr. Grill dripped liquid food into their mouths. "When they reached a stopping point, they allowed the food to drain out of their mouths," he said...."