John Hawks, on the mathematics of family trees and recombinant DNA: In practice, even though we have billions of nucleotides, our DNA cannot follow billions of genealogical lines. Recombination over 30 — 40 generations does not divide chromosomes down to […]
Michael Edward Johnson
Posts by Michael Edward Johnson
Connectomics, and An Approach to Frequency Normalization
Lots of very intelligent people are putting lots of effort into mapping the brain’s networks. People are calling these sort of maps of which-neuron-is-connected-to-which-neuron ‘connectomes‘, and if you’re working on this stuff, you’re doing ‘connectomics‘. (Academics love coining new fields […]
Quote: Salt in the Wound
Ken Jennings, on his match with IBM’s Watson supercomputer: Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma […]
Quote: On Academic Bravery
From an interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky (the world’s leading paranoid on the dangers of AI): Richard Hamming used to go around annoying his colleagues at Bell Labs by asking them what were the important problems in their field, and then, after they answered, he would […]
Research Idea: TMS Sonar
TMS ‘Sonar’ for mapping brain region activity coupling Modern neuroscience is increasingly suggesting that a great deal of a person’s personality, pathology, and cognitive approach is encoded into which of their brain regions are activity-coupled together. That is to say, […]
Quote: Nethack
A friend of mine on difficult video games and accomplishment: Have you heard of the game NetHack? It’s been in continuous development for the last 20 years or so. It’s all text-based graphics, very spartan in that sense, but those […]
Tylenol helps with emotional pain, too
One of the most interesting things we’re learning about pain is that both physical and emotional pain use the same parts of the brain. If someone feels the sting of rejection, most of the same circuits activate as if they’d […]
Quote of the week: on distractions
From the New York Time’s Why Writers Belong Behind Bars: It’s wonderful that writers can access medieval manuscripts, Swahili dictionaries and collections of 19th-century daguerreotypes at any moment. But the downside is that it’s almost impossible to finish a sentence […]
Pain/pleasure metaphysics: a request
Lately I’ve been looking into causal connections between brain states and pain/pleasure. I’m finding plenty of material on specifics such as nociceptors, gate circuits, correlative fMRI studies, and so forth, but there doesn’t appear to be a lot of research, […]
Quote: the most important idea in neuroscience?
Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate, but you cannot at the same time, toward the same object, the same person, want […]