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dryohanjohn.bsky.social
🧠 computational neuroscience | emergence 🤖 Science Writer, Kempner Institute for the study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University 🎓 Lecturer at BU (views here are my own)
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"...religion-adjacent projects like artificial intelligence..." Ten years ago I would have been pretty surprised to encounter a phrase like that. Techbros have since been swallowed by Roko's Basilisk? :P

submitted 5 hours ago • 0 comments

This video on how we calculate cosmic distances is such a joy. Check out the first part too. youtu.be/hFMaT9oRbs4?...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Enjoyed sharing our work on electric fish with @dryohanjohn.bsky.social⚡🐟 Their electric "conversations" help us build models to discover neural mechanisms of social cognition. Work led by Sonja Johnson-Yu & @satpreetsingh.bsky.social with Nate Sawtell kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/news/what-el...

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

Now on display at the #KempnerInstitute: paintings by Arturo Deza, a professional neuroscientist and artist who combines his expertise in the science of vision with an improvisatory painting style. @dryohanjohn.bsky.social sits down with Deza to discuss his work. Read more: bit.ly/3WTUmCH #ML #art

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

What can weakly electric fish teach scientists about #NeuroAI? Read about how #KempnerInstitute’s @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social is studying elephantnose fish to gain insights into #collectiveintelligence and #AI systems. bit.ly/4gQMbi1 @harvardmed.bsky.social @dryohanjohn.bsky.social

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

This piece about the "shift to vibes" might be put into a kind of dialogue with @peligrietzer.bsky.social 's Theory of Vibe [link below]. thepointmag.substack.com/p/vibe-drift

submitted 22 days ago • 1 comment

"An audible sound at 3,000 Hz, the frequency at which our ears are most sensitive, can move the eardrum as little as 1/10th of the diameter of a hydrogen molecule." From 'Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music', by Greg Milner

submitted 26 days ago • 2 comments

"A mechanistic circuit model provides an explanation for the observed properties, and suggests the transition between stages represents a transition from more sensory-driven to more circuit-driven dynamics." The urgency signal that Paul Cisek often talks about might dovetail nicely with this.

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

The irony of reinforcement learning in ML is that an ostensibly real-time, online form of learning requires random sampling from an offline buffer of perfect memories. Is there reason to assume this happens in biological systems? Perhaps this is what the hippocampus-accumbens projection helps with?

submitted 28 days ago • 0 comments

AI W̵i̵n̵t̵e̵r Spring and Autumn period

submitted 30 days ago • 0 comments

Just finished season 2 of 'Paatal Lok'. Brilliant show. Indian crime noir done perfectly. Dark, funny, and exceptionally well made.

submitted 32 days ago • 0 comments

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submitted 33 days ago • 0 comments

"We are interested in philosophy and think it is important for statistical practice—if nothing else, we believe that strictures derived from philosophy can inhibit research progress." 😂 Gelman & Shalizi (2011). Philosophy and the practice of Bayesian statistics https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.10…

submitted 34 days ago • 0 comments

Microsaccades are one of my favorite topics in visual neuroscience. And primates seem to deploy them far more often than other species. jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...

submitted 35 days ago • 0 comments

"The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche..." - Gaston Bachelard, 'The Poetics of Space'

submitted 36 days ago • 0 comments

I just read Ursula K. Le Guin's essay 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction'. A pithy little critique of the excessive focus on hero narratives. Recommended!

submitted 38 days ago • 1 comment

"We conclude that conventional networks trained with supervision lack a mechanism to learn symmetries that have not been explicitly embedded in their architecture a priori."

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

When books choose violence: “The attentive reader will have noticed that equation 4 in the previous section is…” Me, busted: sure

submitted 44 days ago • 0 comments

"Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead." - Samuel Butler (in 1872!) From one of my favorite passages of all time. I was explaining the origin of the phrase "Butlerian j!had" to a friend just now. www.marxists.org/reference/ar...

submitted 45 days ago • 0 comments

Was chatting with some friends about parallel transport, which led to some discussion of differential geometry... and that led us to this fascinating Wikipedia page. [Also: the article title could be the name of a really cool postrock album.] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_...

submitted 47 days ago • 0 comments