When the mind of its own in the wheel puts two and two together...
The Mind in the Wheel – Prologue: Everybody Wants a Rock
We who have nothing to “wind string around” are lost in the wilderness. But those who deny this need are “burning our playhouse down.” If you put quotes around certain words it sounds more like a m…
The Triadic Mind: How Language Reveals the Limits of Human Cognition
Languages are the most complex symbolic systems humans have ever created. Yet children acquire them effortlessly, without formal…
The mistake we all make... and the simple experiment that reveals it
Your answer reveals how you see the world – and the common error that hampers our decision making. In an extract from his new book, psychologist Richard Nisbett reveals the ‘mindware’ to help us think smarter
Brainchildren
Minds are complex artifacts, partly biological and partly social; only a unified, multidisciplinary approach will yield a realistic theory of how they came i...
Meet Pebble Index 01 - External Memory For Your Brain
Catch your best ideas before they slip through your fingers Do you ever have flashes of insight or an idea worth remembering? This happens to me 5 10 times e...
Mindless Machines, Mindless Myths | Los Angeles Review of Books
Erik J. Larson thinks about “Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” which traces Robert Skidelsky’s philosophical reckoning with AI, automation, and the illusion of progress.
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Mindless Machines, Mindless Myths | Los Angeles Review of Books
Erik J. Larson thinks about “Mindless: The Human Condition in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” which traces Robert Skidelsky’s philosophical reckoning with AI, automation, and the illusion of progress.
:quality(75)/https%3A%2F%2Fassets.lareviewofbooks.org%2Fuploads%2FMindless.jpg)
Anthropic on Twitter / X
New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models.Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with.We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude. pic.twitter.com/aLUPBifxth— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) July 6, 2026
The Entangled Brain: How Perception, Cognition, and Emotion Are Woven Together
A new vision of the brain as a fully integrated, networked organ.Popular neuroscience accounts often focus on specific mind-brain aspects like addiction, c
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.
Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models
If the mind is an ocean, we spend our lives floating at the surface. Beneath us, an enormous amount of processing takes place without our knowledge: our visual systems parsing the contours of a face, our motor circuits maintaining our posture. At any given moment, only a small fraction of this neural activity is accessible to us. Yet it is this privileged sliver of activity that we rely on to reason deliberately: to plan what ingredients to buy for a recipe, or to puzzle out why an engine won’t start. Such thoughts can be articulated out loud, deliberately held in mind, and brought to bear on whatever task the moment demands. This distinction, between our accessible thoughts and our unconscious processing, is perhaps the most striking feature of human cognition.
On working machines
In part one, on thinking machines, I explored two facets of the philosophy of artificial intelligence: “intelligence”, and consciousness. That left an important topic to consider for this post: the...
Bicameral mentality
Bicameral mentality is a psychological hypothesis proposed by American psychologist Julian Jaynes. It suggests that early modern humans experienced thoughts and emotions not as originating within themselves but as commands from external "gods". According to the theory, the human mind once functioned with a division in which one part generated verbal instructions while a second part obeyed, forming a "bicameral mind". The eventual collapse of this mental structure is proposed to have led to the development of self-reflective consciousness in humans.
