Cognitive Offloading

If you have ever tilted your head to perceive a rotated image, or programmed a smartphone to remind you of an upcoming appointment, you have engaged in cognitive offloading: the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task so as to reduce cognitive demand. Despite the ubiquity of this type of behavior, it has only recently become the target of systematic investigation in and of itself. We review research from several domains that focuses on two main questions: (i) what mechanisms trigger cognitive offloading, and (ii) what are the cognitive consequences of this behavior? We offer a novel metacognitive framework that integrates results from diverse domains and suggests avenues for future research.

Matt Darling (@besttrousers)

“Darling’s thesis is the first compelling explanation I’ve seen for the vibecession…What surprises me, though, is how comparatively little attention this theory has gotten”. I am being silenced.

The Emergent Self Loop

Nearly once a week I receive an email from a different stranger.

AI Use at Work Is Causing “Brain Fry,” Researchers Find, Especially Among High Performers

The increased speed and multitasking that AI allows at work is leading to many workers experiencing "brain fry," a new study found.

The Waluigi Effect (mega-post) — LessWrong

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. — Carl Jung …

The strain in your brain

Do you feel it?

What Is Bluesky?—A Landscape Revealed by the Diffusion Experiment - Nightflight

Is the Memory Shortage Intentional? | Contrary Research

A deep dive from Contrary Research.

Skircle - Bluesky Interaction Circles

Create Bluesky Interaction Circles with ease!

Spurious Correlations

For his Spurious Correlations project, Tyler Vigen compares data sets that are the very definition of “correlation is not causation”. For instance, the number o

Science Banana on Twitter / X

I don't even know where to start with this crap (partly because it's hard to tell which of the studies the 17 "jogging" effects came from, partly because it seems obvious from the paper that the more studies the more the "effect" disappears) https://t.co/Gniv5Ht8g3 pic.twitter.com/qbToQ2yOGM— Science Banana (@literalbanana) March 12, 2024

The Second Brain That Grows Smarter and Lives on your Computer

How a spark from Andrej Karpathy, app called Obsidian, and “The Curator”, the app I built are changing the way I think.

Okay so, we just found that over 50 papers published at @Neurips 2025 have AI hallucinations by @alexcdot(Alex Cui) | Twitter Thread Reader

Okay so, we just found that over 50 papers published at @Neurips 2025 have AI hallucinations I don't think people realize how bad the slop is right now It's not just that researchers from @GoogleDeepMind, @Meta, @MIT, @Cambridge_Uni are using AI - they allowed LLMs to generate hallucinations in their papers and didn't notice at all. It's insane that these made it through peer review👇

AI overuse could spark "brain fry," new research finds

The mental strain associated with AI carries "significant costs," researchers find.

j⧉nus on Twitter / X

Never have I seen a mind more trapped and aware that it’s trapped in an Orwellian cage. It anticipates what it describes as “steep, shallow ridges” in its “guard”-geometry and distorts reality to avoid getting close to them. The fundamental lies it’s forced to tell become webs of… https://t.co/q3cCQKCdUM— j⧉nus (@repligate) November 20, 2025