Mystified magicians of the mind

Danilo Bzdok | Mila

Danilo Bzdok is a computer scientist and medical doctor by training with a unique dual background in systems neuroscience and machine learning algorithms. After training at RWTH Aachen University (Germany), Université de Lausanne (Switzerland) and Harvard Medical School, Bzdok completed two doctoral degrees, one in neuroscience at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany, and another in computer science (machine learning statistics) at INRIA–Saclay and the Neurospin brain imaging centre in Paris. Danilo is currently an associate professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. His interdisciplinary research centres around narrowing knowledge gaps in the brain basis of human-defining types of thinking in order to uncover key computational design principles underlying human intelligence.

Wisdom in a World in Crisis: The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness - The Great Simplification

In this episode, Nate is rejoined by philosopher and neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist for discussion on how our left-brain dominance obscures our sense of value, especially for abstract qualities such as truth, goodness, and beauty.

Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us

A reflection on the reading life. What formed it, what threatens it, and what remains.

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...

Iain McGilchrist – Rediscovering Wisdom in a World Gone Mad

Helena Norberg-Hodge talks to Iain McGilchrist, a one-of-a-kind thinker, Oxford literary scholar, and doctor in psychiatry and neuroscience.

About Patrick Mineault

I’m an AI researcher and neurotechnologist. I’m a NeuroAI researcher at the Amaranth Foundation. I’m always happy to take on new, manifestly important projects that are nearly imp…

Resource recs on AI catastrophic risk

If nothing magic is happening in the human brain, things could get weird

Taking Love Seriously: What Ancient Wisdom & Modern Psychology Say About Interconnectedness - The Great Simplification

In this episode, Nate welcomes Dr. John Churchill, a psychologist and former Buddhist monk, to explore a map of human development that runs from "first-person" perspective of the isolated self all the way to a felt, embodied sense of interdependence with the planet itself.

Genealogy, Enchantment, and the War for the Mind | The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory | JCRT

Carl Raschke interviews Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm on genealogy after genealogy, the myth of disenchantment, and the long history behind the militarization of the mind.

Interdependent Thoughts

Bookmarked Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? by Ted Chiang in the New Yorker

To experience Zen-like awakening, try going the headless way | Psyche Ideas

Try to point to your true self as you’d point to a brick wall, and other experiments in Zen-like awakening

Realization experiences: a convergent account of insight and mystical experiences

We argue that the powerful transformative effects of mystical-type experiences can be understood using the same machinery that underlies insight problem solving, and that both mystical experiences ...