The Joy of Typing

I’m learning to code at 56. Here’s an epic beat-down of my critical inner self.

By VM Vaughn I’m 56 years old and learning to code. Why? Because I love it. And I’ve got a knack for it. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It’s hard. And that’s OK. I love losing myself in an algorithm challenge. I love squeezing in a few extra minutes te...

The Unbearable Slowness of Being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?

Researchers at Caltech quantify human behavioral information throughput at approximately 10 bits/s across various tasks, highlighting a vast discrepancy with the brain's sensory input capacity,...

The psychological trick you can learn in 10 minutes that will be useful for the rest of your life

Stop feeling overwhelmed.

Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom

When people talk about the value of paying attention and slowing down, they often make it sound prudish and monk-like. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be.

The Human-in-the-Loop is Tired

On reward functions, dopamine, and what it actually feels like when the code starts writing itself

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.

How to gain more from reading by taking it all in more slowly | Psyche Guides

There’s more to words than meets the eye. Deepen your appreciation of literature through the art of slow, attentive reading

Brett Scott (@brettscott)

Despite all the rhetoric about automation supposedly making our lives easier, the true story being told by Big Tech is that our lives are better when speeded up You are supposed to be in an ever-accelerating race, packing more units of experience into the same unit of time, a phenomenon that requires a contraction of patience and a blurring of experience as everything quickens In the end, this is what ‘convenience’ actually is. It’s a state of being in which you become disassociated and disengaged from the texture of the world around you. You pass through it dreamlike, and suddenly wake up decades years later as an elderly person on your deathbed, thinking “WTF happened”, as then the memory slips away

Superhuman: What can AI do in 30 minutes?

AI multiplies your efforts. I found out by how much...

Use the 2-7-30 rule to radically improve your memory - Fast Company

150 years of science shows this brain hack can radically improve your memory. Entrepreneurs and anyone else who needs to learn things fast should take note.

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...

People prefer electric shocks to time alone with thoughts - The Boston Globe

In the rush of every day life, many people <i>say</i> they crave a moment of peace, but a startling new study finds that people don’t much enjoy spending even 10 minutes alone with their thoughts. In fact, our own minds are so intolerable that many people chose to administer painful electric shocks to themselves rather than sit in quiet contemplation, researchers from the University of Virginia and Harvard discovered.

Opinion | A Natural Fix for A.D.H.D. (Published 2014)

The problem is not just your brain. The problem is boredom.