Some ideas are so powerful once you know them, you start to see them everywhere. Normal distributions are one of these ideas. Let's understand it!
Bayesian Thinking in Everyday Life
More than 200 years ago, Thomas Bayes came up with a brilliant idea that has helped shape the world today, called Bayes Theorem. This…
Noise in Cognition: Bug or Feature?
Noise in behavior is often considered a nuisance: Although the mind aims for the best possible action, it is let down by unreliability in the sensory and response systems. Researchers often represent noise as additive, Gaussian, and independent. Yet a careful look at behavioral noise reveals a rich structure that defies easy explanation. First, in both perceptual and preferential judgments sensory and response noise may potentially play only minor roles, with most noise arising in the cognitive computations. Second, the functional form of the noise is both non-Gaussian and nonindependent, with the distribution of noise being better characterized as heavy-tailed and as having substantial long-range autocorrelations. It is possible that this structure results from brains that are, for some reason, bedeviled by a fundamental design flaw, albeit one with intriguingly distinctive characteristics. Alternatively, noise might not be a bug but a feature. Specifically, we propose that the brain approximates probabilistic inference with a local sampling algorithm, one using randomness to drive its exploration of alternative hypotheses. Reframing cognition in this way explains the rich structure of noise and leads to the surprising conclusion that noise is not a symptom of cognitive malfunction but plays a central role in underpinning human intelligence.
The shape of a knowledge worker
In a recent post, I threw around the term 'cognitive exponent' a bunch. Today I'd like to talk about a thing that might help us frame our investigation of what puts someone on the right side of that exponential graph.
Thinking Fast, Slow, Artificially: AI and Your Brain
AI can boost your decisions — or quietly undermine them. Wharton researchers introduce a new theory of cognition that every leader needs to understand.
People Who Can't Visualize Anything Are Challenging a 300-Year-Old Theory of Thought
Mental imagery might not be as central to complex human thought as we believed, philosophers say.
To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future | Quanta Magazine
A controversial theory suggests that perception, motor control, memory and other brain functions all depend on comparisons between ongoing actual experiences and the brain’s modeled expectations.
Social Modeling as Architecture, Not Deficit:
Why Neurotypical Expectations Are an Inappropriate Ask
Exploring Psychology in the Field: Steps and Examples From the Used‐Car Market
Abstract The growing availability of large datasets in a variety of domains presents an opportunity for researchers to use field data to better understand psychological concepts. I discuss, from an empirical economics point of view, steps for how to study cognition in large datasets. I use two recent papers that explore psychology in the used‐car market as motivating examples. These examples help illustrate the potential importance of big data as a way to explore human psychology and cognition. , The growing availability of large datasets in a variety of domains presents an opportunity for researchers to use field data to better understand psychological concepts. I discuss from an empirical economics point of view, steps for how to study cognition in large datasets and illustrate these steps with recent empirical papers.
The Physics and Metaphysics of Social Powers: Bridging Cognitive Processing and Social Dynamics, a New Perspective on Power through Active Inference
The brain in the machine: How AI could help explain how we think | IBM
Scientists are using large AI models to predict patterns of brain activity at scale, a development that researchers say is pushing neuroscience toward a new kind of digital imaging.
Welcome: Mapping the Architecture of Autistic Cognition
Most people experience their minds as opaque.
Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy
The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...
Our Minds Are Weirder than You Think
satellitecomponent/Neurite
Fractal Graph-of-Thought. Rhizomatic Mind-Mapping for Ai-Agents, Web-Links, Notes, and Code.