Tag: brain science

The agony of speaking

~ ABN ~ Leave a comment

My SO and I are doing some painting. Mostly it’s fun, but as we discuss colors and color combinations, it has become glaringly obvious that it can be extremely difficult to talk about what we want but easy to convey our ideas by showing an example of what we want.

I wanted to do something in brown. Words flew all over the room but got us no closer to mutual understanding, let alone agreement. We looked at color charts on the computer but couldn’t agree on what we meant by saturation, muted, lighter, or darker.

My SO, who is much better with color than I am, thought the meanings of those terms were obvious. “You’re overthinking this! You must know what lighter and darker mean!”

“Not when I consider luminescence or saturation, I don’t. I really don’t.”

Is a red-brown lighter or darker than a blue-brown? More or less saturated? I honestly was lost in the terminology and was driving my poor SO crazy.

After several days of this, at some point I noticed my wallet lying on the table. “This is what I mean,” I said. “I want a color like this.” The wallet was a well-worn, dark, leathery brown.

She immediately knew what I was talking about now. “What you want is a really dark brown… that’s almost a black.”

Excited, we went back to the color chart (which has 3,500 color variations) and looked into a different classification of browns. Low and behold, the darkest one available—Tarpley Brown—is exactly what I wanted.

So,  I had something in my mind’s eye but failed repeatedly to convey it to my SO through the use of language. She tried to figure out what I meant but kept searching for a more woody sort of brown while becoming increasingly confused by my groping attempts at description.

From this, we can see how difficult it is to understand other people or even ourselves. Many important aspects of being human simply do not have clear examples in the world around us and are much more difficult to put into words than a color.

How we perceive and what to do about it

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Human perception is massively based on human memory, expectations, and schemas already formed and present in the brain.

A recent study on visual perception came to this conclusion:

Altogether, these results show that many neurons in the medial temporal lobe signal the subjects’ perceptual decisions rather than the visual features of the stimulus. (source)

This study is about visual perception and it focuses on neurons in the medial temporal lobe of the brain, but it’s conclusions have been discovered in many other studies—that is, we very often perceive what we already know or expect to perceive visually, aurally, verbally, semiotically.

Humans are capable of seeing new things and forming new conclusions and perceptions, but our default brain state is that most of the time we react to what we already think we know, consciously or unconsciously.

And how could it be otherwise? We could not function if we had to reassemble every pixel in a photo or our visual field every time we looked at anything. Same for sounds, sentences, concepts, and semiotics in general. If we are unable to quickly generalize and categorize something as something we already know about, we will find ourselves utterly lost in a maze of astounding complexity every second of our lives.

We cannot live without that default state, but when we use it during interpersonal communication we frequently run the risk of applying an erroneous “perceptual decision” about what someone is saying or about how we think they have heard us.

If you make erroneous perceptual decisions at a normal pace, which can be several times per hour, you will almost certainly begin to build up bigger and bigger wrong perceptions of the person you are doing it to. If that person is a spouse or close friend, you will have problems.

How do we usually deal with or work around problems of that type?

  1. We ignore them.
  2. We spend time away from the person.
  3. We get mad openly or seethe quietly.
  4. We resort to the simple generalities of basic friendship—shared activities, safe topics, declarations of loyalty or friendship.
  5. We believe or hope that mistakes will average out and not matter much.

In order:

1) If we ignore problems that arise from erroneous “perceptual decisions,” we are merely pushing them aside where they will continue to fester. Some people are truly able to completely ignore or forget, but do you really want to do that to your memory? And what replaces what you have forgotten? Isn’t it just another false “perceptual decision?”

2) This works to dilute feeling and perception, but not to improve or upgrade it. In most cases, this is a losing strategy with close friends.

3) Getting mad is better than most responses if you have the tools to fix the problem. Seething silently is a horrible way to go, though unfortunately a very common one. The worst of all is “not getting mad but getting even.” People who do this with friends are universally idiots.

4) Sad way to go but probably the most common halfway-decent thing people do. This describes most friendships and marriages. They become  sort of lifeless card games that go on and on because no one knows what else to do. And the longer they go on, the less likely there will be change.

5) I think this is an unrealistic belief because false perceptions can go off at many different angles. They don’t cancel out. At best, this belief may produce an outcome similar to item four above.

There is a way to handle these problems and that way is FIML. With practice, FIML partners will find that they have no festering false perceptions about each other and that they have not been forced to compromise the integrity and complexity of their relationship by resorting to any of the above strategies.

If you read about morality in books and essays, it is all usually very philosophical. What is it? What are the foundations of it? How does fairness contribute? Is it emotional? Cognitive? Non-cognitive? Etc.

But how do you do it? Not how do you do it in the big sense of politics or global warming or philosophy, but how do you do it with just one other person? Can you do that? Have you ever done that? Can you conduct a complex and moral relationship with even one other person?

How can you be psychologically healthy if you cannot? I think most people are stuck, at best, on level four above. The reason is not that they want that but that they do not see another way.

You absolutely have to do something like FIML. If you don’t, false perceptions will accumulate and lead to one of the five things mentioned above.

Word and phrase valence as keys to understanding human psychology

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Since virtually everything we do, think, and feel has some linguistic component it follows that our perceived valences of words and phrases will be reliable indicators of our psychological makeup.

This is especially true if our perceptions of these valences is “captured” in fraught contexts in real-world, real-time situations.

To be even clearer and more precise, it is fair to say that it is only possible to capture actual real valences in real-world, real-time situations.

When we do not work with real-world, real-time situations, we are capable only of working with the idea of them, a theory of them, a memory of them. And none of that can possibly capture the actual valence as it actually functions in real-life.

The theory, memory, or idea of a psychological valence associated with words and phrases occurs at a different level of abstraction or cognition from the valence itself.

Theories, memories, and ideas of psychological valences can be very interesting and are worth pursuing, but they are not the thing itself and as such have only a weak capacity to grasp the psychology exposed by actual valences in action in the real-world.

In a previous post—Words and word groups mapped in the brain—I discussed the following video, which is well-worth viewing again if you missed it the first time.

I said:

From these maps we can see that word groups have idiosyncratic arrangements, associations, and emphases.

And from this we can understand how analysis of interpersonal communication details can lead to beneficial changes in word group arrangements and thus also human psychology.

The video is very helpful for visualizing how words and word groups are organized in the brain. And this illustrates how and why FIML works as well as it does.

By “capturing” actual verbal psychological valences in real-time, real-world situations, partners gain immense insight into how their psychologies actually function in the real-world, how they actually deal with real life.

Focusing on very brief real-life valences has another very large benefit: though the valences are as real as they come, they are also very small, comprising nothing more than part of the working memory load at the time.

This is a bigger deal than it might seem. Virtually all of us have been trained by years of theorizing about our psychologies to see even very small incidents of real psychological valence as aspects of some theory or story about them.

No, no, no. Don’t do that. Just see each one for what it is—a brief valences that appeared briefly in working memory; and that has been “frozen” by the FIML technique as a small snapshot to be identified and understood as it is.

First get the evidence, get the data. Those valence snapshots are the data. Get plenty of them and you may find that you do not even need any theory about what they are or what caused them.

They just are. Indeed, theorizing about them makes them different, bigger or worse, while simultaneously hiding their real nature.

Most of us do not know how to think about real-world, real-time valences because we tend to always fit them into into an a priori format, a format we already believe in. That could be a theory of psychology or a take on what our personality is or what the other person’s personality is.

In the maps shown in the video, that would constitute a whole brain response to a small valence that appeared only briefly.

By using the FIML technique, you will find it is much easier and much more beneficial to reorganize small parts of the verbal map one piece at a time than to reorganize the entire map all at once based on some idea.

In practice, FIML deals with more than just words and phrases, but the whole practice can be largely understood by seeing how it works with language. FIML treats gestures, tone of voice, expressions, and so on in the same way as language—by isolating brief incidents and analyzing them for what they really are.

Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain

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Abstract

A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic that acutely causes distortions of space–time perception and ego dissolution, produces rapid and persistent therapeutic effects in human clinical trials1,2,3,4. In animal models, psilocybin induces neuroplasticity in cortex and hippocampus5,6,7,8. It remains unclear how human brain network changes relate to subjective and lasting effects of psychedelics. Here we tracked individual-specific brain changes with longitudinal precision functional mapping (roughly 18 magnetic resonance imaging visits per participant). Healthy adults were tracked before, during and for 3 weeks after high-dose psilocybin (25 mg) and methylphenidate (40 mg), and brought back for an additional psilocybin dose 6–12 months later. Psilocybin massively disrupted functional connectivity (FC) in cortex and subcortex, acutely causing more than threefold greater change than methylphenidate. These FC changes were driven by brain desynchronization across spatial scales (areal, global), which dissolved network distinctions by reducing correlations within and anticorrelations between networks. Psilocybin-driven FC changes were strongest in the default mode network, which is connected to the anterior hippocampus and is thought to create our sense of space, time and self. Individual differences in FC changes were strongly linked to the subjective psychedelic experience. Performing a perceptual task reduced psilocybin-driven FC changes. Psilocybin caused persistent decrease in FC between the anterior hippocampus and default mode network, lasting for weeks. Persistent reduction of hippocampal-default mode network connectivity may represent a neuroanatomical and mechanistic correlate of the proplasticity and therapeutic effects of psychedelics.

link

It is my understanding that the Buddha and/or the Buddhist tradition was and always has been well aware of psilocybin and probably other psychedelics and herbal drugs, like opium and cannabis.

In light of this, it is significant that the Fifth Precept for lay Buddhists proscribes only alcohol, and it does this very specifically by mentioning two types of alcoholic beverages (fermented and distilled) and nothing else. The Fifth Precept does not mention any other drugs.

As modern Buddhists, we can see that this conforms with what many of us have experienced with psychedelics and cannabis, among other ‘recreational’ drugs. Of course those drugs can be harmful but they can also do people a lot of good. Alcohol use, on the other hand, too often leads to very dangerous and spiritually stultifying mental conditions that do no one any good.

I have no problem with Buddhist teachers extrapolating the meaning of the Fifth Precept to include other drugs and sensory indulgences, but also believe that paying attention to the original meaning and its socio-environmental context (when people knew lots about plants) is important to keep in mind.

For more on this see: Are We Misunderstanding the Fifth Precept? ABN

An example of a psychological morpheme

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A psychological morpheme is defined as the smallest unit of a psychological response.

This term is used in FIML practice to distinguish psychological micro responses from meso and macro responses which are more general and less amenable to change and productive analysis.

There are many kinds of psychological morphemes and every individual has a multitude of them that are unique to them. Some are associated with personal memories and emotions that were aroused in the past. Others are new and arise in the present moment.

Still others are internalized social responses which at their most basic feel almost like disembodied responses, responses that precede thought, that begin creating the world we live in before we even know it. They are part of us, but can be slightly astonishing when we notice them for what they are.

A good example of one happened yesterday. My partner was away on a short trip and since it was a warm day I was working at home in my birthday suit. At some point I decided to call my partner, who would think nothing of seeing me in my birthday suit, but before I did I found myself reflexively putting on a pair of shorts.

I stopped and wondered why I was doing that and realized I was being “directed” by an almost completely emotionless and thought-less psychological morpheme.

Since I was going to speak, I was going to engage in a social act. And since I was going to engage in a social act, some part of me decided I needed to put on a pair of shorts.

This morpheme is interesting because it is so elementary. I was going to speak over the phone, long-distance to someone I have been living with for many years. And yet even still a very weak and basic sense of propriety that I had learned from my culture arose in me and got me to put on a pair of shorts.

It was like a single cold spark. And yet it was strong enough to move my system. It was a sort of “logic” like the logic of a small pattern in sand, or a twist in a tree’s bark. It was “me” putting on the shorts, but the “logic” of my doing so seemed to belong more to nature or a physical process than “my” being.

Psychological morphemes of this type are wonderful to observe. They belong to an almost blank class of responses that work like directional signs that induce us to move one way or another, to do something or not.

Other kinds of psychological morphemes induce us to feel, think, or believe something with no more “charge” than the single small spark that got me to put on my shorts.

Psychological morphemes are the most basic data of FIML practice. They are the small signs that make up the “language” of our psychologies, our minds. Understanding them leads to a rich understanding of your own and others’ behaviors, feelings, and thoughts.

Memory is not reliable but changes to fit present circumstances

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“Our memory is not like a video camera,” Bridge said. “Your memory reframes and edits events to create a story to fit your current world. It’s built to be current.” (source)

The unreliability of human memory is not a new topic, but this study fairly convincingly shows how our memories conform to what we are doing and/or how we have been using them.

One can plausibly extrapolate from this that humans change how they remember and understand themselves and others based on the data of now. A moment of extraneous frustration, for example, may cause us to see someone nearby us in a different light, through no fault of theirs.

If our frustration is with how we are being (mis)understood or with our difficulty in expressing our thoughts, the implications for how we understand the person we are speaking with may be even more serious.

Experienced FIML partners will surely have realized that even minor misunderstandings can lead to large acts of “reframing” events in an emotional way that can be seriously distorted.

Beyond innocent misunderstandings (which, unfortunately, can have tragic consequences), this area of shifting memories is where a good deal of interpersonal abuse occurs. In the worst cases, one (or both) partners abuse normal human malleability to lie. In less bad cases, one (or both) partners is easily excited by their own distortions and quickly comes to believe them, effectively lying to themselves as well as their partner.

In other cases, individuals or entire groups of people may decide to tell a significant lie (slanted history, for example) and then hurl their lie passionately at others. This frequently causes the person being lied to to react with shame or concern based on the liars’ emotional display and not on the facts of the matter. A person being subjected to such verbal abuse will often conclude that if the other person is so passionate, they must have a serious point that should be considered; and this can cause large distortions of well-known facts in the victim’s mind.

All of this is a major reason the Human Realm is characterized by delusion and a large part of Buddhist practice is geared toward removing delusion.

The brain as a guessing machine

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A new approach to the study of mental disorder—called computational psychiatry—uses Bayesian inference to explain where people with problems are going wrong.

Bayesian inference is a method of statistical reasoning used to understand the probability of a hypothesis and how to update it as conditions change.

The idea is that people with schizophrenia, for example, are doing a bad job at inferring the reasonableness of their hypotheses. This happens because schizophrenics seem to be less likely to put enough weight on prior experience (a factor in Bayesian reasoning).

Somewhat similarly, “sensory information takes priority [over previous experience] in people with autism.” (Bayesian reasoning implicated in some mental disorders)

Distorted calculations — and the altered versions of the world they create — may also play a role in depression and anxiety, some researchers think. While suffering from depression, people may hold on to distorted priors — believing that good things are out of reach, for instance. And people with high anxiety can have trouble making good choices in a volatile environment… (Ibid)

The key problem with autism and anxiety is people with these conditions have trouble updating their expectations—a major component of Bayesian reasoning—and thus make many mistakes.

These mistakes, of course, compound and further increase a sense of anxiety or alienation.

Like several of the researches quoted in the linked article, I find this computational approach exciting.

It speaks to me because it confirms a core hypothesis of FIML practice—that all people make many, significant inferential mistakes during virtually all acts of communication.

In this respect, I believe all people are mentally disordered, not just the ones who are suffering the most.

I think a Bayesian thought experiment can all but prove my point:

What are the odds that you will correctly infer the mental state(s) of anyone you speak with? What are the odds that they will correctly infer your mental state(s)?

In a formal setting, both of you will do well enough if the inferring is kept within whatever the formal boundaries are. But that is all you will be able to infer reasonably well.

In the far more important realm of intimate interpersonal communication, the odds that either party is making correct inferences go down significantly.

If we do not know someone’s mental state, we cannot know why they have communicated as they have. If our inferences about them are based on such questionable data, we are bound to make many more mistakes about them.

Disruption of neurotic response in FIML practice

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By analyzing minute emotional reactions in real-time during normal conversation, FIML practice disrupts the consolidation, or more often the reconsolidation, of “neurotic” responses.

In FIML, a neurotic response is defined as “an emotional response based on a misinterpretation.” The misinterpretation in question can be incipient (just starting) to long-standing (been a habit for years).

The response is disrupted by FIML practice and, thus, tends not to consolidate or reconsolidate, especially after several instances of learning that it is not valid.

A neurotic response is a response based on memory. The following study on fear memories supports the above explanation of FIML practice.

Memories become labile when recalled. In humans and rodents alike, reactivated fear memories can be attenuated by disrupting reconsolidation with extinction training. Using functional brain imaging, we found that, after a conditioned fear memory was formed, reactivation and reconsolidation left a memory trace in the basolateral amygdala that predicted subsequent fear expression and was tightly coupled to activity in the fear circuit of the brain. In contrast, reactivation followed by disrupted reconsolidation suppressed fear, abolished the memory trace, and attenuated fear-circuit connectivity. Thus, as previously demonstrated in rodents, fear memory suppression resulting from behavioral disruption of reconsolidation is amygdala-dependent also in humans, which supports an evolutionarily conserved memory-update mechanism.

~Disruption of Reconsolidation Erases a Fear Memory Trace in the Human Amygdala

FIML practice works by partners consciously and cooperatively disrupting reconsolidation (and initial consolidation) of neurotic memory (and associated behaviors). FIML both extirpates habitual neurotic responses and also prevents the formation of new neurotic responses through conscious disruption of memory consolidation.

FIML probably works as well as it does because humans have “an evolutionarily conserved memory-update mechanism” that favors more truth. Obvious examples of this update mechanism can be seen in many simple mistakes. For instance, if you think the capital of New York State is New York City and someone shows that it is Albany, you will likely correct your mistake immediately with little or no fuss.

Since FIML focuses on small mistakes made between partners, corrections are rarely more difficult than the above example though they may be accompanied by a greater sense of relief. For example, if you thought that maybe your partner was mad at you but then find (through a FIML query) that they are not, your sense of relief may be considerable.

Psychopaths don’t EXIST – and Ted Bundy was simply misunderstood, scientist claims

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…according to Dr Rasmus Larensis, a forensic scientist from the University of Toronto Mississauga in Canada, psychopathy might not exist at all.

The big issue, as Dr Larensis points out, is that every single claim which has ever been made about the nature of psychopaths has been systematically disproved.

Ideas, such as the notion that psychopaths don’t feel fear, have either been flat–out disproved or faltered as rigorous evidence in their support failed to emerge.

Dr Larensis even argues that famous ‘psychopaths’ such as the serial killer Ted Bundy are really just misunderstood.

Dr Larensis told the Daily Mail: ‘After decades of research, we still lack compelling evidence for the specific type of person described by the traditional psychopathy model.’

link

Networks of words, semiotics, and psychological morphemes

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Words and semiotics are held together in networks. “Psychological morphemes” are also held together in networks.

A “psychological morpheme” is the smallest meaningful unit of a psychological response. It is the smallest unit of communication that can give rise to an emotional, psychological, or cognitive reaction.

Of course word networks, semiotic networks, and emotional, psychological, and cognitive networks all intertwine with each other.

FIML practice is designed to help partners untangle unwanted emotions from these intertwined networks. FIML practice focuses on psychological morphemes because they are small and thus rather easily understood and rather easily extirpated from real-time contexts (when partners are interacting in real life in real-time).

The hard part about FIML practice is it is done in real life in real-time. But the easy or very effective part about FIML is that once partners learn to do it, results come quickly because the practice is happening in real life in real-time. It is not just a theory when you do it in that way. It is an experience that changes how you communicate and how you understand yourself and others.

In FIML practice partners are mindful of their emotional reactions and learn that when one occurs, it is important to query their partner about it. They are mindful of psychological morphemes and as soon as one appears, but before the morpheme calls up a large network leading to a strong reaction, they query their partner about it.

This practice leads to a fairly smooth and effortless extirpation of unwanted psychological responses. This happens because the data provided by the partner that “caused” the reaction shows the partner who made the FIML query that the psychological morpheme in question arose due to a misinterpretation. Seeing this repeatedly for the same sort of neurotic reaction causes that reaction and the psychological network that comprises it to become extinguished.

A fascinating study from the University of Kansas by Michael Vitevitch shows that removing a key word from a linguistic network will cause that network to fracture and even be destroyed. An article about the study and a link to the study (pay wall) can be found here: Keywords hold vocabulary together in memory.

Vitevitch’s study involves only words and his analysis was done only with computers because, as he says, ““Fracturing the network [in real people] could actually disrupt language processing. Even though we could remove keywords from research participants’ memories through psycholinguistic tasks, we dared not because of concern that there would be long-term or even widespread effects.”

FIML is not about removing key words from linguistic networks. But it is about dismantling or removing psychological or semiotic networks that cause suffering.

Psychological or semiotic networks are networks rich in emotional meaning. When those networks harbor unwanted, inappropriate, or mistaken interpretations (and thus mistaken or unwanted emotions), they can cause serious neurotic reactions, or serious mistaken interpretations.

These mistaken interpretations, and the emotions associated with them, can be efficiently extirpated by revealing to their holder the “key” psychological morphemes that set them off.

The psychology of a semiotic network hinges on repeated reactions to key psychological morphemes and that this process is analogous to the key words described in Vitevitch’s study.

Vitevitch did not remove key words from actual people because it would be unethical to do so. But it is not unethical for consenting adults to help each other find and remove key psychological morphemes that are harmfully associated with the linguistic, semiotic, cognitive, and psychological networks that make up the individual.

NASA scientist who ‘died three times’ saw the same thing every time… and it wasn’t the pearly gates of Heaven

~ ABN ~ 2 Comments

A NASA scientist has claimed she did not just die once, but three times, and saw the exact same thing each time.

Ingrid Honkala, 55, an oceanographer who has worked with NASA, said she had near-death experiences at the ages of two, 25 and 52.

While each incident unfolded differently, she said the outcome was identical: she entered a state of complete calm, with no fear, no sense of time, and a feeling of separating from her physical body.

Honkala described becoming ‘pure awareness,’ immersed in what she calls a vast, interconnected consciousness filled with light, clarity and peace.

She claimed this was not a fleeting hallucination, but a consistent experience she returned to every time she came close to death.

The scientist now believes these moments offered a glimpse into what lies beyond human life, challenging the idea that consciousness ends when the body shuts down.

link

__________

The highlighted paragraphs above describe a samadhi state, which the Buddha said is available to virtually all human beings. Samadhi, or the training for it, is the Eighth Path of the Noble Eightfold Path. To use Honkala’s words, the fourth and highest samadhi state in Buddhism is an experience which transforms human consciousness by ‘immersing‘ us in ‘a vast, interconnected consciousness filled with light, clarity and peace.’ ABN

A challenge to the cognitive model of the mind: Paul Cisek questions the dominant scientific paradigm and the current theory of artificial intelligence

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…human language is a tool for communicating our thoughts, but is separate and distinct from thought itself. Evelina Fedorenko, a neuroscientist at MIT and lead author of the paper laying out the empirical evidence for this claim, was kind enough to let me interview her. Her basic argument is that we know language must be separate from thought because (a) people who lose language ability can still think and reason, and (b) different parts of the brain activate when we engage in different types of thought, and often the “language part” remains idle when we’re thinking. In my view, this evidence deals a serious blow to the hopes of achieving “artificial general intelligence” through the scaling of large-language models since, after all, they are language tools (it’s in the name).

Enter now stage left Dr. Paul Cisek, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, to throw some gasoline on that fire. Cisek first came across my radar last year when a pithy observation he made about LLMs started making the rounds on social media. You can read his full comment here, but to summarize:

  • We know that humans in general can falsely impute intelligence and agency to complex events that take place in the world, as we’ve seen humans do this in the past when interacting with a chatbot such as ELIZA, or claiming the gods make volcanoes explode.
  • But although modern-day LLMs are complex, researchers know quite a bit about how they function, through pattern-matching and use of mathematical theories (among other things).
  • Thus, although the public may be inclined to attribute sentience and agency to LLMs, scientists should know better. Cisek: “We are like a bunch of professional magicians, who know where all of the little strings and compartments are, and who know how we just redirected the audience’s attention to slip the card in our pocket…but then we are standing around backstage wondering, ‘Maybe there really is magic?’”

There isn’t any magic. But a big challenge we face is that the companies that produce LLMs are willfully trying to convince us otherwise, and are working to take advantage of the human impulse to ascribe agency to these tools.

Cisek’s main claims as I understand them:

  1. The simple model of the mind as an information processor that takes input and produces output is mistaken.
  2. We should instead see minds as control systems that guide behavior as part of a continuous process, like a circuit.
  3. Over hundreds of millions of years, biological evolution has expanded the range and depth of behaviors that our minds can control.

…

link

__________

I have taken several excerpts from the essay above to provide a sense of the overall discussion. It’s an interesting read, not very long, not hard to follow. Well-worth reading. ABN

Student Finds the Psychedelic Fungus the Inventor of LSD Spent His Life Searching For

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The discovery could reshape how we study psychedelic compounds in nature and medicine

At West Virginia University (WVU), Corinne Hazel, an undergraduate major in environmental microbiology, examined morning glory plants for signs of protective chemicals. She wasn’t looking for new drugs or anything psychedelic. But nestled in the folds of a tiny seed coat was a hint of white fuzz.

That fuzz turned out to be a fungus that scientists had been seeking since the 1930s. And this included Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD.

Hofmann offered the world LSD in the late 1930s by modifying a compound called lysergic acid, which he extracted from the ergot fungus Claviceps purpurea. That fungus grows on rye and other grains and is well-known for producing ergot alkaloids, a group of chemicals that can be toxic or medicinal depending on the dose.

Hofmann and others searched the plants for a fungus related to Claviceps purpurea, the rye-dwelling microbe that produces ergot alkaloids, a group of potent compounds with powerful biological effects. But for decades, that fungus remained a phantom.

Hazel found it almost by accident.

“We had a ton of plants lying around and they had these tiny little seed coats,” she said. “We noticed a little bit of fuzz in the seed coat. That was our fungus.”

With Panaccione’s guidance, Hazel extracted DNA from the fuzz and sent it for sequencing. The results confirmed what generations of chemists and botanists had only suspected: the morning glory harbored a previously unknown species of ergot-producing fungus.

“Sequencing a genome is a significant thing,” Panaccione said. “It’s amazing for a student.”

link

FIML and cerebral efficiency

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This article argues that the human brain saves energy by predicting or imagining “reality” more than actually perceiving it: Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds? The article argues that this way of using our brains allows us to work more efficiently with complex data or in complex situations.

I think this general premise is pretty well known and agreed on, but the linked article puts it in a new way. The following sentence caught my eye: This… underlines the surprising extent to which the structure of our expectations (both conscious and non-conscious) may quite literally be determining much of what we see, hear and feel.

The article uses visual perception as an example, but the idea applies just as well, and maybe more so, to what we hear in the speech of others. FIML practice works by inserting a new mental skill between the first arising of a (stored) interpretation and its full-blown acceptance as “reality”.

Interoception, proprioception, and perception of dynamic mental states

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Interoception means our “perception or sense of internal body states,” including the states of our cardiovascular, digestive, respiratory, and thermoregulatory systems among others.

Proprioception means “one’s own” or “ones’ individual” (Latin proprius) “perception.” We normally use this word to refer to our physical position in the world—whether we are standing or sitting, how we are moving, and how much energy we are using.

Both interoception and proprioception generally refer to physical states of the body though, of course, how we interpret those states may involve much more than immediate physical considerations.

Erroneous interoception or the misinterpretation of internal states is is generally thought to be an important contributing factor to many psychological disorders, including anxiety, depression, panic disorder, and more.

Consider some other levels of interoception—our states of mind; our mental impressions of other people and of ourselves; our senses of our own psychologies.

These levels of psychological reality are normally accessed through introspection, meditation, mindfulness, and psychotherapy. All of these methods are good, but each of them lacks ongoing, real-time input from another human being, thus missing the dynamic functioning of the human mind in real-life situations.

FIML corrects this problem by providing objective, dynamic access to real-time psychological functioning. FIML is a method or tool for optimizing human psychology by honing our perceptions of our mental states as they actually function in real-world situations.