Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum - Anthropology & Psychology

A brief phenomenology of perception

Sun, 26 Apr 2026 00:04:11 +0000

Perception is not possible without sentience AND thought. Merely seeing without thinking about it grasps nothing beyond its field of vision. Merely thinking about something without seeing it grasps the reality of something but without its phenomenal presence to us. To really perceive something as real in front of us we have to both see it and think it at the same time.

But since our attention is inherently indivisible, it can't attend to what is seen and what is thought at the same time. That's why when you are just looking at something, you're just watching it, and are incapable of thinking. It's also why when you are thinking about something, you are no longer watching it, essentially blinded to what your eyes are looking at.

To solve this problem, we have to, unnoticeably to ourselves, go back and forth between or iterate thoughtless seeing and sightless thought, alternating these two phenomenally-opposite manifestations of the real into one seemingly coherent state called perception.
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"Iteration means repeating a process to generate a (possibly unbounded) sequence of outcomes. Each repetition of the process is a single iteration, and the outcome of each iteration is the starting point of the next iteration.

In mathematics and computer science, iteration (along with the related technique of recursion) is a standard element of algorithms."----- Wikipedia

New word = new experience

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 18:18:42 +0000

New word for today:

"'Sonderance' refers to the act of deeply perceiving, understanding, or empathizing with the complex, hidden lives of others, often stemming from the coined term "sonder". It represents a moment of insight where one realizes that every stranger is the main character in their own intricate story.

Key Aspects of Sonder/Sonderance:

Definition: Coined by John Koenig in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, sonder is the profound realization that random passersby are living lives as vivid and complex as your own, complete with their own routines, worries, and triumphs.

"Sonderance" Interpretation: Often used as a variation to describe the process or state of experiencing this realization, fostering empathy, deep insight, and a sense of connection.

Impact: Embracing this perspective helps reduce self-centeredness, encourages compassion, and helps combat loneliness by recognizing shared humanity.

Origin: Derived from a blend of the French sonder (to probe/plumb) and the German sonder (special)."

This to me is a striking case of having a new word for something suddenly revealing to you a new experience or thought. It demonstrates firsthand that language itself, particularly in the form of neologisms and poetry and original observations, can raise our consciousness and thus enlarge what it means to be human and how we experience reality. Hence my equation: new word = new experience

Everything Is Metaphor

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 20:08:12 +0000

“The Word is not the Thing,

The Word is not the Thing,

Hi-ho the derry-o — the Word is not the Thing!”

- Alan Watts

"This article, these words you are reading — are metaphors. Fumbling attempts to grasp at a concept that is difficult to express and understand because the tools to try and understand it are themselves the blockages to understanding.

A metaphor is not something untrue — but something that reveals truth obliquely, within something that is not the truth itself.

Everything — every concept, every word, is but an analogue for actual Reality. (The ultimate truth behind what we consider to be ordinary reality). Concepts and language are our brain’s interpretation and communication of Reality through our limited senses, and through recognition of patterns.

We think of concepts as Reality — because without them we would have no way to understand Reality at all. But at the same time Reality is not the concept.

Take for example my above statement: “Reality is not the concept of reality”. You understand that, grasp it, sense there is a meaning behind the word “reality”. And yet, how to grasp it behind the veil of concepts and words?

So we use metaphor, poetry, story, archetypes, art. None of these things are “the true thing” either, but each are pin pricks through which the light of Reality can glimmer through in a diffuse, nebulous way, until we start to see a vague shape take form. (See what I did there? I had to use a metaphor because I couldn’t find any other way to explain what I meant).

Language is a metaphor (which is an ironic statement given that the word metaphor is a part of language). The words are associations between experiences across time, communicated in predictable ways. They are not the experience themselves. And yet 99.9% of the time we live our lives as if language and what language describes is the same thing. This is called reification: “when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity”.

Science is also a metaphor. This may seem shocking at first because we are used to thinking of science as “finding the truth about the universe”. But actually science is about making useful predictions about the universe by identifying repeating patterns and drawing relationships between things that are observed to occur. The statistician George Box famously said in 1974: “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”. What he meant was that statistical models and formulae are far more simplistic than real world. This is true for statistics, but it’s also true for things like physics and chemistry. The models used in classical physics describe “particles” (often depicted as a ball with orbiting electrons), and simple cause-effect relationships between them (such as Newton’s Laws).

But Newton’s Laws of Physics are metaphors for the workings of the universe, which are more complex and mysterious than can be described in a few formulae. That is not to say that Newton did not notice a pattern in Reality and describe it in a very useful predictable model — but the so-called Laws are constructed in such a way that are inherently metaphorical.

For example the First Law states that “an object at rest will stay at rest, and an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted on by a net external force”. This statement describes an extremely widespread and predictable pattern at the scale of human observation to the point that laypeople (and many scientists) often consider it a universal truth of reality.

But “the Law is not the Thing” either.

Newton’s equations are simplistic and condensed — describing a reality where the movement of objects is reducible to numbers, linear cause-and-effect. The idea that a single particle can be acted upon by a single other particle. Useful, elegant, but a metaphor nonetheless.

So if everything is a metaphor — what now?

The point of this article is not to denigrate the usefulness of scientific models or of language and concepts, but rather to remind you when we engage in reification we limit our ability to further understand Reality.

Use the models — use the metaphors — but never forget that there is always an underlying larger meaning behind them. and always strive to find better and more creative metaphors for it is only through them that we can ever discover truth."

“We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” — Pablo Picasso

https://ladyreverie.medium.com/everythin...be49b7d6ba

"What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long usage seem fixed, canonical and binding; truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that they are illusions; worn-out metaphors without sensuous power.’
– Nietzsche, On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense

‘The people who get to impose their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true.’
– Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By – 2003, p160

‘I propose that the principal software used in the human brain consists of words, metaphors, disguised metaphors and linguistic structures in general.’ – Robert Anton Wilson, Undoing Yourself Too – 1988, p13

‘We’re trapped in linguistic constructs. All that is, is metaphor. I believe somebody said that before me…’
– RAW, Language, Reason & Reality
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Everything that is at all understandable and relatable is only understood and related to thru something that it is not. That's because understanding isn't like an empty container that is suddenly filled up but always relational and perspectival. It's also why everything is a metaphor that only points toward the real but does not make it phenomenally present in itself as sensory perception does. IOW, the better the metaphor the better it simulates the apprehension of the thing-in-itself by NOT being the thing-in-itself, magically granting us a peek into its essential nature precisely AS IF it were unmetaphorized and unmediated by something it is not. The metaphor of your TV's screen is quite apt here. Like a metaphor it makes being-in-itself conceptualizable by disappearing and seeming to not exist. It makes apparent by becoming transparent. But that conceptualized being-in-itself it makes apparent is nothing more than another metaphor for something else not present, and so on and so forth. Alas, and to use another metaphor, we wander around eternally distracted in an infinite house of mirrors!

Bullying & adverse social climate take toll on mental health of gender-diverse youth

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:35:57 +0000

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1124753

INTRO: Gender-diverse adolescents who experience bullying and live in states with persistently unsupportive gender identity laws are significantly more likely to suffer escalating psychological distress compared to their peers, according to new research by UCLA Health.

The findings, published in JAMA Network, draw on one of the largest, most comprehensive adolescent brain development studies in the U.S. The study results suggest that the mental health burden carried by gender-diverse youth is not an inherent consequence of gender diversity but rather is shaped by the social and political environments in which these young people live.

“What we're seeing is that stigma has measurable neuropsychiatric consequences,” said the study’s senior author Carrie Bearden, a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the UCLA Brain Research Institute. “Bullying and unsupportive legislation are not abstract policy concerns; they translate into real and serious symptoms in adolescents' day-to-day lives.”

Specifically, researchers found that gender-diverse teens reported higher rates of subtle but clinically meaningful warning signs of psychological stress. These experiences, known clinically as psychotic-like experiences (PLEs), are subtle, distressing internal experiences such as feeling unusually suspicious of others, thinking others are talking or laughing at them, feeling threatened or hearing sounds others do not. PLEs are not clinical psychosis. However, if untreated, these experiences can lead to increased risk of developing mental disorders such as depression, anxiety, self-harming behavior and psychotic disorder... (MORE - details)

Why are you gay?

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 09:08:05 +0000

Like most gay men, I wasn't 'born this way' — and I refuse to lie about it

Embracing my dysfunction as an 'identity' nearly killed me through alcoholism and self-destructive promiscuity.

“Why are you gay?”... Then the internet exploded. The voices of countless homosexuals and their supportive family members rose in unison to a pitch so shrill it could crack silicon data chips.

They trotted out all the predictable labels. Homophobe. Bigot. Christian nationalist. ... — simply for asking the question we are not allowed to ask.
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Trauma response
...
So what did he say?

"In almost every case, and certainly in every male case, [homosexuality] is a trauma response. It is not a sexuality."

Milo Yiannopolous speaks for me. I endorse what he said and believe it to be true. I believe I became a homosexual because I grew up under a mother with narcissistic personality disorder, a father who left before I could ever meet him, and an attempted murderer and pedophile for a stepfather.
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1. Yes, I believe the large majority of male homosexuals are homosexuals because of childhood circumstances and trauma.

2. Yes, I believe that most of those who claim that they had no childhood trauma are not being candid — including, in some cases, not being candid with themselves. Personal and professional experience leads me to this conclusion.

3. No, I’m not claiming that every single male homosexual had abusive parents. Yes, I recognize that some male homosexuals come from stable, loving families. I have male homosexual friends who fit this description.

What we used to know

We have lived for so long with the culturally enforced mandate to believe in “born this way” that we have to remind society of what it used to know just yesterday. Those of you in middle age will remember that until the past 25 years or so, homosexuality was understood to be the outcome of an abusive or neglectful childhood.

Not only psychiatric researchers, but everyday Americans noticed that most male homosexuals had troubled or nonexistent relationships with their fathers. They noticed that male homosexuals were unusually close to and emotionally enmeshed with their mothers. They noticed that those mothers often had overbearing, domineering, or melodramatic personalities.

If you’re younger than 40 and reading this with shock, I’m telling you the truth. This view was normal, but it was deliberately re-cast as “homophobia” and “ abuse against gays” in the past 25 years by the same activists who brought you “trans kids,” breast removal of healthy teen girls, and cross-sex hormones for teen boys who “are actually girls.”

That’s the set that brought you “born this way.”
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When the topic is this emotional, people stop thinking and start emoting. They start pretending that humans can’t know anything about the world, can’t recognize any patterns, and can’t come to any conclusions unless a Scientist published a Paper in a a Peer-Reviewed Journal.

Nevertheless, I’ll try. Surprising though it may be, the psychiatric and psychological literature, starting with Freud in the early 20th century, has long noted the pattern I described above. And most, though not all, male homosexuals were sexually abused as children or as minors. (I am a homosexual, but I was not molested as a child.)

Commentator and “ex-gay” Joseph Sciambra has published several bibliographies that round up much of this literature.

Normally, people don’t demand “the Science” on other subjects. No one demands “the Science” before noticing that most teenage drivers are more erratic and dangerous and therefore it pays to drive defensively around them. Everyone knows this, not because they read “the Science.” They know it because they have eyes, ears, and a brain that detects patterns.

... Those conservatives who find the position taken in this piece hard to bear have been manipulated emotionally by gay activists.

If you’re a conservative who finds this uncomfortable or “mean,” I think I know another reason why. You have homosexuals in your family whom you love (so do I, friends). Some of them are your children. And if they’re your children, you’re hearing an implicit accusation: “He’s saying I’m a terrible mother who made my son gay.”
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Even the most loving parents will make mistakes, and the culture outside the parental home is ravening at your children and pushing them to adopt deviant and hedonistic lifestyles. Even the best parents can’t keep all of that out.

'Coming out' to my mother

Let me tell you the story of a night in 1986 when I “came out” to my mother at age 12. Align readers know from my past columns that my mother was an abusive, deranged woman who veered into psychopathy at times. But there were moments when a real woman with real feelings came through.
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I told my mother that I was gay and that I felt duty-bound to tell her the truth about it. Looking back at myself at 12, I shudder that I was already forming myself into a “gay identity” that would trap me in promiscuity, addiction, and emotional disturbance for decades to come. But I didn’t know any better then.

My mother started crying. It wasn’t her usual self-pitying kind of crying, and it wasn’t her angry crying that would escalate to slaps across the face and screamed insults.

“I worried for so long that I would do this to you, that I would make you gay,” she said while she looked down at her hands. “I never gave you a father, and the father figure I brought into your life turned out to be a monster.”

This was one of the few times in our life together that I can remember when my mother seemed genuine and honest and seemed to care about my well-being. I think her sense of responsibility and guilt was real (my mother wasn’t much for feeling normal parental responsibility).

“I’m not crying because you’re gay,” she said. “I’m crying because I know that life is going to be harder for you. I’m terrified that you’ll get a disease and die early. Please be careful.”
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“You didn’t do anything to me, Mom. I was born this way,” I said.

And I believed it.

The limits of tolerance

It is true that my mother never sat down one day and said, “How can I derange my son and turn him into a homosexual?”

But what my mother feared did happen. The abuse, the depravation, the disordered emotions in my childhood home did make me a homosexual. How I choose to behave is my responsibility, but I did not “choose” to be sexually disordered this way. I was just a child.

If you’re reading this and you’re a homosexual or the parent of one or a loved one, and you don’t believe this applies to you, then go in peace. But please let those of us for whom this is important — let us have this conversation. Too many emotionally triggered people do everything they can to shut it down.

They accuse homosexuals like me of being “abusive” and of “hurting” them. No such thing is occurring. All the sympathy "allies" claim to have for homosexuals when we are “born this way gays” evaporates the moment we change our minds. They insult us and call us insane, with more vitriol than actual anti-gay bullies who beat us up in high school.

Silence equals death

We are going to have this conversation. We’re not going to be silenced or manipulated into being good, quiet little gay boys to fit someone else’s fantasy of having a “fabulous” best friend or son.

I lived the “fabulous” life, and it nearly killed me through alcoholism and self-destructive promiscuity. The way I lived brought despair. And I am typical. I am not “just an unusual gay.” My life story looks like the life stories of the majority of gay men. Yeah, I know. They tell you that isn’t true.

They’re lying because they’re terrified that something they’ve relied on too heavily to define themselves as human men may have been a lie all along. I know, because I lied this way too.

Yes, I’m still attracted to men and not attracted to women. I don’t believe I have the ability to change those subjective feelings, but I may find otherwise in time. For seven years I’ve been single and celibate, and I plan to remain so.

Others must choose their own path in their own time. Nothing I’ve written here can honestly be construed as an attack, or an assault, on other homosexuals or those who love them. The truth is not an act of hate or abuse.

What’s real and true matters, and it’s well past time to tell the truth about the lie we call “born this way.”

Overreliance on AI programs may undermine confidence at work + Chatbots & autism

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:14:17 +0000

AI models lean on autism stereotypes when giving social advice, new study finds
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1124546

INTRO: When people ask ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence models for advice, they often share deeply personal details in hopes of getting better answers: their age, their gender, their mental health history, even medical diagnoses like autism.

But new Virginia Tech research suggests those disclosures may change artificial intelligence (AI) models’ advice in ways that track closely with common stereotypes about people with autism. Up to 70 percent of the time, AI discourages those with autism to avoid socializing. Some users disapproved of that in strong terms... (MORE - details, no ads)

Overreliance on AI programs may undermine confidence at work
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/...confidence

PRESS RELEASE: Relying on AI to complete work duties may not be diminishing our cognitive abilities, but it can undermine confidence in our own independent reasoning and perceived ownership of ideas, according to research published by the American Psychological Association. 

The study included 1,923 online adult participants from the United States and Canada who were told to use commercially available AI programs to complete 10 simulated work tasks, such as developing plans with incomplete or evolving information, interpreting ambiguous data, and articulating reasoning for strategic decisions.

After the tasks, 58% of the participants agreed that AI “did most of the thinking” to complete the work, especially in activities related to planning or sequencing. Those participants also reported reduced confidence in their own independent reasoning, lesser perceived ownership of ideas, and making trade-offs between task speed and depth of thought. Men reported higher levels of AI reliance than women. 

However, participants who actively modified, challenged, or rejected AI suggestions reported greater confidence and a stronger sense of authorship, said study author Sarah Baldeo, MBA, a PhD candidate in AI and neuroscience at Middlesex University in England.

“The issue was not AI use itself but the degree of passive acceptance,” she said. “Participants who used AI but still maintained oversight and active judgment tended to feel more confident in their own reasoning.”

The research was published in the online journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior. The study findings are correlational so can’t prove causation. AI programs should be developed to prompt users to not rely too heavily on AI content, think of their own alternatives, and review assumptions, the journal article stated.

“Broadly, the best way to use AI is to train it rather than letting it train you,” Baldeo said. “Program it to function for specific uses, and stop anthropomorphizing AI.”

Baldeo offered some other tips:

Try solving a problem yourself before asking AI programs to do the work for you.
Refine AI prompts at least two or three times to receive a more high-quality response that also engages your own cognitive abilities.
Take at least two or three days off each week from using AI programs at work to avoid the risk of “intellectual leveling” where people start to linguistically sound like AI from overuse.

“The potential long-term risks aren’t that AI makes people less intelligent but that some users may become less engaged in the deeper cognitive work that produces novel thinking,” Baldeo said. “That is why the distinction between AI assistance and overreliance is so important.”

Article: “Generative AI Reliance and Executive Function Attenuation: Behavioral Evidence of Cognitive Offload in High-Use Adults,” Sarah Baldeo, MBA, Middlesex University; Technology, Mind, and Behavior; published online April 16, 2026.

Compulsory sex-marking as a threat to personal autonomy

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:41:21 +0000

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/journals/et/pr/260409

PRESS RELEASE: Do our norms around sex presentation uphold a constrictive gender regime? In a new article in Ethics, Ophelia Vedder writes that the abolition of hegemonic gender roles must involve the elimination of “compulsory sex-marking,” or the coercive social practice of signaling sexual identity through conventional means like clothes, hairstyles, and personal pronouns.

Ultimately, Vedder writes, sex-marking not only perpetuates heterosexist oppression, but also represents a threat to individual autonomy.

In “Getting Free from Gender: The Case Against Compulsory Sex-Marking,” Vedder writes that sex-marking organizes compulsory heterosexuality by classifying people into two distinctive groups. This system has been defended on the grounds that it eases social coordination by facilitating procreation, demarcating work into “male” and “female” professions, and providing templates for social interactions. However, under this system, one group—women—is typically singled out for subjugation.

Moreover, sex-marking poses an additional harm: “it gives rise to an ascribed identity, funneling individuals into social roles on the basis of unchosen characteristics—namely, the sex to which they were assigned at birth.”

This intrusion upon autonomy is most clearly articulated through the transgender experience, as the perceived deviation from gender norms by trans people often results in severe social repercussions. And it is through the lens of trans liberation, Vedder writes, that a world without compulsory sex-marking must be visualized.

Since “some ways of realizing trans embodiment embrace sex-marking,” is a gender free future one that cannot accommodate trans identity? On the contrary, Vedder argues that dismantling our hegemonic gender regime will involve ensuring that sex-signaling practices are flexible, pluralized, and freely chosen.

The retreat from compulsory sex-marking will lead to more autonomy for trans individuals, and “will open up a greater space of personal freedom for us all.”

Study shows people use same neurons to see and imagine objects

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 22:21:31 +0000

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1122252

INTRO: Why can images of things we have seen seem so real when we later recall them from memory? A new study led by Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University investigators sheds light on the answer.

The study shows that the same brain neurons are activated when we imagine something and when we perceive something. The research, led by Cedars-Sinai, is the first to provide a detailed understanding of the shared mechanism that underlies visual perception and creation of mental images in the human brain. It was published in the journal Science.

“We generate a mental image of an object that we have seen before by reactivating the brain cells we used to see it in the first place,” said Ueli Rutishauser, PhD, director of the Center for Neural Science and Medicine and professor of Neurosurgery, Neurology and Biomedical Sciences at Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University, and the study’s joint senior author. “Our study revealed the code that we use to re-create the images.”

The findings provide a biological basis for visual imagination, a process that is also critical for creative arts.

“Further insight into this neural process has the potential to open pathways toward developing new therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other mental conditions that involve uncontrolled vivid imagery,” said Adam Mamelak, MD, director of the Functional Neurosurgery Program and professor of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai, and co-author of the study... (MORE - details)

Female Boob Size Aggression Revealed?

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:41:24 +0000

Breast size and female jealousy. Real or imagined? A study here where sampling consisted of primarily Hispanic college age females.

https://www.psypost.org/women-show-incre...udy-finds/

Since I’m a guy who will look it’s tough not to feel attracted by large bosoms. Figure it’s evolution’s fault. Study made me question whether as a man if I socialize differently with a well endowed woman vs a gal not so gifted? Don’t notice but I probably do act differently and it must be important enough that other women take offence and generally feel envious enough to turn aggressive against a rival I suppose. Never had a gal berate me for looking at another woman with large breasts, in fact when my head turns while walking with my wife, she has told me she’d worry if I didn’t look.

Anyways, how far does this aggression, if real, extend between females? To be fair I don’t look at other guys attributes and who knows maybe I would if they weren’t covered up for the most part. Large breasts OTOH don’t seem to need exposure, a guy can imagine.

Had a gf once who was quite strikingly good looking but lacked the large mammaries. After couple years I was ready to pop the question but I didn’t, broke up, later dated a similar gal but with much larger breasts and ended up marrying her. Not once did I think I was proposing marriage because her boobs were larger than previous gf. I’m sure there is some primal mechanism that drew me to a gal with larger breasts, just natural for a guy to do so I assume.

Kafka and "Imposter Syndrome"

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 22:48:26 +0000

We are all just going thru the motions of a System that was handed down to us without choice. Nobody really knows what they are doing or why when it comes down to it. We recite our lines on cue and play our roles at our jobs, and then go home and wonder why we feel so empty and unreal. When we wonder why we all play along with this charade, the answer always seems to be "Because that's the way it's always been. So shut up and just be happy you have a warm house and food to eat." Like drones in a beehive, we have evolved to be parts of the System that keeps it running smoothly and orderly. Those who dare to reject this fate are ostracized and labeled mentally ill or lazy or anarchist or dissident or even criminal. The System you see has evolved to automatically defend itself from any attempts to sabotage it or even just question its grand disensouling narrative.

“Wasn’t it true, then, that everything in his life from that point on had been a succession of things he hadn’t really wanted to do? Taking a hopelessly dull job to prove he could be as responsible as any other family man, moving to an overpriced, genteel apartment to prove his mature belief in the fundamentals of orderliness and good health, having another child to prove that the first one hadn’t been a mistake, buying a house in the country because that was the next logical step and he had to prove himself capable of taking it. Proving, proving, proving.."---Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1335946835042742

How the human brain builds our sense of time

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 18:05:56 +0000

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1122692

PRESS RELEASE: How does Jannik Sinner manage to hit the ball at exactly the right moment, with remarkable precision? And how do we, in everyday life, perceive the duration of events around us? The answer lies in how the brain constructs the perception of time, as shown by research published in PLOS Biology by Valeria Centanino, Gianfranco Fortunato, and Domenica Bueti. Starting from what we see—such as an approaching ball—temporal information is processed by the brain through progressively more complex stages: from the occipital visual cortex, to parietal and premotor areas, and finally to frontal regions.

Using high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and measuring time perception in healthy volunteers, the researchers shed light on what happens in the brain when we estimate the duration of a visual stimulus. “Our results show that time perception is not a unitary process, but the outcome of multiple processing stages distributed across the cerebral cortex,” the authors explain. “Each stage contributes differently, from encoding physical duration to constructing the subjective experience of time.”

In an initial stage, occipital visual areas encode duration through gradual (monotonic) neural responses: the longer the stimulus, the stronger the neural response. This information is then transformed in parietal and premotor regions into selective (unimodal) representations, where distinct neural populations respond preferentially to specific durations, enabling the “readout” of time. Finally, higher-order regions, including the frontal cortex and anterior insula, are involved in the subjective categorization of duration, shaping how time is perceived.

The PLOS Biology study goes beyond identifying where time is processed in the brain, proposing instead a mechanistic model of how temporal information is processed.This new framework not only advances our understanding of time perception but also opens new avenues for investigating how the brain constructs subjective time—and why this experience can sometimes be distorted.

Imagination is more than sensory replay

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:52:59 +0000

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1121120

INTRO: Imagination is one of the most powerful things our brains can do. We can relive past events while taking a walk, rehearse future conversations through inner speech or sense the heat of a fire without touching it — allowing us to learn, plan and avoid danger without direct experience.

Why imagination is often accompanied by mental imagery remains a longstanding question. When one thinks of an apple, for example, many “see” an image of an apple in their mind. When one thinks of their favorite song, many “hear” that song playing in their mind, including vocals and specific lyrics. Mental imagery has often been thought to rely mainly on reactivating the brain’s sensory regions in the absence of input — a process known as sensory reinstatement.

But a new Northwestern University study suggests that higher‑level brain systems that interpret and organize perception may also play a central role in imagination.

The scientists asked study participants to imagine different scenarios, such as a child’s birthday party or a castle on a hill, while undergoing individual‑level precision fMRI scanning. The findings suggest that imagination is not simply a copy of sensation. Instead, it appears to emerge at later stages of processing, when the brain represents information holistically as scenes, words, events or ideas rather than raw sensory input.

“When you ask someone to imagine the sound of a kid’s birthday party, they don’t just hear it — they also automatically picture the scene,” said senior author Rodrigo Braga, assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “It makes sense that imagination operates in this holistic, higher‑level space, given that we use it to plan, understand and speculate.”

The study was published March 31 in Neuron. The findings suggest mental imagery is closely tied to higher-level cognitive functions, as opposed to being a strictly sensory phenomenon... (MORE - details, no ads)

Mistaking intelligence & "doing" for consciousness (the inner life category error)

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:39:09 +0000

The inner life we're trading away
https://bigthink.com/philosophy/the-inne...ding-away/

KEY POINTS: Neuroscientist Christof Koch argues that our culture’s obsession with “doing” over “being” has left us unable to distinguish between intelligence and consciousness — a confusion that helps explain why so many people mistake sophisticated AI for something with an inner life. Machines can perform the same tasks as intelligent humans without experiencing anything at all. Koch suggests that a future dominated by brilliant yet unconscious machines could steadily drain human existence of meaning. The antidote, Koch argues, is to cultivate reflective self-consciousness: the practice of pausing, looking inward, and examining your own thoughts and feelings. It’s a capacity no machine can develop for you.

EXCERPTS: For Koch, the surge of people attributing consciousness to their chatbots is no amusing matter. The trend erodes more complex and demanding human relationships and, at a deeper level, “massively devalues the human experience.” He has watched the mirage form from its earliest days, when Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed in 2022 that the company’s large language model was sentient and deserved recognition as a person. Today, Koch notes, there is “every day a conference somewhere in machine consciousness and sentience.”

[...] For Koch, the confusion begins in a deeper bias built into modern culture: We reward doing far more readily than we value being, or experience. “Particularly nowadays, and over the last 200 years,” he says, “in these capitalist societies we value work that relates to intelligence, whether physical or intellectual — first blue-collar work and now white-collar work. What matters is not what you think, dream, or imagine; it’s what you do. That’s how we pay you. That’s how we value your contribution to society for the most part.”

[...] A culture organized around doing struggles to tell the difference between intelligence and consciousness — between being “dumb” or “smart” and being “less” or “more” conscious. This is why Koch keeps returning to that distinction. “Many people assume,” he says, “that artificial general intelligence would of course imply consciousness: ‘Isn’t consciousness intelligence?’ I think that’s wrong. Intelligence and consciousness are two distinct aspects of life.” Even brain mapping reflects this divide: Activity linked to conscious experience gathers toward the back of the cortex, while the systems that support intelligent behavior sit farther toward the front. Intelligence and experience can come apart.

[...] Psychedelic states offer another example. “When you’re tripping — if you’ve ever done ayahuasca or mescaline or mushrooms — you’re experiencing visions of heaven or hell, yet you’re not doing much. Likewise, when you’re dreaming in REM sleep, you may be flying, fighting, making love. Again, there’s no behavior there. Yet you’re conscious.”

[...] For Koch, conscious experience — what he calls “the feeling of life itself” — comes first. “What truly exists is consciousness. That’s the only thing I am directly acquainted with. I don’t know about atoms, galaxies, and neurons; all of that is inferred. The only thing I know is seeing, hearing, feeling.” Even as a scientist, it begins there. Every act of science unfolds within awareness: studying the trace on an oscilloscope, following tracks in a cloud chamber, listening to colleagues present their findings, or picturing Einstein running his famous thought experiments on special and general relativity.

[...] Even if machines can never be what we are, they will steadily grow more like us in performance. “Ultimately, it’s about doing things in the marketplace or on the battlefield,” Koch says. “And there, they’re going to become better and eventually displace us.” Evolution, he observes, crowned humans the dominant species for our intelligence and aggression. Now we are seeking to build creatures that will surpass us on both. “They will become smarter than us and, of course, more aggressive than us. Is that really going to end well?” (MORE - missing details)

Is time a figment of our imaginations?

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:33:45 +0000

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026...aginations

EXCERPT: . . . Time is elusive in other ways, too. We have no sensory organs for detecting it, nor any dedicated brain areas for tracking it. Our experience of time can vary hugely: minutes drag if we’re bored or uncomfortable; hours race if we’re excited or having fun; we can easily be fooled about how much time has elapsed. And in certain circumstances, our sense of time can even go in circles, break apart or stop altogether.

Take Lara, who suffers from a condition called akinetopsia, in which events no longer progress smoothly but in sudden jumps. When she pours tea, the liquid appears as a frozen column in the air, before suddenly overflowing the cup. One man with psychosis described repeatedly reliving the same half hour. In one classic study of the psychedelic drug mescaline, an intoxicated volunteer ate a spoonful of soup before glancing away from his plate and back down: “It had been in front of me for hundreds of years.”

Rather than being mere mistakes or distortions, these effects reflect something deeper: the role we all play in creating our own time. Because even cosmologists, measuring the universe, don’t find any moving river of time: most believe there’s no physical flow of events beyond our perception, no moment of “happening” or “becoming” in which the future slips into the past. Quantum physicists come up empty-handed, too. The famous double slit experiment shows that a physicist’s choice of how to measure a photon influences what they observe: whether it travels through one slit, like a particle; or through both, like a wave. But there’s a lesser known variant of this experiment, in which the physicist doesn’t decide what measurement they’ll make until the last possible moment.

In this case, their choice, at the point of measurement, apparently influences not just the current status of the particle they find, but the journey it has already completed: even “past” events are unfolding as we look. As the novelist William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”

Time, then, is less a universal truth than a feature of how we interact with the world. This insight is reflected in the way some indigenous communities experience time... (MORE - details)
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The brain itself is the sensory organ for detecting time or the appearance of it. Via antecedent information being stored in memory, it compares that with new information and discerns a difference between the two (interpreting that as change). Each of those cognitive distinctions is an island unto itself, only presenting itself as real. Granted, though, the narrative part of consciousness isn't usually paying attention to each automatic discernment of difference and so the assessment of "temporal passage" can subjectively seem to vary.

One thing about akinetopsia is that it illustrates how -- even if there was an objective flow, where time is speciously treated as if a substance flowing through a structure -- we would not be experiencing that mind-independent rate but instead the brain's retarded representations. There are subatomic events measured in zeptoseconds and "smaller" time units that the brain's milliseconds in duration snapshots of consciousness would extend over and not capture (even if they could peer down unaided to that substrate).

New study shows democracy has deep global roots—not just Greece and Rome

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 20:52:03 +0000

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1119863

INTRO: A new study on ancient societies from around the world is rewriting what we thought we knew about democracy. A team of researchers analyzed archaeological and historical evidence from 31 ancient societies across Europe, Asia, and the Americas and found that shared, inclusive governance was far more common than was once believed.

“People often assume that democratic practices started in Greece and Rome,” said Gary Feinman, the study’s lead author and the MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican and Central American Anthropology at the Field Museum’s Negaunee Integrative Research Center. “But our research shows that many societies around the world developed ways to limit the power of rulers and give ordinary people a voice.”

In an autocracy, just one person or a small group holds all the power; examples of autocracy can include absolute monarchies and dictatorships. In a democracy, decision-making power is shared among the people. Elections often go hand-in-hand with democracy, but not always—many autocrats have been freely elected.

“Elections aren’t exactly the greatest metric for what counts as a democracy, so with this study, we tried to draw on historical examples of human political organization,” says Feinman. “We defined two key dimensions of governance. One of them is the degree to which power is concentrated in just one individual or just one institution. The other is the degree of inclusiveness—how much the bulk of the citizens have access to power and can participate in some aspects of governance.”

Feinman and his colleagues examined 40 cases from 31 different political units across Europe, North America, and Asia, spanning thousands of years. These societies all had different methods of record-keeping, and not all of them left behind written records. So, the team had to find different ways to infer what the governments in these historical contexts were like.

“I think the use of space is very telling,” says Feinman. “When you find urban areas with broad, open spaces, or when you see public buildings that have wide spaces where people can get together and exchange information, those societies tend to be more democratic.”

On the other hand, some architectural and city-planning remnants indicate a society where fewer people concentrated power. “If you see pyramids with a tiny space at the top, or urban plans where all the roads run toward the ruler’s residence, or societies where there’s very little space where people could get together for exchanging information, those are all proxies for more autocratic cases,” says Feinman.

The team examined the 40 cases that had been documented by generations of archaeologists and historians, and systematically analyzed different aspects of the places' architecture, art, and urban planning... (MORE - details, no ads)