everyone is a groupuscule

hey lux

“Common scaling laws for city highway systems and the mammalian neocortex”:

City highway networks may actually provide a model
for better understanding fundamental properties of
neocortical scaling, having the benefit of
comparably infinite amounts of easily-accessible,
free data.

ABSTRACT—In the current studies, we tested the prediction that learning of novel patterns of association would be enhanced in response to unrelated meaning threats. This prediction derives from the meaning-maintenance model, which hypothesizes that meaning-maintenance efforts may recruit patterns of association unrelated to the original meaning threat. Compared with participants in control conditions, participants exposed to either of two unrelated meaning threats (i.e., reading an absurd short story by Franz Kafka or arguing against one’s own self-unity) demonstrated both a heightened motivation to perceive the presence of patterns within letter strings and enhanced learning of a novel pattern actually embedded within letter strings (artificial-grammar learning task). These results suggest that the cognitive mechanisms responsible for implicitly learning patterns are enhanced by the presence of a meaning threat.

[…]

In the meaning-threat condition, participants read an absurd short story called “The Country Dentist.” The story is a modified¹ version of Kafka’s 1919 short story “The Country Doctor.”

¹All references to death and dying were removed to distinguish affirmation following from the absurd nature of the story and affirmation following from mortality-salience meaning threats (see Greenberg et al., 1992).

In the story, a rural dentist sets out during a snowstorm to help a young boy with a toothache. As the story progresses, the narrative gradually breaks down and ends abruptly after a series of non sequiturs. We also included a series of bizarre illustrations that were unrelated to the story. In the no-meaning-threat condition, participants read a different story that we wrote. This story, also titled “The Country Dentist,” is parallel to the Kafka tale, but contains no non sequiturs and follows a conventional narrative. It contains illustrations that relate to the story. (The stories are available on-line at http://www.psych.ubc.ca/~heine/ImplicitLearningStories.doc.)

As expected, all 16 control volunteers perceived the hollow mask as a normal face – mis-categorising the illusion faces 99 percent of the time. By contrast, all 13 patients with schizophrenia could routinely distinguish between hollow and normal faces, with an average of only six percent mis-categorisation errors for illusion faces. #

“A Plastic Temporal Brain Code for Conscious State Generation”:

Whenever the temporal firing patterns produced by these dedicated resonance circuits reach the statistical temporal coincidence threshold, they generate a conscious brain state. Such a temporal code would unlock the door to consciousness like some bar code would unlock the door of an electronically protected safe.