Newsletter

Hello,

Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:

Notes:

Last week’s distraction from writing about my PhD, looking at shared madness, led me to finally update my long-running article on successful prophets. We think of cults as the product of dangerously charismatic leaders but on examination this narrative falls apart. Really, the most successful prophets are not a person, but the followers, who use the leader as an emblem.

New Articles:

How does the brain ‘think’? Pt. III

Excerpt: In part three of a series explaining my PhD, I talk about how I might just have tracked down something in the brain that does a bit of ‘thinking’, by looking very hard at the brain when it needs to make easy and hard ‘decisions’ about where some moving dots are going.

Updated Articles:

Successful Prophets

Excerpt: I’m starting to suspect that something is missing from our narratives surrounding the influence of cult leaders. We see destructive cults as the product of the tragic influence of one dangerously charismatic leader. But on closer inspection, this doesn’t really seem to be true. Cult leaders are often pretty weird. What gives?

New Marginalia:

Babies learn to talk in the womb. Highlights:

When babies are born, they cry in the accent of their mother tongue

Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare but well-documented phenomenon called vagitus uterinus

Language learning begins in the womb … Exposure to speech in the womb leads to lasting changes in the brain, increasing the newborns’ sensitivity to previously heard languages … newborns had not just memorised … [these elements of speech] … they were actively moving air through their vocal cords and controlling the movements of their mouth to mimic this … Babies are communicating as soon as they are born, and these abilities are developing in the nine months before birth.

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Giant rat penis redux - AI-generated diagram leads to journal article retraction. There is a hand in this leg. Still made it into the Journal Medicine. See also the giant rat penis in another AI-generated figure that made it to publication.

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The puzzle as propaganda:

At the height of African decolonization, radical writers turned to interactive features like competitions and quizzes to engage their audiences.

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On Turing’s 1952 ChatGPT

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The Secret Of Minecraft:

“A generative, networked system laced throughout with secrets.”

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I hope you found something interesting.

You can find links to all my previous missives here.

Warm regards,

Dorian | btrmt.