Newsletter
How neurons influence behaviour and other things
August 30, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
I updated my article on making meaning in the brain, and made some small edits to repressed memories this week, alongside the usual article.
How neurons influence behaviour
Excerpt: Whatever podcaster you like is almost certainly lying to you about how the brain works, and how that influences your behaviour. Knowing about the brain almost never tells you how people behave. But there are some exceptions. This is part one of a series on those: what can neurons tell us about human behaviour?
Main idea: Neurons link into ‘pathways’ that map perceptions to actions. But, neural pathways don’t just link one thing to one other thing—each pathway is involved at many things at once. So to change one, you have to also contend with all the rest.
The cases against free will. Good introduction to determinism.
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John Haidt very desperate to prove social media bad. His most recent book seems to have got people up in arms (I guess there’s only so much complaining you’re allowed to do) and so he’s back in to prove it with a four part post on a meta-analysis that someone else did. It’s a stretch, even from the first post, but it certainly seems plausible that reducing consumption for about two weeks might reduce mental health symptoms, but it’s already weird that doing this for longer seems to reduce the effect size (Table 1), and short term (one week) reductions seem to go both ways—improving or worsening. It could be ‘withdrawal’ causing these backfire effects like Haidt reckons, or it could just be like I keep saying, that social media use really isn’t more than a symptom of all the other ways life is worse and so there’s really variable responses to removing it.
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Rotten Meat & Fly Larvae—What You Aren’t Told About Traditional Diets
Humans have always enjoyed eating rotten and putrid meat. Some of the anecdotes seem outrageous, bordering on the absurd to contemporary ears.
They then list all the anecdotes, in horrific detail. My favourite quote:
the meat is so full of lethal byproducts that the local people (Khanty, Evenki etc) have to be conditioned from childhood to be able to stomach it and not die a horrible death from neurotoxin overload.
I’ve said it before. Atavism isn’t the answer.
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Mythbusting organic farming:
The sad truth is, factory farming is factory farming, whether its organic or conventional. Many large organic farms use pesticides liberally. They’re organic by certification, but you’d never know it if you saw their farming practices … They’re organic by the letter, not organic in spirit … Many natural pesticides have been found to be potential - or serious - health risks … nearly half of the pesticides that are currently approved for use by organic farmers in Europe failed to pass the European Union’s safety evaluation that is required by law
getting rid of pesticides doesn’t mean your food is free from harmful things … because organic foods tend to have higher levels of potential pathogens. One study, for example, found E. coli in produce from almost 10% of organic farms samples, but only 2% of conventional ones
science simply cannot find any evidence that organic foods are in any way healthier than non-organic ones - and scientists have been comparing the two for over 50 years.
the real reason organic farming isn’t more green than conventional is that while it might be better for local environments on the small scale, organic farms produce far less food per unit land than conventional ones.
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Retraction Watch is getting more fun. 3 MDMA papers retracted; junior researchers cited more if supervisor is well known; UK has launched a meta science unit. Among other fun things.
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The Promise of Vertical Farming. Monocropping is bad. Also it accounts for 15% of all habitable land. How close is vertical farming to a solution?
What I’m getting at is that we will soon be able to decide what to do with a large proportion of the 15% of habitable land that we’ve dedicated to agriculture until now.
Optimistic article, tempered by their follow up more recently, here. All very interesting.
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Tibetan Buddhism wasn’t so friendly:
squabbles between or within Buddhist sects are often fueled by the material corruption and personal deficiencies of the leadership … But what of Tibetan Buddhism? Is it not an exception to this sort of strife? … A reading of Tibet’s history suggests a somewhat different picture. “Religious conflict was commonplace in old Tibet,” writes one western Buddhist practitioner. “History belies the Shangri-La image of Tibetan lamas and their followers living together in mutual tolerance and nonviolent goodwill. Indeed, the situation was quite different. Old Tibet was much more like Europe during the religious wars of the Counterreformation.”
I don’t know that this is that surprising. Nice to know we’re all as likely to murder each other as anyone else.
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,