Newsletter
Neurotransmitters are a confidence game and other things
October 11, 2024
Hello,
Here’s everything since my last little missive to you:
I updated my article on neurotransmitters so substantially that I republished it this week. I still think they’re useless to talk about, but at least now you’ll come away better informed about them than anyone who tries to use them to make you buy something.
Neurotransmitters are a confidence game
Excerpt: You might have heard people often talk about the ‘reward neurotransmitter’ or the ‘love hormone’ or the ‘happiness molecule’ and so on. Fact is, although we know about some actions of these neurotransmitters, we actually have very little idea about how those actions play out in actual behaviour.
Main idea: Neurotransmitters are psychological snake oil. A confidence game pop-psychologists play with their audience. There is frankly no convincing story of human behaviour made more comprehensible by talking about dopamine.
Plutocrat Archipelagos. Interesting profile of ultra-high network individuals that descends into a sort of panicked call to arms that you’ll either agree with wholeheartedly or dismiss out-of-hand depending on your political orientation. But well written, and the first part is interesting either way
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Seeing into the past, literally:
Based on the most recent measurements, the galaxy was determined to lie at a redshift of 14.18, which means we see it as it appeared 300 million years after the Big Bang — when the universe was about 2% of its current age.
Nothing specific here, just some interesting musings on the early universe and our struggle to fit it into our model of the world.
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The Horizon Of Desire. Thoughtful piece on the benefits gained out of our recent fraught attempts at developing new narratives around sex and consent. Many complain that e.g. the #me too movement went ‘too far’, and maybe it did lead to certain injustices. But this piece articulates nicely how pendulum swinging has its place. And in fact, hints at my own cynicism that pendulum swinging is the only way anything ever really changes.
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On culture specific mental disorders.
Lets take two unrelated facts: 1) pain medication is often white, because patients associate white with pain relief and white coloured placebo pills are more effective at combating pain than other coloured medications, 2) thousands of Indian men report suffering from a condition called ‘Dhat syndrome’, where young men believe their vital energies are being sapped through loss of semen, causing guilt, insomnia, heart palpitations and anxiety amongst other symptoms. What connects these two things? The idea that the human body is open to culture in a way that directly changes physiology.
This is like the spiritual sequel of It’s not ‘just’ a placebo.
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AI and Intelligence Analysis. Generally interesting, though they point out the data issue. And also suggest it’ll help avoid cognitive bias, though obviously we’d just be replacing one set of biases with another (whatever the model was trained on).
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“A sense of beauty” in untrained deep neural networks:
The sense of facial beauty has long been observed in both infants and nonhuman primates, yet the neural mechanisms of this phenomenon are still not fully understood. The current study employed generative neural models to produce facial images of varying degrees of beauty and systematically investigated the neural response of untrained deep neural networks (DNNs) to these faces. Representational neural units for different levels of facial beauty are observed to spontaneously emerge even in the absence of training. Furthermore, these neural units can effectively distinguish between varying degrees of beauty. Additionally, the perception of facial beauty by DNNs relies on both configuration and feature information of faces. The processing of facial beauty by neural networks follows a progression from low-level features to integration. The tuning response of the final convolutional layer to facial beauty is constructed by the weighted sum of the monotonic responses in the early layers. These findings offer new insights into the neural origin of the sense of beauty, arising the innate computational abilities of DNNs.
Saving this for later, because I wonder how closely this ‘beauty’ tuning maps onto known properties of facial beauty in humans (i.e. inverse distance from prototypical faces—symmetry, averageness, etc).
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I hope you found something interesting.
You can find links to all my previous missives here.
Warm regards,