We mistake the brain for the seat of intelligence and the individual for its owner. Both depend upon a much larger system.
Tag: brain
A stroke is the abrupt loss of blood flow to brain tissue, either because a vessel is blocked or because it ruptures. The former is ischaemic, the latter haemorrhagic, and both are catastrophic in different ways. One starves neurons, the other floods the surrounding tissue under pressure. Either path leaves a sudden absence where function […]
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Brain Damage
It’s like being stranded behind a pane of glass—your mind can still build cathedrals, but you’ve lost the key to the front door. The everyday stuff—speech, reading, rhythms of social interaction—fractures. Meanwhile, the deep structures, the insights, the recursive loops of thought—they’re still there, maybe sharper. But try explaining that to someone who’s already decided […]
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Post-Stroke Recovery
Statistically, stroke is among the most disabling medical events. About one-third of survivors regain independence, another third live with permanent disability, and roughly one in four will experience another stroke within five years. The danger is sharpest in the first year, but risk never disappears. Rehabilitation outcomes depend on severity, treatment speed, therapy, and other […]
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Brain Damage 2.0
What acquired brain damage has taught me about human intelligence is that it behaves less like a monolith and more like a composite frequency structure—stacked capacities, each tuned to a distinct operational band. When one of these layers is lost, the system doesn’t fail outright. Instead, the remaining functions persist, but with distortions—subtle misalignments, delays, […]
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Language Leads
Language leads. That’s the hinge point—what swings open the door to everything else. It’s not merely a mirror of thought, or a tool we use. It thinks us, moves us, builds us. Once language emerged, it didn’t just describe life; it became its own strata of evolution. A self-propagating layer, viral in structure, cognitive in […]
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Oxygen Stories
Based on the literature, there’s a deep link between speech, breathing, and cognitive processes. Speech breathing is distinct from resting breath: it involves shorter inhalations and longer, controlled exhalations to maintain continuous vocalization and support extended, cohesive thought (McFarland, 2001; Conrad & Schönle, 1979). The control of breath during speech can influence oxygen flow to […]
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Consciousness, Language, Paradox
Context: Brain experiment suggests that consciousness relies on quantum entanglement Of microtubules and metaphors… …we can not describe anything beyond our systems of description. This tells us something significant about the nature of these conscious systems and of what kinds of explanations might be possible. Entanglement suggests, to my mind, that the ways in which […]
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Will AI Destroy Social Media ?
Is artificial intelligence going to destroy social media? Would it even matter if it might not also destroy us in the process? These are fractal tesseracts of linguistic narcissism as wheels within wheels of technologically mediated autopoiesis. Will we be able to see anything outside the half-mirrored sphere of reflective, reflexively dopamine-boosting narrative self-engagement? There […]
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Technological Immortality?
Nope. If nothing else and far beyond the actual sophisticated engineering (*not* rhetorical) problem this represents, to render life endless is simultaneously to render it meaningless. It may not always be obvious but value is not anywhere near so much a function of abundance as it is of scarcity. It is the transience of our […]
The notion (articulated in the video) that the homeostatic process by which quasicriticality is maintained in the brain may have an essentially cybernetic explanation. In Jeff Hawkins’ “A Thousand Brains” he references neurophysiologist Vernon Mountcastle’s belief in the existence of an underlying (as unifying) organisational principle in the brain. I wouldn’t be at all surprised […]
Context: Neuroscientists listened in on people’s brains for a week. They found order and chaos. Brain as decentralised communications network that exists with optimal efficiency on a globally-distributed fractal boundary between order and disorder? “Specific brain networks seemed to communicate with each other in what looked like a “dance,” with one region appearing to “listen” […]
