Brain

“I mean, to me, I don't mean that metaphorically, like the brain very literally, very clearly, plainly is a computer in, in my understanding of the world. I also view the universe generally as a computer. Like we can solve pro like you can solve computational p…”

“The brain has built-in mechanisms to shut us down so that we don't do self-harm, right? And so those are the same mechanisms that, at a drive level for human beings, you know, govern our conduct. So, so underperformance is built into the human condition. So th…”

“Like, your brain has to simulate whatever trait it is that you're focused on. Whether it is at other people or at yourself, your brain has to simulate that trait in order to understand it fully.”

“There were studies that were done in monkeys using tools. And you can actually find where in the brain, ah, like which neurons activate for the monkey to figure out where its hand is. It turns out that if it's using a tool, they activate based on location of t…”

“Curiosity isn't triggered by knowing nothing. It's triggered by knowing almost enough. Like a partial answer. A question, but not the resolution. A setup. No payoff. The brain experiences this as a physical discomfort.”

“You don't see with your eyes, you see with your brain based on priors, based on what's happened in the past. Your brain has been conditioned that that's the way reality works. So it's predicting a future that doesn't really exist.”

“Now I understand completely clearly that consciousness is actually a product not on the of the brain, but also of our all senses, and sensors, and basically brain itself doesn't produce consciousness. Consciousness is a whole, you know, in and out resonance mo…”

“There actually are some cases of patients that were born blind who but it wasn't it wasn't a loss of the optic nerve, it wasn't something in the brain, but they had congenital cataracts, so their vision was blurry from birth, and they were never able to really…”

“Well, I mean, the brain is a computer, and it's gonna, saying that it's gonna get me yelled at by some corner of the field, but I think, like, I think that you can take that, like, almost literally. It's a very different architecture than, like, a, like a von …”

“When you train AI models, like image models or, and even language models the representations that you get inside them look a lot like the representations you see in the brain.”

“I don't think everything consciousness does or is, is computable. I think the brain is more analog than digital in many ways.”

“In computers, you can run the same software on any number of different hardwares. But in brains, hardware and software are absolutely indistinguishable. Every experience, every memory is a physical set of connections in the brain.”

“The big unknown to get to whole body reversible is the brain. It's unclear, like the brain can withstand a lot of change and does withstand a lot of different types of damage or change with age, for example. But it's unclear whether, like, what kind of injury …”

“The brain is a retrospective narrative alignment mechanism, not it's actually terrible record keeping, but it mostly attempts to take the most salient version of our self-identity and reconcile the history with it. And it sort of rewards you for actions that a…”

“As you start with location and action, the brain gets flooded with chemicals that essentially say, shut the hell up. This might keep us alive.”

“When you look inside these AI models, you see These mathematical objects that look a lot like what you see in the brain in neuroscience. Like, the representations are converging, and this is an empirical finding.”

“The part of the brain that experiences social rejection is the same part of the brain where you experience physical pain, and so you will viscerally move away from any experience where you're the weird one.”

“Your brain can't do two things at once. It can't say, get out, and breathe. They cannot occupy the same space.”

“As you age, part of your brain that keeps you well-balanced atrophies, and you can't maintain the balance very well, so kids are very good at this. As you age, you get worse, ok?”

“And because it happens in real time, you can learn how to activate your centers in the brain and the higher and higher and higher levels. So you can actually exercise them the same way you go to the gym and you do reps and you see your bicep grows. The same he…”

“Most of the brain is, is actually not relevant for communicating with the outside world or with artificial intelligence. Most of the brain is taking care of the body and not in ways that are Particularly relevant to interfacing with the outside world.”

“The brain is, is a unique organ in that it's we tend to think of the brain as like software, right? With it, there's all these connections and programs being run. And the weird part thing that happens over development much like a green tree that develops bark …”

“Psilocybin at both the macro and micro dosing level moves the brain in a beneficial direction. Whether you're cognizant of it or not, but if you're cognizant of it will move the brain in a beneficial direction even more rapidly.”

“Psilocybin mushrooms are neuro-generative, so they make new neuroplasticity wiring, and they're neuro-regenerative. And so they'll regenerate damaged areas of the brain. They're also neuro deconstructive. So they will unwire unhappiness and they will then wire…”

“If you never get any adversity or anything that's negative, You're just going to take this for granted, and you'll just be exactly as happy as before, except now it will require a lot more to just get you to that baseline. So in a way we need to constantly get…”

“So there's research on the brain that shows when our brain gets an incomplete picture of something, we fill in the gaps in a way that makes it more positive.”

“When we get rid of visceral fat, when we get rid of belly fat, when we get rid of that stuff, what happens as a result is the brain starts to work better. You start to amplify and start to grow areas in your brain that are responsible for decision making and e…”

“80% of the information from your vagus nerve, which innervates all of the organs for the most part, is actually coming from the organs to the brain.”

“There's also a chemical Process, if you will, that, that happens when you do actually touch. All of a sudden, your brain is like, oh, that's being worked. Like, it's actually a chemical process that's occurring as well, not just the, a woo-woo that I'm touchin…”

“You can use summary prompts. This is incredibly powerful. It just means you say the beginning of a sentence, or the beginning of, yeah, the beginning of a sentence, and your brain's gonna fill in the gap. It's gonna, you're prompting your brain, and your brain…”

“So we now know these drugs are primarily working, not on your gut, but on your brain.”

“The way it works in the brain is, is it narrows your desires and wants to this one thing. That's what happens over time.”

“The way of how to get self-organizing computation to run on the brain that is producing representations of an agent that lives in the world is a simplification of the interests of that organism, so it can, the organism can be controlled. It's a difficult techn…”

“I don't think that the consciousness in the LLM or the consciousness simulation in the LLM is has the same properties that it has in our brain. It does not have the same functional role, and it's also not implemented in the right way.”

“I know with my thoughts, in any given situation, I will disregard the first Five or six thoughts I have on anything because I know my brain's like just trying to situate itself.”

“80% of our neurons go from our body to our brain versus 20% is our brain telling our body what to feel.”

“And there's four times more afferent neurons going from the body to the brain as from the brain to the body.”

“The same proteins, GPCRs that are in our brains are in our gut, and the mind-gut interface is, is, is very complicated and very interesting, and we're just starting to sort of poke away at it”

“I, at this point, I think we understand neural networks a lot better than we understand the brain. So whenever someone talks to me about the brain, I always think, well, what does a neural network do? And then probably actually the brain does that.”

“We've recently discovered in the last five, six years that sleep isn't necessarily a whole brain at the same time phenomenon. That in fact, some of our brain can be asleep while other parts of our brain can be awake.”

“It's only been in the past 10 years or so We realized that there are actual, the slow waves that we didn't know what their function was when we fall asleep. Are actually sweeping through and cleaning our brains from the debris that builds up across wakefulness…”

“If you miss a night's sleep, or one night you just can't get to bed at the regular time, and the next more, the next night you will probably be sleepier earlier, and if you can go to sleep a little bit earlier, you will Catch up on that deep slow way of sleep …”

“The completion of the metabolism of alcohol sends an arousing and alerting Message to your brain. So a lot of people, if they, they're drunk and they fall asleep, they will wake up at, you know, three, four in the morning and find it difficult to go back to sl…”

“So to, in order to understand that, it's essential to appreciate that pleasure and pain are co-located in the brain. So the same parts of the brain that process pleasure also process pain, and they work like opposite sides of a balance.”

“Most people think that their self-awareness Is basically the sensor system that captures their brain. Like because I'm conscious and because I can feel when I have a headache, it basically is a robust enough sensor system to do it. And that's not correct. So m…”

“One way to enhance it is to have the feet slightly elevated, 10 to 15 degrees. I put a pillow under my ankles when I sleep at night. Usually in the middle of the night, I realize I kicked it away or something like that, but feet elevated naps of about 10 to 15…”

“You have more connections being made in the brain. You have more neurons being generated, which is neurogenesis. The connections in our brain are mediated by the synapses. So you have synaptogenesis.”

“I would say it's very dangerous to stay in bed awake for long periods of time. And it's especially dangerous to do that and force yourself to try and sleep and become frustrated with not being able to sleep. And the reason is the following. We are very Pavlovi…”

“Is it necessary to have explicitly hardwired mechanisms in our brain that allows us to do things like symbolic manipulation or reasoning? And I find that hard to believe that, that they need to be hardwired.”

“If by symbol, we mean the ability to form sort of discrete categories represent sort of discrete categories in our, you know, mental representation system. Then I think pretty much every brain has some sort of symbolic representation.”

“Our brains actually use digital communication internally. A neuron, you know neurons send spike to communicate with each other. And the reason is it's easier to regenerate a binary signal than it is to regenerate an analog signal, and it's more efficient energ…”

“The jerkiness of our Zoom calls and the, you know, which just kind of doesn't help us, our brains be able to synchronize with each other, which They need to do in order to feel empathetic and connected.”

“I think this is this crazy view we have of the brain is that like, we know that we belch and fart, and we don't attribute deep meaning to belches or farts. But the same belches and farts produced by the firing of our neurons are like, oh, I thought about that.…”

“Cause I mean, I can tell you the one big breakthrough that we now know is that concussions make you incredibly depressed cause your brain is trying to stop you from getting injured again. And so it kind of shuts down all the pathways that Tell your brain it's …”

“Your brain is automating whatever it can to save energy and to conserve effort wherever possible, and so you're going to be building habits whether you want to or not”

“When it comes to emotion, as with almost everything in, in biology variation is the norm. There isn't one anger. You have a whole population of angers that you can feel, and your brain doesn't conjure them randomly. It conjures them according to your brain's b…”

“The brain, your brain is automatically making inferences about the internal thoughts and feelings of people based on their actions, but we are blinded To the fact that they're inferences, that they're guesses. We think we're reading people when, in fact, reall…”

“Why did a brain evolve? It didn't evolve for you to think or feel or see. It evolved to regulate your body.”

“It doesn't matter whether you're thinking or feeling or seeing or hearing or whatever. It's all the same mechanisms. Your brain is taking in sense data from the body and from the world, and it's using past experiences to make sense of what that means.”

“You don't have an emotional brain. You don't have a rational brain. There's no part of your brain that's devoted to emotion that isn't used when also in moments when you are being rational.”