@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe
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axoaxonic

@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe

Studying mathematical/theoretical/computational neuroscience & data science in dᶻidᶻəlal̓ič (Seattle) -- more interested in studying nervous systems through abstraction than studying neurons to improve artificial systems

⚧ ND (ASD/mTBIs/cPTSD/ET/probably more letters) ⬛

Long time musician, now slowly inching my way thru academia as first in my close family to do so. Grew up unschooled, which gave me a heavy autodidactism habit

CW: Posts about disease, links to research involving animals

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BlackAzizAnansi, to random
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Drop one of your family secrets.

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@BlackAzizAnansi Not really a secret just sad and nobody talks about it. My aunt kidnapped my grandma who was in late stage dementia, to manipulate her into leaving her inheritance to my aunt. Nobody knew where they were hiding until someone in the family hired a PI. When they were tracked down, the PI was met at the edge of the property by someone brandishing a gun, and the investigation ended there. My mom didn't know her mom had passed away until years after it happened

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@BlackAzizAnansi My grandma was a single mother working as a nurse in LA, but got some money from marrying the guy who invented the little plastic clamp tool that helps people open jars. Guess it was enough to corrupt my aunt and cause a lot of grief in my mom's family

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

A lot of people are posting a video by Sabine Hossenfelder right now, and I'm not going to comment on the video or the points and discussion, but I wanted to post this video detailing her problematic views on trans issues, how she promoted (in a biased-centrist way) the harmful, TERF-associated, and unfounded view that gender affirming care for trans kids is a social contagion leading to "rapid onset of gender dysphoria," while making claims that transitioning before puberty is harmful https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Kau7bO3Fw Also there's a line where she offhand belittles people who say early gender affirming care saves lives

"Whether or not she meant to, she repeatedly used a misleading rhetorical device to elevate transphobic talking points to the same level as scientific evidence, and she did that in front of a very large audience"

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

If people into category theory for neuroscience and people into topology for neuroscience want to interact more, here's a cool open access book to bridge the gap: "Topology: A Categorical Approach" Tai-Danae Bradley, Tyler Bryson and John Terilla (2020) https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262539357/

NicoleCRust, to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

Simple RNN models that capture neural network criticality / edge of chaos?

I'd like to play around with simple (tutorial-like) recurrent neural network models that capture the phenomenon of criticality. Something like the smallest possible number of recurrently connected model neurons that can recapitulate phenomenon (like information processing peaks for intermediate coupling weights).

Any leads?

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@tyrell_turing @NicoleCRust @derstrudel @albertcardona I think the difference is the nonexistence of a chaotic attractor when RCs lose stability.

"In many reservoir computers, depending on the node type, there is no actual chaotic behavior. Instead, when the largest Lyapunov exponent for the reservoir becomes positive, the reservoir network becomes unstable; in simulations, the reservoir signals diverge to positive or negative infinity. It is more accurate to call the point where the Lyapunov exponent becomes positive the edge of stability, so I will use that term instead of edge of chaos."

But they don't seem to elaborate on the distinction

axoaxonic, to firefox
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

A extension that changes the new tab screen to a to-do list.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-todo/

It's the most effective to-do I've ever used because it's in my face every time I'm getting deep into surfin' the 'net

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

Is it possible to include a function in TeX that randomly shuffles the order of author names on a paper every time it's rendered as a PDF?

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

Cognition like inner speech and motor imagery can be seen as a , like Hesslow (2002, 2012) has shown, or as a hallucination/illusion as they reactivate sensorimotor networks but don't correspond one-to-one to direct stimuli from physical reality. That doesn't mean all of perception fits into illusion metaphors: the fidelity of sensory neurons is pretty faithful to the physical qualities they transduce, even if upsampled, mixed together, and modulated downstream.

If this distinction was public knowledge, maybe there would be less people thinking nihilistically that nothing is real and therefore meaningless. Instead ideas that the reality we experience is all a hallucination gets sensationalized in news stories and TED talks

axoaxonic, to scifi
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

Just found this list of neuroscience themes in literature https://dynamicsubspace.net/research/neuroscience-and-science-fiction-literature/

axoaxonic, to trans
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

I wonder if this glasses frame company intentionally made these translucent acetate frames look like the flag https://elklook.com/products/aloe-geometric-blue-pink-ace

axoaxonic, to Seattle
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

Yesterday I met the final boss version of cars pulling into the bike lane: construction downtown at Westlake redirected all car traffic to move around it by going into the bike lane. No warning signs, just cones and a stream of cars suddenly in front and behind me for two blocks

axoaxonic, to random
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axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

In this society that emphasizes competition and mastery to create value, so many people say you have to focus on one thing to be successful, but no one really says how to do that.. When I was younger I heard that advice, I decided to focus on neuroscience, but even within this field there's actually millions of potential things to focus on.

If anyone wants to share their method/s of deciding what to devote serious time to, feel free to reply

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

Some research suggesting that traveling waves exist in the spinal cord as well:

"Synergy temporal sequences and topography in the spinal cord: evidence for a traveling wave in frog locomotion", Saltiel, et al, 2016
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/105252/429_2015_Article_1133.pdf?sequence=1

"Propagation of Sinusoidal Electrical Waves along the Spinal Cord during a Fictive Motor Task", Cuellar et al, 2009
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/3/798 [cat study]

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

Went to the Shahdmehr lab youtube page too look if there were any vids, and was surprised to find a whole series of hour-long lectures from the Johns Hopkins Cerebellum Seminars

https://www.youtube.com/@shadmehrlab1352

Invidious version to avoid trackers and allow adblockers:
https://vid.puffyan.us/channel/UCSifaCZt1HmnZJ3440AOf8g

axoaxonic, to Neuroscience
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

Can't find the original post thanks to Mastodon's lack of search, but this is happening in ten days: http://tchumatchenko.de/Workshop/workshop_schedulePage.html

Dendritic computation,
synaptic plasticity & molecular mechanisms

NicoleCRust, (edited ) to random
@NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social avatar

Delightful mystery

People in Tampa can hear a low frequency sound across the Florida peninsula; even in their homes. The mystery: where is it coming from? One expert thinks it’s coming from under water: black drum fish mating season.

https://www.npr.org/2024/02/01/1228286349/south-tampa-mystery-where-is-the-sound-coming-from-neighbors-investigate

https://ocr.org/sounds/black-drum/

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@NicoleCRust there's a similar phenomenon in West Seattle https://www.knkx.org/other-news/2012-09-06/mysterious-hum-keeping-west-seattle-up-at-night

People think it's probably from a fish called the Midshipman fish

timnitGebru, to random
@timnitGebru@dair-community.social avatar

Has anyone does any investigations on the so-called human "super recognizers" used by police? The first time I heard about it was in a German article discussing how German police are using that to identify Eritrean protestors they want to target.

axoaxonic,
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@timnitGebru Long reply, sorry, but a couple weeks ago I was looking into them. This is one of the only videos I found that wasn't a pop news segment https://youtube.com/watch?v=E1UPdvUb_9w, a talk by Dr. Meike Ramon of the Applied Face Cognition Lab at University of Lausanne. The lab has produced a few papers on SRs https://afclab.org/publications

"Only 15 empirical studies currently exist" since the original study on four subjects in 2009 by Russell, et al https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/PBR.16.2.252

They are used by law enforcement agencies (notably, SR Kelly Hearsey said on the Crawlspace Podcast that she was hired for the Jamal Khashoggi case to investigate the use of a body double), but Dr. Ramon calls the employment of them by multiple police agencies "dubious", where hype about their skills is manufactured by "fee based associations" while scientific knowledge about the phenomenon is limited.

The cops promote their abilities to recognize people in general, but the academic basis is about face recognition, studying real people with superior face recognition ability, on the opposite end of the spectrum from those with face-blindness/prosopagnosia. Selection for employment is often based on mass online testing, which can be faked or done by bots etc.

Her lab's work has shown that most people with exceptional skill in one area like face recognition does /not/ actually correlate with exceptional skill in related tasks like connecting the same person's face at different angles or times in their life, although there are a few who excel at every task.

Unfortunately in the talk she doesn't go into the media claims that super recognizers can pick out people who are wearing facial and head coverings (like protestors) like with the person in this BBC clip https://youtube.com/watch?v=PuPfQ8UZTGQ It only uses an example of someone who's face is mostly visible though. While one study provided evidence that they're better at recognizing obscured faces than average recognizers, mostly when eyes are still visible, https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/19273/3/19273%20DAVIS_Masters_of_Disguise_2017.pdf (nothing about gait/body language), I don't think there's any research on whether or not they can out perform computer vision

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

Applying information theory to cellular ion concentration gradients, these authors derive a principle where cells optimally code responses to environmental perturbations -- incl input from other cells -- by minimizing the cross entropy (Kullback-Leibler divergence) between intracellular and extracellular ion concentrations.

"We demonstrate the ion dynamics in neuronal action potentials described by Hodgkin and Huxley (including the equations themselves) represent a special case of these general information principles."

"Cellular information dynamics through transmembrane flow of ions", Gatenby and Frieden 2017 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15182-2.pdf

jonny, to random
@jonny@neuromatch.social avatar

I feel like I like to teach and learn "backwards" sometimes. Like I benefit from a few examples, but then going right for the base principles of the thing immediately after, and then follow that by reading how some ppl who regularly engage with the thing talk about it. Even if a lot goes over my head, I feel like I get a flavor for the landscape better that way - know what I need to know, what is unknown to me vs. Unknown to everyone, etc.

I believe in meeting ppl where they are when teaching, but I feel like that often means sacrificing teaching some fundamentals in favor of faster examples, rather than recalibrating tactics or bridging from prior knowledge.

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@jonny The whole of something contains its core elements. Jumping into the advanced side early really makes the structural and basic stuff clear because you see how it connects to everything else, and why it's necessary. It always feels more meaningful and makes me understand something better, even though I'm paradoxically more confused in the process. Glad you're bringing this style to your teaching

I was inspired to study this way by reading Kató Lomb’s "Polyglot: How I Learn Languages" https://www.tesl-ej.org/books/lomb-2nd-Ed.pdf
She started learning languages after 30 and became a professional translator and interpreter in 16 of them

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@jonny It's a great book about language learning but also about learning in general I think. It's been a while since I read it though.

Also, the world of polyglots in general is really interesting to explore, like Alexander Arguelles who knows 50+ languages https://www.youtube.com/@ProfASAr

and LaoShu505000 who gamified language learning, "leveling up" by walking around with a GoPro talking to random people in their native languages https://www.youtube.com/@laoshu505000

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

So much of my PTSD from 10 years of being involved in protests and direct actions is from how the the cops and counterprotestors reacted, but the memories of the actions themselves are the opposite of trauma memories yet equally indelible.

Stay safe out there, take care of yourselves and others, don't let them break your spirit and shred your message with cowardly brute strength.

axoaxonic, to random
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

I tried uploading three different pictures of me to a modern automatic photo captioning app that uses AI, and it referred to me as a "woman," a "person," and a "man"

This paper from 6 years ago is still relevant:
"The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition", Os Keyes, 2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3274357

ttpphd, to random
@ttpphd@mastodon.social avatar

My sir/ma'am ratio is way off lately.

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@ttpphd Could visit the Philippines for balance https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mamsir

kjhealy, to random
@kjhealy@mastodon.social avatar

Kerry Howley out there on the front lines, exploring the current outer limits of Californized Celebrity-Academic Self-Help Podcast Psychopaths. It’s a relief that she’s such a good writer because honestly these people are just batshit weirdos who insist on talking about themselves like space aliens. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/andrew-huberman-podcast-stanford-joe-rogan.html

axoaxonic,
@axoaxonic@synapse.cafe avatar

@kjhealy It really surprised me when I found out Huberman's postdoctoral advisor was Ben Barres

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