12 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2025
    1. it has a different representation of what to do if it gets injured in the future. It's a latent memory. It doesn't do anything until it gets injured. It just sits there and you would have no idea that it's there by looking at the at the anatomy. But if it's get if it gets injured, this is what its idea of a correct worm.

      for - adjacency - stored latent memory of future morphology - can be altered - Michael Levin - potential progress trap

  2. Feb 2025
  3. Jan 2024
    1. Phoebe, the World’s Cutest Dog by Michelle Johnson, all rights reserved. Used with permission. Cropped from Original.

      Or should it be: Phoebe, the World's Cutest Dog [cropped] by Michelle Johnson etc.

      The original attribution is based on the Best Practices Wiki that CC made

  4. Sep 2023
    1. these guys are lemurs 00:19:09 taking hits off of centipedes so they bite centipedes literally get high and they go into these trance-like states I'm sure this is not at all familiar to anyone here 00:19:24 um they get super cuddly uh and then later wake up and go their way but they are seeking a kind of transcendent State of Consciousness Apes will spin they will hang on Vines and spin to get dizzy 00:19:37 and then Dolphins will intentionally inflate puffer fish to get high pass them around in the ultimate puff puff pass right many mammals seek a Transcendent 00:19:57 altered state of being and if they communicate they may well communicate about it
      • for: animals getting high, animals seeking altered state of consciousness, lemurs - getting high, dolphins - getting high, apes - getting high
  5. Jun 2023
  6. Aug 2022
    1. Anthony Costello. (2022, February 24). The risks of cognitive symptoms lasting at least 12 MONTHS were much higher in the infected group. 4.8x higher for fatigue, 3.2x for brain fog, 5.3x for poor memory, and an incredible 51x for altered taste and smell. We need data on children, but it could easily be similar. (17) https://t.co/JC1qYyW2Xc [Tweet]. @globalhlthtwit. https://twitter.com/globalhlthtwit/status/1496957266016313348

  7. Nov 2021
    1. The dopamine reward system has also been shown to bestimulated by most drugs of abuse and plays an important rolein addiction [33]. An important question is whether jhanameditators are subject to addiction and tolerance effects thatcan result from stimulation of the dopamine reward system.

      The question of potential addiction to self-induced states that activate the dopamine (and/or other neurochemical) reward system(s) is important. From a more philosophical angle, should we welcome beneficial addictions that, if cultivated, might significantly improve individual and group quality of life? Isn't this related to our high regard for replacing detrimental with positive habits? Habit formation and maintenance also depends on activation of neural reward systems (see Nir Eyal's book, Hooked).

    2. imaging the brain of an individual who claims to generatejoy without any external rewards or cues could point the waytoward improved training in joy and greater resilience in theface of external difficulties. Of particular interest is the neuralmechanisms by which happiness is generated.

      Such a self-administered neural 'technology' of happiness should be driving much more related research but I see no other neuroscientific studies delving into jhanas.

    3. We report the first neural recording during ecstatic meditations called jhanas and test whether a brain reward system plays a rolein the joy reported. Jhanas are Altered States of Consciousness (ASC) that imply major brain changes based on subjective reports:(1) external awareness dims, (2) internal verbalizations fade, (3) the sense of personal boundaries is altered, (4) attention is highlyfocused on the object of meditation, and (5) joy increases to high levels. The fMRI and EEG results from an experienced meditatorshow changes in brain activity in 11 regions shown to be associated with the subjective reports, and these changes occur promptlyafter jhana is entered. In particular, the extreme joy is associated not only with activation of cortical processes but also with activationof the nucleus accumbens (NAc) in the dopamine/opioid reward system. We test three mechanisms by which the subject mightstimulate his own reward system by external means and reject all three. Taken together, these results demonstrate an apparentlynovel method of self-stimulating a brain reward system using only internal mental processes in a highly trained subject.

      I can find no other research on this particular matter. It would be helpful to have other studies to validate or invalidate this one. This method of reward requires a highly-trained participant and involves no external means.

  8. Aug 2020
  9. Sep 2016