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I want to pass on the full text of an editorial by Blau et al in PNAS, the link points to the more complete open source online version containing acknowledgements and references:

From Chuey et al. in PNAS (open source):  

Significance

Bosch et al. do a perspective in PNAS (open source) pointing out that: ...contemporary built environments are steadily reducing the microbial diversity essential for human health, well-being, and resilience while accelerating the symptoms of human chronic diseases including environmental allergies, and other more life-altering diseases. Here is their abstract: There is increasing evidence that interactions between microbes and their hosts not only play a role in determining health and disease but also in emotions, thought, and behavior. Читать дальше...

 A global collaboration from many cultures shows that songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech, suggesting evolutionary origins universal to all humans that cannot simply be explained by culture. The numerous samples of music collected could be arranged in a musi-linguistic continuum from instrumental music to spoken language.

Numerous MindBlog posts have presented the work and writing of Elizabeth Feldman Barrett (enter Barrett in the search box in the right column of this web page). Her book, "How Emotions Are Made," is the one I recommend when anyone asks me what I think is the best popular book on how our brains work.  Here I want to pass on her piece on AI and emotions in the Sat. May 18 Wall Street Journal. It collects together the various reasons that AI can not, and should not, be used for detecting our emotional... Читать дальше...

 I want to pass on a few clips from a recent Thomas Edsall essay, followed by a condensed version of the longer piece provided by Chat GPT 4:

I've finished reading through Fareed Zakaria’s recent magisterial book: “Age of Revolutions Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present.” I was so impressed with the concluding pages of the book, titled "The Infinite Abyss" that I have re-read it several times, and was about to attempt a summary of its main points before checking and finding, sure enough, that Chat GPT4 and Anthropic Claude saved me at least an hour of work by performing their quite adequate responses to my prompt: "Writing... Читать дальше...

Interesting work from Charbonneau et al. in macaque monkeys on the affective (gentle, pleasant) touch pathways that in humans use a different neural network than pathways of discriminative touch:

A fascinating model for collective behavior from Heins et al.:

Significance

We introduce a model of collective behavior, proposing that individual members within a group, such as a school of fish or a flock of birds, act to minimize surprise. This active inference approach naturally generates well-known collective phenomena such as cohesion and directed movement without explicit behavioral rules. Our model reveals intricate relationships between individual beliefs and group properties... Читать дальше...

When I wake up in the morning, I frequently remind myself to be grateful for the luck of having been born in 1942, and being able to ride the crest of a number of fortunate external circumstances that made my generation vastly better off than those who followed. I was in high school in the late 50s when Sputnik happened, fueling a huge increase in federal research funding that, powered my laboratory research career how our vision works. Both my parents and myself were clients of state governments... Читать дальше...