Deric's MindBlog
MindBlog's Intellectual History, 2006–2026
Reflections on The Predictive Self.
When the Two Sides of Empathy Fall Out of Balance
AI as discovery, not invention.
Do Language Models Have a Global Workspace?
The Neural Basis of Laughter
Contemporary Russian piano composers and Agentic AI
Top-Down To Bottom-Up: Rhythmic Synchrony Relaxes Social Priors to Enable Change
What six AI models do and don’t know about me
Future-Capable: Curiosity, Adaptability, and Kindness in the Age of AI
Boredom can be Good for You...
When the Self Dissolves, the Precuneus Goes Quiet: A Rigorous Test of Meditation’s “Many-to-(n)One” Continuum
A dimmer switch for reward: the vagus sets the gain
Spontaneous problem-solving in bumble bees
Cleaning our brains during deep sleep
AI construed as a brilliant friend...Claude's New Constitution
The World is Unraveling: A 3-Step Guide to Staying Sane & Useful
The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness
Getting Gooier: How AI Is Reshaping Human Nature
Agentic AI and the next intelligence explosion
AI Is Not an Alien Intruder — It Is the Latest in a Four-Billion-Year Evolutionary Cascade of Symbiotic Transitions
The Tech Mirage: Why the U.S.-China AI Race Is Failing Us All
Activating the evolved healing mechanisms of the placebo response requires permission from a safe environment
When Execution Gets Cheap, What Remains Scarce? - The last biological moat.
The Refusal to Dehumanize - Rewilding Creativity
The Physiology of Agency in the Age of AI
What a self is.
From Animal to Humans - Multimodality as a safeguard of honesty in communication and language
Executive Function: Universal Capacity or Schooled Skill?
The Default Mode Network as a Bidirectional Interface Between World and Mind
AI, Agency, and the Quiet Hollowing of Mind
Memes Before Machines: The Real Cognitive Risk of the AI Age
AI use can compromise our serendipity, creativity, autonomy, and sense of agency.
One terminal chats with another to start vibe coding a new dericbownds.net
The polyvagal theory is dead - and HRV isn't a simple indicator of arousal
The nature of intelligence and selves.
A seismic shift in our understanding of intelligence
AI Makes Workloads Worse, Not Better
Empathy as a Brain Rhythm: Orexin, Theta Oscillations, and Prosocial Behavior
A MindBlog-ready ChatGPT synthesis
Will Deric’s Mind Blog be firing Deric soon? Is AI is doing his job better?
The geometries of change and the value of being human
Changing our systems of governance
New Ferality - Seeking new ways of being wild in new nature
Buying Futures, Renting the Past: How Speculation and Nostalgia Became the Economy
MindBlog is now 20 years old.
Against the Machine
I am not my problem
The Future of Being Human
The Mythology of Conscious AI
The Case for Being Human
Do we have an appetite for transcendence?
Venkatesh Rao's 'World Machines'
The Institutional Stance - an evolved intuitive theory?
What our brains are doing as we experience musical pleasure.
What are humans for? - AI Forces a Question We’ve Been Dodging
The Modernity Machine
Human Machines and AI Machines
Time, space, memory and brain–body rhythms
Changes in human brain organization at age ~83 (as well as ages ~9, 32, and 66)
Bigger AI models are failing faster - The future evolution of AI is into the 4D world
Focused attention mindfulness meditation changes our cerebrospinal fluid dynamics
“Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving
From today's Wall Street Journal: how the top 0.1% can live.
Dangerous Ideas.......
Welcome to the Polycene
How nature nurtures
Inequality and hierarchy are features of all natural systems
Is AI Pushing Us Back to a Pre-Gutenberg Culture? - A Rethink of Creativity in the AI Age
Claude Goes to Therapy
The Age of De-Skilling
I am not my problem
Is the current AI frenzy a bubble certain to crash? - a check in with disagreebot.bom
The illusion of judgment in LLMs
The 2025 Ig Nobel prizewinners in full
Large-scale cortical functional networks are organized in structured cycles
Why depolarization is hard: Evaluating attempts to decrease partisan animosity in America
Platforms like X and TikTok are destroying our culture.
Evolved mental errors that underlie our current cultural and political malaise
Could humans and AI become a new evolutionary individual?
Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - non-dual awareness as the opiate of the thinking classes.
Value, Purpose, Meaning, Futures
How Humans Work - an integrated model
The brain fires up immune cells when sick people are nearby
Chants across seven traditions share acoustic traits that enhance subjective relaxation
A Materialist's Credo
Rethinking how our brains work.
The case against reality
Resetting my brain…
Selected MindBlog posts on defining what our human self or "I" is.
Why You Are Probably An NPC (Non playing character)
AI is a Mass-Delusion Event - and - Gen Z and the End of Predictable Progress
Gaze patterns can serve as a sensitive marker of cognitive decline
Predictability and the pleasure of music
A brain-computer interface that reads inner thoughts.
Polarization may be inherent in social media
Points on having a self and free will.
The number of fake scientific journal articles is doubling every year and a half.
A 25 year study of what distingiushes 'Super-Agers'
Face (e)motion and the third visual pathway.
Why we put off things we enjoy doing.
The coming societal collapse