PsyPost: Learning from AI summaries leads to shallower knowledge than web search. “Results of a set of experiments found that individuals learning about a topic from large language model summaries develop shallower knowledge compared to when they learn through standard web search.” Want free, ad-free search tools which help you instead of supplanting your brain? SearchTweaks!

FYI: Cybersecurity in Your Role? Crucial Insights! #shorts: Many people are actively involved in security, even if it's not their primary job. It's a pretty big part of their thinking. This could be self-selection for this talk, but there's only one track, so maybe not. #security #job #thinking #pipeline https://www.youtube.com/shorts/f8LDH7kQGeE

💜🩵💛🩷💗💁🏿‍♀️*People who often think about someone from the past don’t realise their mind is trying to say something, says psychologist👉

#Thinking #About #Love #Ones #Not #On #This #Earth #Anymore #Because #They #Still #Touch #Your #Spirit

People who often think about someone from the past don’t realise their mind is trying to say something, says psychologist
https://floobits.com/17-164630-people-who-often-think-about-someone-from-the-past-dont-realise-their-mind-is-trying-to-say-something-says-psychologist-2-ln/

Writing tests whether your thinking can survive contact with language.

#writing #language #thinking

Memory in the Meme

We live in an age of disposable context. We scroll through the infinite ribbon of the glass screen, pausing only for a microsecond to register a flicker of recognition before sliding our thumb upward, condemning the moment to the digital abyss. We have been trained by the Technocrats, those right-brained architects of our algorithmic prisons, to view this behavior as consumption. They tell us we are “consuming content.” But they are wrong. When we pause on a meme, that pixelated artifact of cultural shorthand, we are not consuming. We are remembering.

The meme is often dismissed by the serious-minded as the detritus of a distracted generation. It is seen as a low-resolution joke, a lazy way to communicate a thought that should have been an essay. But as someone who has spent a lifetime studying the intersection of the “Human Meme” and the hard realities of communication, from the stageboards of Broadway to the silent, proximal grammar of American Sign Language, I tell you that the meme is something far more curious. It is a vessel of containment. It is the modern amber in which we trap the mosquito of our collective emotion, preserving the DNA of a specific moment in time that would otherwise evaporate into the ether of the forgotten.

Consider the “visual vernacular” of the internet. In American Sign Language, we talk about the power of the classifier—a handshape that represents a class of objects, moving through space to tell a story that words cannot capture. The meme operates on this same frequency. It is a classifier for the soul. When you share an image of a skeleton sitting on a park bench waiting for a reply, you are not just making a joke about patience. You are transmitting a complex, heavy emotional state—the specific, crushing weight of being ignored—without uttering a syllable. You are using a shared visual language to contain a feeling that is too large and too messy to be constrained by the rigid geometry of the English alphabet.

There is a “braided prairie” quality to this phenomenon. Growing up in Nebraska, I learned that the land remembers everything. The wind that cuts through the tall grass carries the same dust that settled on the pioneers. The meme is our digital prairie. It is a vast, open space where millions of individual blades of grass, our individual anxieties, our triumphs, our absurdities, weave together to form a cohesive landscape. When a meme goes viral, it is not because it is clever. It is because it has tapped into the groundwater of that prairie. It has found a common root. It allows us to stand in the middle of the digital nowhere and say, “I am not alone in this feeling. You are here, too.”

This is the function of memory in the meme: it fights the “cultural instinct to forget.” The machine wants us to forget. The algorithm prioritizes the new, the fresh, the “trending.” It wants us to be in a constant state of forward motion because a person who stops to remember is a person who stops clicking ads. But the meme acts as a brake. It is an anchor. It drags the past, a screenshot from a 1999 cartoon, a blurry photo from a 2012 news broadcast, into the present and forces us to reckon with it. It creates a loop of “static time,” freezing a reaction in perpetuity.

I have written before about the tragedy of the “Original Cast Recording”—how it captures a living, breathing theatrical performance and freezes it into a definitive, unchangeable document. The meme does something similar, but with a crucial difference. The cast recording demands you listen to it as it was; the meme invites you to remix it as you are. It is a living archive. It allows us to take the memory of the past and overlay it with the context of the present. It is a collaboration between the dead (the original context) and the living (the current caption).

However, we must be wary of the container itself. We are building our “palace of memory” on rented land. We entrust our cultural heritage to platforms that view our memories as data points to be mined, not treasures to be kept. We are facing a crisis of digital preservation. The “Link Rot” of the web is real. The servers will eventually be wiped. The Technocrats will pull the plug when the storage costs outweigh the ad revenue. And when that happens, what becomes of the memory?

This is why the act of sharing a meme is, in itself, an act of defiance. It is a way of keeping the signal alive. We are the “Human Meme.” We are the biological substrate that keeps these ideas breathing. When you save a meme to your phone, you are acting as an archivist. You are curating the museum of your own existence. You are saying that this specific collision of image and text, this specific containment of irony and truth, matters enough to be saved from the flow.

We must not mistake the trivial for the temporary. A joke can last a thousand years if it touches a truth that the history books are too polite to record. The meme is the folklore of the future. It is the cave painting of the twenty-first century, scratched not into stone, but into the liquid light of the screen. It proves we were here. It proves we saw the absurdity of the world, the horror and the beauty of it, and instead of screaming into the void, we chose to contain it. We chose to frame it. And we chose to share it.

So, the next time you hesitate to post that silly image, remember the weight of what you are doing. You are not just adding noise to the signal. You are preserving the hum of the human condition. You are ensuring that the memory survives the moment. You are telling the future that we were complex, and we were funny, and we were here.

La startup de Mira Murati, Thinking Machines Lab, está perdiendo a dos de sus cofundadores a manos de OpenAI #Barret_Zoph #cofundadores #dos #está #Inteligencia_artificial #Lab #Machines #manos #Máquinas_pensantes #Mira #Mira_Murati #Murati #OpenAI #perdiendo #startup #sus #Thinking #ButterWord #Spanish_News Comenta tu opinió...
https://butterword.com/la-startup-de-mira-murati-thinking-machines-lab-esta-perdiendo-a-dos-de-sus-cofundadores-a-manos-de-openai/?feed_id=64880&_unique_id=6968aa8b8ed72

Trees

My joke about thinking trees flopped.

It was too cerebral for most and too arboreal for others.

#AucklandComedy #Comedy #Joke #NZComedy #Thinking

I’ve been listening to music instead of audiobooks or podcasts on my walks lately. I found my mind wandering too much to concentrate on the books. Might as well think while I walk. I do not get bored with my own thoughts, funny enough. #Walking #Thinking #Writing

Kognitiivisten vinoumien kartan liitteeksi sopii JyU:n Tiede ja ase -sarjassa 2025 ilmestynyt systemaattinen kirjallisuuskatsaus eräistä tuollaisista disinformaation syötön todennäköisinä kanavina, https://jyx.jyu.fi/jyx/Record/jyx_123456789_101618/Details

#informaatio #information #ase #weapon #destruction #distraction #propaganda #manipulation #cognitiveWarfare #war #research #psychology #philosophy #disinformation #ajattelu #thinking #resilience #society #knowledge #asenne #attitude #sociology #socialmedia

#thinking

PSA: #EdTech proponents at US district level are now promoting #vibecoding where #AIconsultants train teachers how to “#code using ChatGPT” to create math or language exercises for students. These churn out short snappy quizzes with time limits (usually 2 minutes) to hold attention. They’re being introduced JUST BECAUSE IT CAN BE DONE. None have given evidence of #learning . Folks confuse #engagement with #learning. The #thinking process is slow and needs time so that #deeplearning can happen.

Think HAPPY thoughts.

#Mindfulness #Thinking #Thoughts #SelfReflection #MentalClarity #ConsciousLiving #InnerAwareness #Quotes #ShareInspireQuotes

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.
-- Marshall McLuhan

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #MarshallMcLuhan #MassTransportation #Thinking

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Pictographs #RockArt #NativeAmerican #Utah

Lifehacker: Why I’m Never Going to Let AI Write My Emails. ” Anecdotally, I’ve spoken to quite a few people who now use AI chatbots in this way. But it’s not something I’m ready to embrace, and I don’t think I ever will. These are my reasons, which may or may not resonate with you, though I haven’t mentioned the issues of energy use and copyright violations that hang over the use of AI more […]

Deep Buster. #grickledoodle #dogs #thinking #cartoon #art #drawing #funny #humor

Just published on Medium- Leopardi was a great Italian poet: a few people know that he invented the first hypertext
https://medium.com/philosophytoday/the-first-hypertext-was-italian-9162a41d902a

#hypertext #poetry #leopardi #Italy #thinking #intelligence #AI

Hold the phone, folks! 🤯 The academic wizards have unleashed a paper with a title so grand, it takes an entire breath to say! Apparently, it's about some "Dynamic Large Concept Models" doing "Latent Reasoning" – or, as we humans call it, "thinking". But let's be real, who needs actual content when you have buzzwords galore? 📚✨
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24617 #DynamicLargeConceptModels #LatentReasoning #AcademicBuzzwords #Thinking #Innovation #HackerNews #ngated

Creative thinking as mushroom picking: a sketch of a psychoanalytical account of thinking-through-writing

I’ve been preoccupied by this passage from Feud’s Interpretation of Dreams about the lattice work of associations which builds up the texture of our dream worlds:

The dream thoughts to which we are led by interpretation cannot, from the nature of things, have any definite endings: they are bound to branch out in every direction into the intricate network of our world of thought. It is at some point where this meshwork is particularly close that the dream wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium.

Bollas talks about this the Evocative Object World (pg 29-30) in terms of “internal constellations of interest” which “form through the associations of thought during the day, usually in response to discrete episodes of lived experience, following long-standing desires in the self”. The analytical significance comes “When the structure reaches an ‘epiphany’ , understood here as a moment of insight that allows the self to increase its reflective capacity, the person looks upon himself and others in a somewhat new manner”. These constellations of interest, the meshwork, builds throughout our everyday experience. From The Evocative Object pg 63:

Without thinking about it much, when we traverse a city – or walk in our district – we are engaged in a type of dreaming. Each gaze that falls upon an object of interest may yield a moment’s reverie – when we think of something else, inspired by the point of emotional contact – and during our day we will have scores of such reveries, which Freud termed psychic intensities, and which he believed were the stimuli for the dream that night. But as a type of dreaming in their own right, the reveries wrought by evocative objects constitute an important feature of our psychic lives.

The clinic provides a site where these associations can be articulated in a manner that ensures reception. The unconscious communication in the psychoanalytical dyad receives these associations in a manner that contributes to further building the meshwork but also creates the condition for these ‘epiphanies’ to emerges the points at which the mushroom rises up out other mycelium and is picked in a manner which changes everything. You cannot go back to being the person who saw things in the old way. Psychoanalysis provides occasions for articulation along with a specific mode of reception. This process happens outside of analysis as well though, in dreams (as in the opening quotation) but also in our engagement with cultural objects. From Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas pg 37-38:

And now and then we will be quite transformed by the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object meeting up at just the right time. One late afternoon in the summer of 1972, I heard a performance of one of Hindmith’s viola sonata in a small church in New England. It immediately served to process a feature of my idiom, and this occasion sponsored vivid and intense feelings and ideas which lifted me into the next moments of my life. Shall we ever have the means to analyse that? Why that particular work?

In a real sense I was not the same person after reading Eliot’s Four Quartets for the first time. Nor was I the same person after binge-reading Game of Thrones. Nor after reading my first x-men comic when I was a kid. Or seeing Gaslight Anthem live for the first time. Or going to my first rave. Or reading Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo for the first time in my late 20s. Or trying to make my own breakcore this winter. Or indeed really getting into Bollas over the last few months. What I love about Bollas is how he provides the means to treat these cultural experiences in a roughly symmetrical way: some are imbued with cultural capital, others are not, but they all contribute to the elaboration of my personal idiom. I’ve chosen these examples because they contribute to ‘epiphany’ as well: in the sense of leading to a change, even if subtle, in how I see myself and my place in the world. They are points where the micro-structure of my idiom gives rise to a change in the macro-structure of my character. Or to put it more poetically, the mushroom rises up out of its mycelium.

As so often happens I’m reminded of a letter C Wright Mills wrote to his friend, the historian William Miller, who was struggling with a new job he had started:

You ask for what one should be keyed up? My god, for long weekends in the country, and snow and the feel of an idea and New York streets early in the morning and late at night and the camera eye always working whether you want or not and yes by god how the earth feels when it’s been plowed deep and the new chartreuse wall in the study and wine before dinner and if you can afford it Irish whiskey afterwards and sawdust in your pants cuff and sometimes at evening the dusky pink sky to the northwest, and the books to read never touched and all that stuff the Greeks wrote and have you ever read Macaulay’s speeches to hear the English language? And to revise your mode of talk and what you talk about and yes by god the world of music which we must now discover and there’s still hot jazz and getting a car out of the mud when nobody else can. That’s what the hell to get keyed up about.

In the register of Bollas we could say that Wright Mills is reminding his friend of all the sensory pleasures to be found in the world (“too much society crap and too much mentality and not enough tactile and color and sound stuff going on“). These are evocative objects which provoke enjoyable feelings in us. They are the objects which make us feel alive. These include “the books to read never touched”, “all that stuff the Greeks wrote”, “to hear the English language” and “to revise your mode of talk and what you talk about”. But also earlier “the feel of an idea”.

This is a phrase forever lodged in my psyche because it immediately captured the phenomenology of creation for me. I know what it feels like when an idea is ready. I know that if I reach for that idea at that moment then expressing it will be energising and rewarding. I’ve written this blog post in less than 10 minutes so far because my experience is that when I have the ‘feel of an idea’ the words will pour forth because I am in contact with what has been evoked in me. If I write it down to return to it later I occasionally find some residue of the energy but usually it’s an inert experience in which I churn out words to tick something off a list. The versatility of blogging rests in its capacity to provide a continually available occasion for articulating a single idea. If I have that feeling, I can immediately reach for the blog and in less than 20 minutes (almost always) I have articulated the idea I felt.

I now see the ‘feel of an idea’ as a particular kind of mushroom which has emerged out of its mycelium. Much as analysis provide fertile terrain for articulating associations (in a manner which leads to more associations) and which are then received in a fruitful way, writing provides the means through which we articulate idea-mushrooms with different modes of reception which shape what we do with them. In these sense we can think of occasions for articulation provided by the different writing practices as offering different ways of ‘picking’ these idea-mushrooms and working with them. I would argue the creative use of LLMs can be seen in terms of this genealogy, or at least they can be used in this way. This is essentially Bertrand Russell’s advice which I picked up a long time ago:

My own belief is that a conscious thought can be planted into the unconscious if a sufficient amount of vigour and intensity is put into it. most of the unconscious consists of what were once highly emotional conscious thoughts, which have now become buried. It is possible to do this process of burying deliberately, and in this way, the unconscious can be led to do a lot of useful work. I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity – the greatest intensity of which I am capable – for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done. Before I had discovered his technique, I used to to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress: I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry, and the intervening months were wasted, whereas now I can devote them to other pursuits.

In Generative AI for Academics I wrote that LLMs can be used to plant ideas in the unconscious mind in this way. What I think I’ve finally sketched out is a psychoanalytical account of what this means and how it differs across different kinds of writing practice. How can we plant ideas and then pick the idea-mushrooms in the most enjoyable and creative way possible? I suspect mostly by having multiple modalities through which we do this work i.e. a range of occasions for articulation with the different modes of reception associated with them.

#BertrandRussell #bollas #cWrightMills #feelOfAnIdea #Freud #Thinking #thinkingThroughWriting #writing