pinotsislab

In #depression, electric fields diverging from the activity of neurons that generate them may signal a loss of coordinated control—much like an orchestra in which musicians gradually drift out of alignment with the conductor academic.oup.com/cercor/article…

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models. Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.

𝗥𝗶𝗱𝗶𝗰𝘂𝗹𝗲𝗱, 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗥𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝘚𝘪𝘹 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥 𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘴 𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘢𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵, 𝘷𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴 𝘰𝘯… 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝘃𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗪𝗮𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 1916 · 𝘋𝘦𝘵𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 2015 · 99 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴 A direct consequence of general relativity — yet doubted for decades 𝗯𝘆 𝗘𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗶𝗻 𝗵𝗶𝗺𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳, who in 1936 submitted a paper with Nathan Rosen to 𝘗𝘩𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸 claiming plane waves can't exist. Referee Howard Percy Robertson caught the error (a bad coordinate choice); Einstein, furious the manuscript was shown to a specialist, withdrew it and never published there again. Doubt over whether the waves carried energy ran into the 1950s. On 14 Sept 2015, LIGO caught two merging black holes as a strain of 1 part in 10^21. Nobel, 2017. 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗿𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗸𝗵𝗮𝗿 𝗟𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁 𝘋𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘥 1930 · 𝘝𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 1970𝘴 · 40+ 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴 At nineteen, sailing to Cambridge, Chandrasekhar applied special relativity to a white dwarf's electrons: above ~1.44 solar masses the star cannot resist collapse — the first hint of black holes. At the Royal Astronomical Society in 1935, Arthur Eddington, the era's most powerful astrophysicist, rose after his talk and declared "there should be a law of nature to prevent a star from behaving in this absurd way." The room laughed; Chandrasekhar left for Chicago. Vindicated by pulsars (1967), Cygnus X-1 (~1971), the 1983 Nobel, and M87*'s imaged horizon (2019). 𝗭𝘄𝗶𝗰𝗸𝘆'𝘀 𝗧𝗿𝗶𝗼 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 1933–1937 · 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘥 1967–1979 · 42 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴 Abrasive and widely dismissed, Fritz Zwicky was right about three things decades early. 1933: the virial theorem on the Coma cluster showed galaxies moving far too fast for their visible mass — 𝘥𝘶𝘯𝘬𝘭𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘦, ~400× the luminous estimate. 1934, with Baade: coined "supernova" and predicted the leftover neutron star. 1937: argued galaxies act as gravitational lenses. All landed — pulsars (1967, 33 yr), Rubin's rotation curves (1970s), the Twin Quasar lens (1979, 42 yr). Dark matter, though, is a confirmed 𝘦𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘤𝘵, not yet an identified 𝘴𝘶𝘣𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦. 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗲𝗹𝗹'𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗿𝗲𝗺 𝘗𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘥 1935 · 𝘛𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘥 1982 / 2015 · 47–80 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴 EPR argued in 1935 that quantum mechanics must be incomplete — "spooky action at a distance." For thirty years this was philosophy, not physics ("shut up and calculate"). In 1964 John Bell turned it into an inequality quantum mechanics violates. Aspect's 1982 Orsay experiments gave the decisive early confirmation (47 yr); loophole-free tests came in 2015, first from Hanson at Delft with electron spins 1.3 km apart (80 yr). Nobel 2022 (Clauser, Aspect, Zeilinger). Bell's once-ignored paper now anchors quantum information. 𝗕𝗼𝘀𝗲-𝗘𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗶𝗻 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘗𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 1924 · 𝘙𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 1995 · 71 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴 From Bose's 1924 photon statistics, Einstein predicted a gas near absolute zero collapsing into one macroscopic quantum state — long dismissed as a mathematical curiosity. Fritz London revived it in 1938, tying it to superfluid helium; Landau resisted, his rival two-fluid model doubting condensation was essential. A pure condensate needed cooling methods half a century off. In 1995 Cornell and Wieman made one in rubidium-87 at 170 nanokelvin; Ketterle followed in sodium. Nobel, 2001. 𝗕𝗶𝗿𝗸𝗲𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝘗𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘦𝘥 1908 · 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘥 1967 · 59 𝘺𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘴 In 1908 Kristian Birkeland proposed the aurora is driven by currents flowing 𝘢𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨 Earth's field lines, backed by terrella experiments. Sydney Chapman favored atmospheric currents and dismissed him for fifty years; he died unvindicated. Proof needed altitude: 1966 satellite magnetometer data was read by Cummings and Dessler in 1967 as his field-aligned currents and the Triad satellite resolved two current sheets in 1973.

Cerebral Cortex Ephaptic coupling can explain variability in neural activity academic.oup.com/cercor/article…

Thank you Earl, this feels like an important bridge paper. The deeper read, to me, is that cortical field activity moves from being treated as a passive read-out of neural firing to an active state variable in the computation itself. Trial-to-trial variability may not simply be noise, excitability drift or background modulation. It may be the visible trace of a changing extracellular field-state: neural activity shapes the field, and the field then biases the next neural trajectory. That makes ephaptic coupling a real computational layer. Not replacing spikes or synapses, but constraining the ensemble they form. In field terms, variability becomes informative: the system is revealing which field-geometry it is computing through while solving the same task. This is exactly the kind of layer VFD has been trying to formalise: spikes and synapses provide discrete routing, while the shared field constrains, gates and stabilises the ensemble.

Electric fields help guide neural activity, even from moment to moment. A new study adds evidence that electric fields in the brain help to organize and shape underlying neural activity via “ephaptic coupling.” picower.mit.edu/news/electric-… #neuroscience @mitbrainandcog @ScienceMIT

News alert: New paper! Electric fields help guide neural activity, even from moment to moment “The brain is a rollicking sea of electrical influences” picower.mit.edu/news/electric-… work by @dimitrispp #neuroscience

Variability in brain oscillations can be explained by ephaptic coupling w/@MillerLabMIT doi.org/10.1093/cercor…

Something important is becoming visible across neuroscience, developmental biology and consciousness research. These may not be competing explanations. They may be different resolutions of the same biological field architecture. @MillerLabMIT / @dimitrispp give the measurable cortical layer: extracellular electric fields are not just passive read-outs of neural firing, but can feed back into neural ensembles through ephaptic coupling. @drmichaellevin gives the wider biological layer: bioelectric networks coordinate cellular collectives into adaptive problem-solving systems across development, regeneration and physiology. @StuartHameroff points to the intracellular depth layer: the cytoskeleton and microtubules may be where field effects couple into the cell’s internal architecture. @penrose asks whether the deepest layer may require physics beyond classical computation. These do not need to replace one another. They may be adjacent scales of one nested closure system: physics → cytoskeleton → cell → bioelectric tissue → neural ensemble → cognition VFD frames the common object as field-constrained geometry: not neurons, cells, microtubules or fields in isolation, but the way each scale constrains the next through a shared dynamical structure. The test is not mystical. Perturb the field. Measure the ensemble. Measure the cell-state. Measure the cytoskeletal response. If patterned field changes propagate coherently across these levels, and if changing cytoskeletal dynamics, gap junctions, ion-channel states or anaesthetic sensitivity alters that propagation, then the bridge becomes experimentally visible. We may not be looking at four unrelated theories. We may be looking at one living architecture viewed from four different resolutions.

@VFD_org that's exactly the approach of cytoelectric coupling +information is represented in the electric field fluctuations so it has a distinctive role pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37210066/

Analog computation is real, and your brain can take advantage of it. This chip does something similar, using natural electrical drift in its hardware to perform efficient analog computation. doi.org/10.1126/scienc… #neuroscience

@JosephJacks_ @StuartHameroff What is the reference?

@dimitrispp Can’t wait to learn more. There are backward in time dynamics in microtubules .. @StuartHameroff has written about this in the past.

@dimitrispp Positrons?

@JosephJacks_ Yes! Working with Partha on that.

What does quantum electrodynamics have to do with neuroscience? Literally everything.

How do scientists detect a ripple in spacetime? In this Open Seminar episode, @MIT_Physics Professor Matt Evans explains what gravitational waves are, how they're created, and how researchers detect them using instruments like LIGO. Watch the full episode on MIT Learn: bit.ly/4gfArJ3

> I don't follow the logic that dualism can be tested by science since by definition it claims a "non-physical" aspect, this is only a contradiction if you make one key assumption, which is sort of the whole point here: that "tested by science" has to be "physical". Why assume this? For example, many (not all) mathematicians think they are discovering (not creating) facts and patterns that can neither be derived from, nor changed by things you do in, physics. You can't just fire the math department and hope to derive the truths of number theory etc. from physics experiments. You can't change the digits of e by tweaking the universal constants. There are plenty of important patterns out there that are as real (or more, since people are fine if the speed of light or gravitational constant changes over cosmological time; no one is fine if I propose that the digits of e change over time) than physics. Those patterns play critical, causal roles in physics, biology, cognitive science. So, as an engineer, something is real to me if I a) have to worry about it, or b) can make use of it. I didn't talk about this stuff prior to 2025, because I didn't have a way to make it practically useful. Now I see ways, so I've got people working on it. If you want to see the actual argument, youtu.be/K8BmMU1Tm-I?si… osf.io/preprints/psya…

Just for the record. I'm talking about about 3rd person observable behavior (in anatomical, physiological, and good old 3D space), not consciousness. I also make no claims whatsoever about quantum anything. And finally, strict "testable" is as hard for materialism as it is for dualism (a crisp experiment that would cause adherents to drop the model), but if you mean it has no detectable consequences that can be experimented on, or that it generates no new research agendas, I beg to differ. We are doing experiments and analyzing primary data relevant to those questions. I'm only interested in the kinds of frameworks that drive you to do new experiments no one had done before, not mysterianism. And I'm not interested in any axioms that are not allowed to be questioned (e.g., materialism). It's all up for investigation, and every model eventually meets its limits.

@JasonSynaptic .@drmichaellevin has beautiful work on how (platonic) math, often used in physics but separate from it, can motivate new discoveries in biology shorturl.at/Kkjg3 Just an example from QM shorturl.at/ZrlC0 @MillerLabMIT @/@DanielLanino @StuartHameroff

@JasonSynaptic @dimitrispp @MillerLabMIT @StuartHameroff Lots of it! Here’s my recent review on the topic doi.org/10.1002/agt2.7…

@JasonSynaptic @MillerLabMIT @dimitrispp 1. doi.org/10.3390/e26060… 2. Binding problem and emergent ontological dimensions of qualia are both uniquely solved by entanglement. See above for binding (not Orch-OR, as I see significant problems with that model) and the PBR theorem doi.org/10.1038/nphys2… for the ontology

@JasonSynaptic see here for tests of quantum coherence in brain dynamics-- not consciousness @MillerLabMIT @DanielLanino @StuartHameroff arxiv.org/abs/2508.21490