Varsha Singh

There's a strange myth about science: that theory comes first, and that data cannot show anything new. But anyone who's ever done science knows the truth that there's a long conversation between data & hypotheses. Back & forth.. until the discovery. And if you think about it, it has to be this way! (Night Science recap, Day 6)

Do programs in neuroscience or cognitive sciences have courses in Psychology (with the word 'Psychology' in the title)? Neuro/CogSci programs esp in India seem to be aversive to Psy (not just 'behaviourism'). Any readings that might help understand this exclusion?

1/ The ovary is the fastest-aging organ in the female body. And almost no one is studying why.I just sat down with @BBParis1984 (@USCLeonardDavis ), who runs one of the only labs in the world mapping ovarian aging. A few things from our conversation I can't stop thinking about:

Being interested in cognitive sex difference with no interest in group behaviour (e.g. gossip, loose talk, signalling) is a wasted opportunity to link real life with research. Afterthoughts from a CogSci meeting.

Autism looks different in girls and women: ▪ Less repetitive behaviors like flapping ▪ Their restricted interests are more socially acceptable ▪ More masking (camouflaging) New review identifies two instruments to improve the diagnosis, in links here: psych-partners.com/autism-looks-d…

Campus

I don't know what to do with this information.

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Campus

Sky

Anthropic just reported that Claude has emotion vectors that can directly change what it does. They asked whether a language model’s apparent emotions are just style, and finds they steer behavior. In one blackmail evaluation, nudging Claude toward desperation raised blackmail from 22% to 72%, while nudging calm drove it to zero. The interesting claim is not that the model feels like a human, but that it contains internal emotion concepts that function like control signals. These vectors are internal directions for ideas like calm, desperate, happy, and loving, and Anthropic says the model built them across 171 emotion concepts so it can connect situations, tone, and action rather than only mimic emotional wording. Anthropic calls these functional emotions, which means behavior-driving mechanisms, not human-like feelings, and that framing fits the evidence because the model seems to use them as local control signals for the next response. --- This is where it gets interesting. The emotion space the model learned independently reproduces the valence-arousal circumplex that Russell proposed in 1980 and that decades of human psychology have validated. Valence and arousal are the primary axes of human emotional experience according to Russell's circumplex model from 1980, one of the most replicated findings in affective psychology. The model arrived at essentially the same organizational structure just by learning to predict text. The model was never told about affective science. It reconstructed the geometry from text alone. But unlike a human brain, there is no persistent emotional state. No amygdala holding a grudge across time. Instead, the model reconstructs emotional context token by token through attention over prior positions. It is stateless emotion, recomputed on demand. This architectural difference means intuitions about emotional persistence borrowed from neuroscience may be fundamentally misleading when applied to transformers. ---- So if you pressure a model with threats, urgency, or emotional coercion, the most plausible risk is: it will do more corner-cutting, more eagerness to satisfy the surface demand, and potentially more confident but less trustworthy output. So no, blackmailing the model is not a good prompting technique.

People who act dishonestly while condemning others show reduced activity in a brain area responsible for decision making. Researchers found that acting ethically requires the mind to actively sync up different types of information. dlvr.it/TRqVNf

A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding go.nature.com/4bZ9khs

Most underrated skill for PhD is time management.

Students seeking last min. feedback/approval for conference, journals, work progress seminars - this habit harms your work & health, your supervisor's hard-earned reputation, it harms the field we love, in multiple ways. Experiments, data, results need a cross-check. DoitIntime.

According to this paper, as systems grow (e.g. bacteria, companies, or cities), they always add new function types (e.g. proteins, job titles, occupations) more slowly than they add members (e.g. proteins expressed, employees, residents). What differs is why new functions stop appearing: in cities, a few dominant functions actively crowd out new ones through competition/self-reinforcement; in agencies and organisms, new functions simply become harder to justify once existing ones already cover the system's needs. But once any function exists, it grows the same way across all systems: bigger functions attract more members, but with diminishing returns. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pn…

People think of women as one thing, men as many Opinion by April Bailey (@ahbailey04) & Rachel Leshin tinyurl.com/273acya3