Field · 15 posts

Senses & Perception

The bandwidth of experience. Below, everything that touches this field, including pieces that live mostly in neighboring territory.

The collection

All of Senses & Perception

Senses & Perception

The Expanded Human Senses

School teaches five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The body actually runs many more sensory systems than that, monitoring both the outside world and its own internal state at all times.…

7 min · Senses & Perception
Senses & Perception

Don’t Judge an Article by Its Title

I was heartbroken when Harvard Business Review editors decided to title my 2003 article “Don’t Trust Your Gut” ( certainly a buzzier catchphrase than “How To Leverage Your Intuition With Analytics” or other…

2 min · Senses & Perception
Senses & Perception

Don’t Judge an Article by Its Title

I was heartbroken when Harvard Business Review editors decided to title my 2003 article “Don’t Trust Your Gut” ( certainly a buzzier catchphrase than “How To Leverage Your Intuition With Analytics” or other…

2 min · Senses & Perception
Senses & Perception

Core ideas that have persisted

For a few months now I have enjoyed reading the regular (mostly truncated) email I receive from TuringPost and today I took the plunge (see why below) and became a paid subscriber -apparently on founder Ksenia…

2 min · Senses & Perception
Senses & Perception

The Perfect Egg

And I thought that the 63-degree Celsius egg (or 145.4 F), whereby you leave a whole egg in its shell in a 63-degree (60-70 to control how runny you want the yolk) water bath for one hour, was the pinnacle of…

2 min · Senses & Perception
Senses & Perception

The verification bottleneck

Anastasia Borovykh, you are right, humans are good at "taste", knowing what is interesting or not, distinguishing what's meaningful from what is just truth without meaning. Human taste is found at the two end…

1 min · Senses & Perception
Senses & Perception

Alexis III

As a final homage to the timeless observations of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835), there is a lot to learn from his description of the constant pursuit of material (and rapid)…

1 min · Senses & Perception
Senses & Perception

Gradual change blindness

Finding a picture of myself in my mid twenties is the one way I realize I got older. Compare it to my profile pic and you might wonder how this is the same person. But if you had seen me every day since then,…

1 min · Senses & Perception
Senses & Perception

Fruit flies are people too

(Doing a little A/B testing here to see if a picture of "mating" fruit flies attracts more views than a link to the Nature article: In a surprising turn of events, scientists have discovered that even in fruit…

1 min · Senses & Perception
Senses & Perception

Why do we have to watch podcasts?

In the sacred list of examples where innovation does not simply replace some existing technology with something faster, better, cheaper but creates an entirely new category of behaviors, is television, a…

1 min · Senses & Perception
Artificial Intelligence

Timing matters in the Cursor acquisition

The announcement of Cursor's $60B acquisition by SpaceX is timely, for two reasons: 1⃣ It is bolstering the share price right now, as confirmed by the 10% bump today. As my colleague Raphaelle d'Ornano wrote,…

3 min · Artificial Intelligence
Biology

Ultra-Processed Obesity

A timely review article about “The role of Ultra Processed Foods (UPF) in obesity” (by a team from the University of Sao Paulo and NYU) summarizes a lot of evidence that sounds obvious e.g., diets “high in UPF…

2 min · Biology
Complexity & Simulation

Olfaction

I love this introduction to scent design by Taylor Rayne at Asimov Press (Scent, in silico, and the role that machine learning and genAI is playing in the field's recent advances: Google DeepMind's Principal…

2 min · Complexity & Simulation
Artificial Intelligence

We need a Journal of Disappointing Results

I recently had the privilege of hearing about an unpublished study that would save (academic, corporate or nonprofit) scientists in the field a lot of misery if they knew about it. But the study “failed” in…

1 min · Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence

Discovering state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms

An important Nature paper by a Google DeepMind team (first author Junhyuk Oh) became available online unedited to accelerate the dissemination of ideas: this paper shows that Reinforcement Learning (RL)…

1 min · Artificial Intelligence
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