mihir 🌻 @MihirNow

@RubenLaukkonen i got converted after that delicious mango matcha latte im Santiago!!

@sharenarice omg when are you in London? I'd love to meet you :)

@RogerThisdell @Noah_B_Clark i think a low hanging fruit study would be to expose people to different types of images (e.g. high valence vs low valence inducing), while collecting EMG data from the body, to explore how different images effect the somatic field. also comparing meditators with non-meditators

@RogerThisdell @Noah_B_Clark i love this soo much!! i feel like there's a banger research study waiting to be done on this

@TylerAlterman this paper precisely talks about this issue, and provides positive visions for alignment research: arxiv.org/abs/2605.10310

The state space of human consciousness is a design space, and we now have new tools to navigate it deliberately at new depths for the first time. Below are some thoughts on psychotechnology RnD: substack.com/@eirinimalliar…

@khalio @mathyouf @maisonvyg totally! i am very excited about the applications related to things like accelerating learning and skill acquisition of different kinds. e.g. github.com/danielkaijzer/…

Maybe future BCI research will not only ask: “How can we build better interfaces?” But also: “How can we train better users?”

Our work points to a complementary possibility: perhaps we can also train the brain to become easier to read. Meditation could be one way of helping the brain enter states that are intrinsically more stable, less noisy, and easier to decode.

BCI research has been exclusively focused on building better instruments and algorithms to extract cleaner signals from the brain. But what if part of the problem is not only how we read the brain, but also the state the brain is in when we try to read it?

Ruben Laukkonen @RubenLaukkonen

a month ago

The first direct test of the theory. Though, you'll see in the theoretical framework that there is also substantial evidence drawn from existing work. biorxiv.org/content/10.648…

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My new meta-theory of meditation! I’ve been incubating on this for about five years. It all began when I measured my own brain during my postdoc in 2021. I was setting up a decoding pipeline for an EEG experiment, which was working extraordinarily well. On my brain, I could decode sounds from EEG activity near ceiling (~0.9 AUC). But then, when I ran the same experiment on other participants, the best I got was an AUC of 0.62. Why that happened haunted me for literally years. Then one day, I realized what the difference was. The difference was that, during data collection, I was meditating. Because that was something I just naturally did when sitting still and listening to sounds. I was intently focused on the sounds I was hearing, with an otherwise empty mind. So my brain was also focused and clear. And therefore, easy to decode. It’s pretty obvious in hindsight. So then I tested this on some existing preliminary data, and low and behold, participants during meditation showed better sound decoding than participants not. Now I just needed to figure out the mechanism and run a hypothesis-driven experiment. How does meditation translate to clearer neural signals? Well, think about how any basic meditation practice works. You selectively enhance some aspect of experience (i.e., signal), be it your breath, a mantra, the body, or awareness itself. You also selectively declutter or “let go” some other aspect, such as self-centred rumination and other pointless neuroses (i.e., noise). You enhance a present-moment signal and you release the noise. So a clear mind ought to be reflected in the brain’s signal to noise ratio and this makes the brain more decodable! If your intentions are clear; so is your brain. It better tracks the input. It better mirrors the world. The implications are fascinating. One surprising consequence is that the future of brain-interfaces might depend on the capacity to meditate. Because you can’t decode a brain that’s noisy. So being able to control machines with your mind might one day depend on your capacity to enact a clear mind. One of the most cited papers in the field famously criticized meditation for claiming to be a panacea. And yet, there is reason to believe that meditation is at least panacea-like, given it’s unusually broad applications for psychopathology and beyond. Why is that? Well, according to the present theory, the reason meditation is so generalizable is because many psychopathologies can be linked to poor neural f-SNR (think, obsessions, depressive rumination, anxious worrying, delusional thinking, etc.). Most of the things we suffer is a consequence of us losing touch with the signal manifold. We get absorbed in our self-generated ignorance; lost in the endogenous noise of our own creation. The second arrow. If we learn to practice mindfulness, for example, we begin to be able to agnatically select how much abstraction is appropriate for the moment. We begin to be able to skilfully traverse the hierarchy of the mind according to the demands of the present; letting go activity that hinders our ability to see clearly. But what about deeper insights? The more advanced practices and realizations we encounter in meditation can be framed as removing pervasive channels of noise driven by aberrant priors, e.g., those comprising a rigid self-model. There are entrenched habits in our minds that consistently warp our more direct experience with layers and layers of confusion. Potentially, unraveling these maladaptive priors through insight is like wiping a thick layer of grime from a mirror that has quietly distorted every reflection, allowing the whole field of experience to become clearer at once. Perhaps, then, awakening is a dramatic change in the generative model that leads to a non-linear boost in the brain’s signal-to-noise. This would go a long way in explaining the profound clarity that accompanies such shifts. The paper also provides extensive tools for objectively measuring a clear mind. We already have strong evidence that the SNR indicators reflect meditation depth better than both traditional linear and non-linear metrics (see comments). And here’s a really cool bonus finding: The meditative posture may act as a kind of inner neurofeedback device. The careful posture we maintain during meditation enacts a sensorimotor error-correction loop, signalling through prediction errors when the mind fails to track the present moment. A slumping posture reveals you’re in noisy territory (e.g., mindwandering), alerting the mind to return to the signal when bodily alignment falters. Empirical evidence, figures, and more below. Special thanks to @mihir_nath_ for spearheading the empirical work on meditation and the brain's SNR. Read the full paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2606.29698

What is intelligence for? In a rare collaboration between top universities and 3 frontier labs, we all agree that alignment should move beyond pathologizing to a positive focus on flourishing. We need north stars not just barbed wire. A close historical analogue comes from psychology. For much of the twentieth century, mainstream psychological science organized its aims around diagnosing, predicting, and treating dysfunction: depression, anxiety, psychosis, addiction, and other forms of impairment. That focus was justified and socially urgent, and it produced progress. Yet the field also discovered a systematic limitation. The constructs and instruments that reliably detect pathology do not, by default, specify what counts as a life well-lived. The turn toward positive psychology expanded the scientific target space by developing distinct theories, taxonomies, and measures for wellbeing, strengths, virtue, purpose, wisdom, meaning, and prosocial functioning, alongside interventions to boost these capacities beyond the status quo. As AI becomes embedded all over society and everyday sensemaking, a solely negative posture risks optimizing our information ecology for risk avoidance rather than human development. It may reduce catastrophic errors but leave agents in a local optimum of superficial and `soulless' assistance, where subtle misalignments abound. It also reveals that alignment is not a purely technical problem. We have to cut across vast disciplines because questions about the good life demand insights from philosophy, pychology, neuroscience, economics, and beyond. We need to work together to build AI systems that explicitly understand, model, and enhance human, animal, and ecological flourishing. The core challenge is therefore to build systems that can represent and reason about wellbeing as a structured manifold of human goods, trade-offs, and temporal dynamics, while enabling individuals and communities to retain agency over what counts as better in their context. While some may explicitly desire a system that is strictly and indiscriminately instruction-following, others must have the genuine option to choose systems configured to support their long-term growth or specific ethical commitments. This distinguishes *consented guidance*, where a user authorizes a system to help align their immediate actions with their higher-order goals, from *technocratic imposition*, ensuring that the pursuit of flourishing remains an exercise of, rather than an infringement upon, human agency. It gives me optimism that we found common ground on such a profoundly complex issue as the end game(s) of AI. Because when learning become cheap, we need to take a serious look at what intelligence is actually for.

@briantlord soooo cool! congrats Brian!!

@algekalipso @KanizsaBoundary well given the fact that about half the people attending TSC have very strong pro woo priors, I'd say the consensus was split 50-50

@KanizsaBoundary @algekalipso lol i was there in the audience during this demo. during the q&a session someone kinda debunked the whole thing. most likely case is that the blindfolds are not actually "blinding"

@nickcammarata can you give a detailed breakdown of the mental moves that you make when you want to get rid of some sensory phenomena?

@99thMonkie gediposting

@krtktwri @algekalipso @ebarenholtz @drmichaellevin 💯💯

@OshanJarow 🙏🙏🙏 here's the poster version :)

@Noah_B_Clark although recently i got my insula stimulated, and it almost gave me a panic attack lol. so there's definitely a there there. maybe an order of magnitude milder version of MDMA might be possible to instantiate with ultrasound

@Noah_B_Clark I'd suspect it won't be possible to replicate such strong effects with ultrasound as the resolution of ultrasound is still much cruder than what would be necessary. also the phenomenological effects of ultrasound seem mostly imperceptible so far.