Spring Brain

Reporting live from multiple sunny Seattle days in a row! My far-too-many office/houseplants are absolutely buzzing with the news. Another particularly amazing thing about Seattle spring is that we're a perfect 1-2 hr daytrip from Skagit which is flower heaven and changed my definition of colors (also there's a Taylor Shellfish for anyone who wants to eat oysters on logs next to the Sound). I read Floret Farm's book while on a weekend trip there, and have since been obsessed with Erin and more so Jill. For a bite sized intro, I loved this interview with Sarah Raven because you get to hear two badass women leading new ways of farming and creating! They talk about the intentionality of gardening and taking in the tiny, overlooked details of each bloom. Which on a corporate Friday is a tall order but maybe we can swing an uptick in classic smelling of the roses albeit not each petal. 

A potential method of doing just so- I was listening to Ezra Klein interview Michael Pollen on his book about consciousness and there is a mountain of good stuff in there including a bit was on lantern versus spotlight consciousness/attention. I've brought it up more times than necessary this week, especially with some of you! The simplification is that singular task focus/high executive focus is Spotlight and taking in everything is Lantern, and they make the point kids are a great example of Lantern attention all the time. I challenged myself to scale into Lantern while commuting and walking my dog this week: each block I (ironically) focused on taking in as much as I could in one of the five senses, rotated to a new sense for each new block, and then the last two blocks I tried to take all the things all at the same time. I'm not good at this nor an expert and there are centuries of expert work on this, but I did google it and found this neuro article that I liked. Take from it what you will.

I'm pretty convinced we're all going to need more things like that, especially as this AI-leaning crowd continues to overdose on AI tools a la Trunchbull's infamous chocolate cake. I've been thinking about what AI changes about cognitive decision making for a bit and am starting to see qualitative and quantitative science come out in the past month or so. The one that I think needs more air time, The brain side of human-AI interactions in the long-term: the “3R principle” | npj Artificial Intelligence, relates to my pet theory of AI cognitive risk, that integration of AI, often built to give options to select from, atrophies assessment and analytical areas of cognition while overtraining on selection (which humans are quite bad at normally). It's a theory paper, so I'm eagerly awaiting the imaging follow-ons, but uses neural plasticity fundamentals to argue that synaptic strength (what wires together fires together!) changes if a person interacts passively with AI- aka just accepting suggestions- as neural activity could remain below firing threshold. The hopeful element, which I've been noodling with folks in Microsoft's Thinking and Learning with AI research group on, is that if we start questioning/co-creating with AI we'll likely be activating that assessment/analytics muscle again. So, stay skeptical y'all!

Since we're on the topic of brains doing stuff, perhaps a double click into how music affects brains doing stuff. Many alma maters have sent me things on this lately like this fun one on how music primes our minds for social connection. The research shows that harmonious chord progressions actually stimulate the brain regions responsible for social perception. It also reminds me of neural synchrony, a topic I studied in grad school with Wharton's Neuroscience Initiative that is worth a deepdive imo. And they also just set science to a soundtrack! The same (amazing) team is looking into synchrony effects in and out of different parts of classical music groups while tracking brain response in real time with their own sensor suite that allows for less interrupted and more natural data gathering of brain signals during activities. 

This was pretty brain heavy so, hard fork, I've been digging this album 'Hard Hearted Woman' by Ora Cogan which is perfect for the the start of spring, and eerie enough to stop me from getting ahead of myself because June-uary is coming. On the nose, there are aromas of Fleetwood Mac and classic 70's folk, with mid-notes of Lana del Rey and the subtle tannins of a barely controlled punk rock pre-scream-drop that resolves instead into a glowy choir/strings/synth sunshine bath. But moreover, as someone who knows next to nothing about producing music, the mixing specifically pulling the guitar and percussive lines up forward more than usual really made it for me. Hope it makes it for you!

May the beam of your attention be the light fixture you need it to be,

Tori