children born without neocortex can be behaviorally ~indistinguishable from children w full neocortex. laughing smiling eating

Jasmine is a friend of mine and I saw firsthand her and Mikita’s integrity and dedication to OpenAI’s safety team. disappointing to see this sudden ousting

protestant ethic equates struggle with toughness with good. that only makes sense if you believe that you are either 'tough' or 'soft'. gandalf, milarepa, siddhartha were both

unfortunately the state of science on migraines is abysmal. the distinctions between eg ‘migraine’, ‘tension headache’, and ‘exercise headache’ is not coherent peter goadsby (who was at the workshop where the international classification was proposed) says in his presentation: “i don’t know anyone i respect who can put an evidence based sentence together on the subject of tension-type headaches” as he mocks the classification system

ran this summit a couple weekends ago in santa barbara about bringing rigor to mindbody practices. we had people from antonio damasio's lab, a neuromotor expert and somatic therapist, a close student of karl friston. more soon

i'm running an experiment! i want to better quantify change during pain reprocessing therapy. if you have chronic pain and are interested in receiving treatment from an expert PRT practitioner at a discounted rate, dm or email me at [email protected] four slots open

one of the biggest challenges in the face of healing chronic illness is epistemic: how do you know what to trust? there's an archetypal hero's journey through healing chronic illness: hero is sick and confused, turns to the medical establishment, which fails to comprehend her condition. she is thrown into The Wilds, and turns to healers and practices of increasing strangeness (mindbody medicine, reiki, occultic rituals). If things go well, at some point she reaches a depth of transformation where the illness is beheld in full and integration happens one of our biggest problems is that the gulf between the Medical Establishment and The Wilds. with physical therapy, you can audit the (often incorrect) mechanistic claims about pain to then reason about what can and can't help. when it comes to an approach like the Abrahamson auric cleansing (a prominent example many have used to stop smoking), you can't audit the claims. you have to go by vibes and toss aside what we do know about human biology or physics we can and need to establish a clearer map of The Wilds, which means a new science of health. there are lots of great albeit scattered efforts (interoception science, fascial conferences, computational neurophenomenology) -- everything i write is an attempt at clarifying this

revisiting sound wave physics rn workflow: 1. skim chapters of edelman's 'understanding ultrasound physics', 2. take a printed test from a generated quiz pdf 3. use fable to grade my responses and update cards in a space repetition system enormously better than my old anki setup

in my mind the biggest contribution of john sarno is the idea that chronic pain can actually be resolved outside of sarno's influence, the people studying chronic pain mainly seem to believe that it is a lifelong thing you have to manage. even suggesting that chronic pain can go away is heretical in some circles i've been in. it perhaps should be unsurprising there seem to be much fewer cases of resolution in those cases. obviously this is not true in every case (the buddha had back pain, so do a number of very accomplished practitioners), but to deny that this is possible for so many people is an enormous tragedy. pain can, for many people be unlearned!

remember when mathematics used to be the language of the gods?

my favorite marker of spiritual integration is whether the person can reliably show up on time, for friends or work