Mary Martin

In recent years, neuroimaging has provided evidence to suggest that imagining the future relies on much of the same neural machinery as remembering the past. One hypothesis that such findings motivate is that memories must be reactivated in order to extract the information needed to “flesh out” detailed simulations. Indeed, if simulations involve... See more

In other words, there’s never been a better time to become an effective altruist! Get in now, while it’s still unpopular! The times when everyone fawns over us are boring and undignified. It’s only when you’re fighting off the entire world that you feel truly alive.

a particularly vivid form of future thinking: the imaginative construction or simulation of scenarios that might occur in one’s future. We hypothesized that the flexible use of episodic details from memory during imaginative simulations of the future can help to understand constructive aspects of memory, such as its susceptibility to distortion... See more

we tell ourselves that humans do something clever or tactical because our brains have simulated that this course of action will produce favourable outcomes, but when we learn that ants do the same thing by enacting preprogrammed responses to pheromones, surely that doesn’t count.

The hippocampus has been a focus in the study of recombination during simulation – perhaps unsurprising given the established role of this structure in relational processing, including the binding together of disparate elements during working memory as well as episodic encoding and retrieval (Axmacher et al., 2010; Eichenbaum, 2001; Hannula &... See more

When you apply possibility thinkingin your daily life, it can give you a powerful sense of agency. It can help you find innovative solutions to actually do what you want to do, in one form or another.

LY Corporation has been digging through the data for Pokémon Sleep, and the overall results show that users have been resting easy and well since the app came out.

Per this framework, main ingredient to meaningful & flourishing lives: Expand "the phenotypic bound on the amount of surprise people can tolerate in their lives," or: inhabit the goldilocks zone of uncertainty. Fun paper by @PredictiveLife & @JulianKiverste1. Few other riffs:... See more

While early tech leaders hoped to liberate humanity from hierarchical governments, their products instead multiplied the available channels for exerting control.