Mary Martin

These findings are consistent with research demonstrating that mindfulness meditation increases positive emotions while decreasing negative and anxious emotions.

A lot of effective altruism organizations have made AI x-risk their top cause in the last few years,” explains Sayash Kapoor from Princeton. “That means a lot of the people who are getting funding to do AI research are naturally inclined, but also have been specifically selected, for their interest in reducing AI x-risk.”

Thus, the interest in AI... See more

For instance, studies on meditators have shown that their somatosensory perception is more sensitive to subtle internal sensations, potentially leading to both enhanced detection of bodily signals and misinterpretation of these signals (Mylius et al., 2023).

it’s hard to empirically quantify intelligence because it exists only relative to our expectations – expectations that are human and, moreover, individual to particular humans.

Roshi Joan Halifax tells a story about witnessing a conversation in the early 1970s between Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, and Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and systems theorist, about the mind. Bateson asked, “Where is the mind?” Salk pointed to his own head. Bateson chuckled, shook his head, and pointed to the space between... See more

The more you build your self-conception

on memory, which is notoriously unreliable, and the more you try to give yourself an identity

by constructing a narrative of your life, the less likely you are to understand who and what

you really are.

Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions — by their very existence as ideas — function causally to bring about their own reality.

A systematic review recently published in Mental Health and Physical Activity analyzed the results of 35 studies to look at the combined effects of mindfulness and exercise.

The results suggest that when combined, mindfulness and exercise might offer the most benefits for mental health.