xAI had a lot of negotiating power here because Anthropic had ~0 comparable options and ultimately desperately needed the compute now. So, it wouldn't surprise me if data sharing was an explicit part of the agreement
I appreciate that you feel this way, but the mechanisms behind exactly which neural circuits are activated by TMS are simply not yet fully understood.
From 2024:
> Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive, FDA-cleared treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders with broad potential for new applications, but the neural circuits that are engaged during TMS are still poorly understood.
Not necessarily - I think it works like Daniel Kahneman's System 1 and System 2. Your conscious system is System 2 - when it's not working correctly, you just fall back to System 1.
Independently, since the whole idea relies on resonance, it may be the case that an fMRI doesn't actually interfere with the "stochastic resonance" mechanic quite like TMS (transcranial magnetic simulation) seems to.
In cognitive psychology there's all sorts of evidence that we have two distinct processes, but I don't think anyone has really mapped it to a physical system yet.
Modeling two physical systems is pretty interesting though because dementia ends up looking like a clear failure of System 2. Really neat idea generator even if imperfect.
I think Daniel Kahneman's System 1 (habits, unconscious) and System 2 (learning, "error correction", conscious) are physical systems, and System 2 takes a LOT more energy to run.
So, when you get tired, System 2 leans more and more on the much more energy efficient System 1. So you get behaviors that look like unrestrained habits: poor impulse control, lowered emotional regulation, etc
These have always felt like symptoms of the problem to me, so perhaps just downstream effects! Definitely not sure, obviously plenty of complexity to this one.
I think this is the interesting question. I'm an extremely deep sleeper and almost nothing wakes me up while I'm sleeping, but I've found that I naturally sleep significantly longer if my bedroom has too much light or there's a significant amount of noise around me while I'm asleep. So despite not actually waking up consciously, I think I sometimes end up in this partial wake state where I'm not getting proper REM sleep and as a result, not actually getting the rest I need.
It wouldn't surprise me if this is often the case for people who feel they need more sleep. Having proper blackout shades and full silence (via ear plugs or otherwise) during sleep allows me to sleep a significantly shorter period of time as measured by however long I end up staying asleep. I typically don't use an alarm, so it's fascinating to be able to notice that natural difference in how long my body seems to need before booting back up.
Interesting anecdote - the pandemic is what triggered my awareness of this effect. When I'm at home alone sleeping (typically into the late morning, I'm a night owl), my dog will sleep with me. When my girlfriend started working from home from early in the morning, he would wake up with her and bark loudly at the occasional activity outside. I suddenly couldn't wake up on my normal schedule, even though I wasn't actually consciously woken up by the barking. The thought occurred to me that it could still be the barking and something related to the depth of the sleep, so I tried ear plugs + having my girlfriend close the bedroom door. Suddenly I was back to sleeping normal hours. Years of strange sleeping pattern problems were explained in an instant.
I would imagine the group of people who immediately accepted everything this book claimed as fact and went on to immediately adjust their lifestyles to match may have a strong correlation with the group of people who are more susceptible to the placebo effect.
I didn't make it through the first chapter before I started looking into the accuracy of the claims he was making. Some of them were clearly bananas.
Immensely frustrating how many people are citing his book in a thread about one of your own blog posts, of all places. I was so glad to see your post about it at the time, and this experiment is an interesting follow up.
"Why We Sleep" is everything wrong with "science" today, and as a person who also isn't a huge fan of sleeping, I'm desperate to understand the real drawbacks to a lack of sleep. That dumpster fire of a book has set back honest research on the subject by years.
Just venting, as I know you agree. Thanks again for your contributions to sanity.