[TT 003] Dreamscaping, COVID vaccine, Algorithms of Thought, visual metaphors, brain kissing, underpants profit
Howdy thrivers,
This past weekend my wife and I did a dreamscaping retreat focused on the topic Best Year Yet. We drove through a blizzard, skied an epic powder day (50 inches in 50 hours!), and both found the retreat rich with meaning and connection. Highly recommend it for any relationship (romantic or not).
I also wrote the first draft for my framework for reading scientific articles for non-academics. I believe the world can be a better place if we democratize (in a transparent way) scientific knowledge. So this is my first step in that direction, and I warmly welcome feedback from academics and non-academics alike.
Speaking of science for non-academics, I have an empowering invitation in the first section below. So let’s dive in to this edition of Thriving Thursday.
---
Invite to non-academic science talk titled “COVID-19: virus, vaccines, variants”
🙌 🔬 My brother is a world-class biochemist at UT Austin that has spent the last year working on COVID-related research (before that, his primary focus was DNA error correction).
Once COVID hit, he turned his unique superpowers (intellect, lab, communication skills) to do his part in solving a global crisis. In addition to contributing to the research on spike proteins used in some vaccines (patent-pending ;) ), he also donates his time to act as a bridge between scientific and non-scientific communities on key topics around the pandemic. If you can’t tell, I’m deeply impressed and inspired by how he is showing up for his communities and the world at large in these challenging times. 🙏 🙇
Now, my brother is offering layperson talks on the knowns and unknowns of the COVID vaccine, and he has graciously offered to do one for my larger community of family, friends, colleagues and their family, friends, colleagues, and their … basically, the more people that are knowledgeable and aware of the science, the better. This talk has no political or personal agenda beyond enabling folks outside the ivory tower to make informed decisions with the best available knowledge today.
I will be hosting a 1 hr Zoom call on Wednesday, Feb 17 @ 8pm CT with my brilliant and generous brother and his talk is COVID-19: virus, vaccines, variants.
If you have questions upfront, please notate them in the signup sheet. I’ll bundle questions and moderate the Q&A section at the end of the call.
Click here to sign up for an accessible COVID vaccine talk
Also, feel free to distribute this invite widely. The more people empowered with the best available information, the better off we all are.
On Algorithms of Thought
🤔 💬 One of the reasons I'm so inspired by the Roam Research community is the density of brilliance and high signal to noise ratio. For example, CortexFutura recently wrote an impactful article on Algorithms of Thought (AoT).
Algorithms of Thought then are procedures for thinking through a problem or situation to solve it.
AoTs sound crazy nerdy, but they are basically wired into our cognition from birth. The vast majority of humans do them the vast majority of the time ... subconsciously.
Prompt: I was invited to go for a hike next Saturday.
AoT: Well, what's the weather going to be like? Who all is going? What's the difficulty level? How is my body feeling? What else did I have planned for that day? And so on.
The brilliance of AoTs is creating a codified process to define the relevant considerations and make the thought sequence explicit. That way we don't skip over the steps that we forget, are inconvenient or, worse still, point away from the thing our inherently limited current worldview promotes. Bonus points that, in Roam, one can see every time a given AoT was activated and what came out of it. Pretty darn nifty.
It's awesome on an individual level, but it starts to get extra exciting when we share our AoTs like open-source software. From CortexFutura's follow up post on AoTs
If you’ve … set up the algorithm above … think about what just happened. I transmitted mental software over the Internet. If you find the algorithm useful, you can now use it, forever, without any more training. If you don’t, you can adjust it to your needs, and then publish your better version for others to use. Or to keep it to yourself, your own trade-secret.
For me personally, I like AoTs that are framed in a sequence of questions. I find questions to feel more human for prompting, almost like I’m having an honest conversation with (wiser) past and future myself. You’ll see an example of that in my reading academic articles for non-academics post.
I’m noodling hard on where I can apply AoTs in my daily life. I have a sneaking suspicion that I can create a library of anti-flow (or re-flow?) AoTs - whenever I drop out of a flow state, I pull up a laser-focused AoT, deliberately introspect for a pre-defined set of time, and let the currents pick me back up on my path. As I develop these, I’ll continue to publish them open-source, and hopefully, others will fork my cogware (mind software) and continually improve with their own experience and expertise. GitHub for collective conscious anyone? 🤔 indeed …
On designing visual metaphors
✍🏼 🕸 I am beyond impressed by the intellectual and creative talents of [[Maggie Appleton]]. She takes exceptionally abstract concepts and makes them into accessible, enjoyable, and intuitive illustrations (examples: APIs as robot waiters or her illustrated notes to Building A Second Brain (BASB)).
Not surprisingly, Maggie has a very structured workflow (an AoT even?) for how she develops her visual metaphors and abstract concept illustrations. She’s writing a 4-part case study and here is part 1.
I hope I have the privilege of collaborating with Maggie on a project someday.
On the brain waves of kissing
😘 🧠 A recent study published in Nature put a mobile EEG (brain wave measuring device) on couples and watched what happened when they hugged, kissed, and said nice things to each other. So far, the study happened in the living room and not the bedroom … yet.
Here is a quick graphic of the experimental vs. control groups:
Turns out, kissing a romantic partner tickles the left frontal lobe of your brain (right behind your forehead) and inhibits the right frontal lobe. Interestingly, damage to the right frontal lobe is associated with disinhibition, (sometimes dramatically) increased sexual drive, manic tendencies of rapidly oscillating emotional states, irrational behavior, and delusions of grandeur. Right frontal lobe damage can also impact certain qualities of speech
speech may be rushed, contaminated with unusual, tangential, and delusional ideas, and in some cases, melodic control over speech appears to be lost, such that the patient’s melody of voice may not correspond with or parallel what is being said
Ah yes, reminds me so of my teenage years …
On spinach that emails about bomb threats
🥬 📧 If anyone ever doubted “plant intelligence” just wait until they send you a text to duck and cover.
Not surprisingly, plants can be exceptionally sensitive sensors for things in the ground. Scientists at MIT learned that they can embed nanotubes into spinach to detect bomb materials in the soil, and I learned that nanobiotics is a word. (pop sci writeup, original academic article)
When the spinach roots detect the presence of nitroaromatics in groundwater, a compound often found in explosives like landmines, the carbon nanotubes within the plant leaves emit a signal. This signal is then read by an infrared camera, sending an email alert to the scientists.
The applications for this are mind-boggling. I totally appreciate the value in military and de-militarizing contexts, though they are less interesting to me. How can we turn this tech to facilitate regenerative practices to re-thrive our natural landscapes?
Or even use it to facilitate human thriving? One of the known challenges with our depleted soils is that the food we grow today is significantly less nutrient-dense than that of our grandparents. Is it possible to grow scouter nano-plants that track the micro- and macro-nutrient loads in soil to optimize for growing nutrient-dense foods? And can those nano-plants simultaneously be engineered to clean our air, our water, or anything else we’ve polluted along the way?
OK, and the most important question - can I still eat that spinach? And will it send a tweet from my digestive tract? Talk about a grumbling stomach …
On a business … plan?? … for underpants
So that’s where all my underpants (and socks?) go when they get lost in the dryer …
Sounds like a lot of business plans that I observe in the tech space. Just remember Step 3!!
---
Until next week,
~Henry