Olivia
Online
Brain in Tuition
@BrainInTuition
Hong Kong
Joined September 2015
1.3K Following
79 Followers
893 Posts
What happens when neurons meet silicon? A new world emerges.
Partnering with Amazon to bring it to customers. DM me for early access.
BRAININTUITION
You don't have one brain. You have five — and most people only ever use one or two at a time. Pet the Lizard. Feed the Mouse. Brief the Monkey. Release the Dolphin. Direct the Octopus.
Master all five and you operate at a level most people never reach.
https://t.co/jjUstzcNVy
@videoclaw Videoclaw
Who to follow
Luca Pappalardo
@lucpappalard
Researcher at @IstiCnr | Professor at @scuolanormale | #AI | #HumanMobility | #ComputationalSocialScience | behind @scikitmobility
Rohit Sharma
@piandro3142
Doctor (Neurology/Neuro-Ophthalmology Fellow, ex-Oxford ANZAN Fellow) | Editor @Radiopaedia | Enthusiast of: cricket, AFL, jogging, hiking, bánh mì
Emily C. Kemp, PhD (she)**on academic job market**
@emily_kemp7
T32 postdoc fellow @UCSD researching CU traits & youth externalizing | formerly @CHSConsortium/@MedUnivSC, @LSU, & @Yale | #BLM #translivesmatter | opinions=own
4 billion years of human evolution unfold in minutes
[🎞️ thebrainmaze]
Define OpenScience
I just launched an AI model based on sleep data… and it accurately predicts your age.
I teamed up with @m_franceschetti, and it's now available on their platforms.
It turns out you have a sleep fingerprint. This research can identify you out of thousands of users from one night's signal with 92.5% accuracy.
It also detects…
+ biological age within 3.3 years
+ diabetes better than Apple’s model
+ speed of aging
+ heart failure at 0.822
This Eight Sleep model is possibly the most accurate contactless bioage estimate ever reported.
What we did:
#1 What data was it built on?
This model was built on the largest raw biosignal dataset ever used to train an AI, from any device, including every wearable on the market.
> 2.04 million hours
> 136,575 participants
> 498k sessions
> 122 million segments
#2 What can it predict?
It can predict your biological age (the age your body acts like) within 3.3 years.
It also predicts heart-related and metabolic conditions. Here are the detection scores (AUROC):
> diabetes (0.852)
> heart failure (0.82)
> hypertension (0.810)
> sleep apnea (0.792)
> snoring (0.751)
> general heart conditions (0.734)
> cancer (0.678)
> hot flashes (0.671)
> migraines (0.673)
#3 How was it built?
Interestingly, the pretraining task was not “predict someone’s age”. The model was tasked with comparing two 60 second windows across different nights to figure out if the nights belonged to the same person.
To do that, it had to find someone’s ‘sleep fingerprint’. These are biological signals that the data is coming from the same person. Things like how forcefully your heart contracts, your breathing depth and rhythm, and the timing of the recoil wave each heartbeat sends through your body.
Those signals are age-predictive. It learned to estimate age, detect diabetes, and flag heart failure as a downstream readout.
The whole pretraining run was ~four days.
#4 Why is it good at age?
The reason aging prediction is accurate is mechanical. Aging stiffens arteries, reduces cardiac compliance, changes autonomic tone, HRV declines. Aging also alters sleep architecture. Deep sleep shrinks and fragmentation rises.
Every one of those changes the recoil waveform and its overnight dynamics.
Said differently, the heart of a 65 year old mechanically pushes the body differently than a 25 year old's.
#5 Why a bed vs wearables?
A bed is an elegant solution. It makes a high fidelity uninterrupted 5 to 10 hour recording every single night possible. And session-level sequence modeling becomes viable.
Whereas wearables get fragmented data: battery limits, sparse snippets, people taking the watch off, adherence dropping over weeks.
#6 More data, better prediction
The bigger the training batches (the more people the model compares at once) the better it got, log-linearly (R²=0.982).
That means the recipe is predictable: you can forecast improvement with more compute, the same way scaling laws work for language models.
The current model only ever compares two nights at a time, and the average training user contributed under 4 nights.
The team's stated next step is modeling 30+ consecutive nights per person. You can imagine how this will improve with the constant stream of data Eight Sleep gets every night.
—
It’s worth noting some limitations. Internal labels are self-reported and external cohorts are small, and that this is a research milestone, not a diagnostic device.
What makes this exciting: a passive, daily activity like sleep can now provide meaningful insight into your well-being.
I speak often of Autonomous Health, a world where the things around us take care of us without our knowing or asking.
Eight Sleep is a great example of this in practice and a major reason I maintain so much optimism for the future of health.
neuroscientists say your brain does not verify truth or lies. it responds to repetition. when you repeat a thought, your brain strengthens the neural pathway linked to it. over time, that pathway becomes automatic. this process is called neuroplasticity.
Failure is king
"The fastest way to trigger neuroplasticity isn't playing brain games or reading research papers.
It's forcing your brain to fail repeatedly at something you have zero natural talent for. high frustration is the literal chemical signal that forces synaptic rewiring."
90% of the thoughts you had today are identical to the ones you had yesterday.
in this clip, dr. joe dispenza breaks down metacognition, the power to step back and observe your own thinking instead of blindly believing every thought.
if you don't master metacognition, you aren't choosing your life, you're just running an old script on autopilot.
how to use metacognition to catch bad mental loops before they ruin your day in the article below.
https://t.co/OTLFKcqkzq
Please read
The Adolescence of Technology: an essay on the risks posed by powerful AI to national security, economies and democracy—and how we can defend against them: https://t.co/0phIiJjrmz
https://t.co/hucpQQ0aAr
This is a scary article but with balanced views. This is happening right now.
https://t.co/GCz7g67znl
I am confident at this point that restoring full body functionality is possible with @neuralink
Amazing
Neuralink will start high-volume production of brain-computer interface devices and move to a streamlined, almost entirely automated surgical procedure in 2026.
Device threads will go through the dura, without the need to remove it. This is a big deal.
The entropic brain today https://t.co/r2JVr8MD7D via @OsfFramework
First mushroom trip data is out: my brain activity.
Dose: 5 g dried Psilocybe cubensis (B+ strain)
Containing 24.9 mg psilocybin
Psilocybin longevity experiment.
What we see in the brain:
+ brain activity data mirror my subjective experience
+ strong decrease in my brain’s control center (prefrontal + premotor cortex)
+ strong increase in sensory, auditory and speech integration
+ higher entropic brain patterns: open, flexible, less predictable, exploratory
+ brain network patterns resembling a youthful state vs aged and rigid
Matching what I reported experiencing:
+ “felt like my consciousness was dialed up to 10/10.”
+ “I felt hyper aware and hyper alive.”
+ “I experienced sense of touch with awe.”
+ “my mind was insatiably curious and wanted to deploy its sensors into the world and discover all things.”
+ “My brain wanted to stare, study and marvel.”
+ “The flavor exploded in my mouth.”
+ “...restored my perception to youthful levels, returning them to factory settings and dissolving my aged numbness.”
Why this could matter for longevity:
+ In people aged 65-85, higher happiness was linked to a 22% reduced risk of all-cause mortality over 15 years.
+ A meta-analysis showed that optimism correlated with a 35% decrease in heart attacks and a 16% decrease in all-cause mortality.
+ Having a strong purpose in life is associated with a 17% reduction in both heart attacks and all-cause mortality.
+ In psychedelic medicine, treating depression with ketamine has been shown to reverse biological age by up to 3 years.
Together, these findings suggest a plausible mechanism by which psychedelics, including psilocybin, can prolong both health and lifespan by improving mental well-being and rewiring the brain to a more positive, creative, and curious state.
My team and I hypothesized that neuroplasticity, the loosening of rigid inhibitory patterns that makes the brain more flexible, creative, and relaxed, and even the subjective psychedelic state itself may be as meaningful for longevity as methylation shifts, senescence reversal, or telomere biology.
What’s happening mechanistically
Earlier work shows that psilocin (the active metabolite of psilocybin) acts primarily as an agonist at 5-HT₂A serotonin receptors in the cortex. These receptors are especially dense in high-level association and sensory regions, as mapped in a high-resolution PET/MRI atlas of the human serotonin system.
When these receptors are activated, brain imaging studies show an induced state of desynchronization, entropy, and neuroplasticity. This process erodes the rigid brain hierarchy and default mode networks in favor of a brain-wide spontaneous, creative, curious, and child-like state.
Kernel Flow data shows the same pattern:
The recorded timepoints included:
+ baseline: directly before session start (not shown)
+ timepoint 1: 4 hrs after dose (acute phase effects).
+ timepoint 2: end of the day, before bedtime.
+ timepoint 3: the following morning.
I continue to measure my brain daily.
Image notes
+ The three maps show changes vs. baseline (not absolute activity)
+ Red = increased connectivity, blue = decreased connectivity vs. my baseline.
+ The left reference map shows the 5-HT₂A receptor distribution from PET, the main psilocybin target.
Time Point 1 - 3 hrs post dose
+ Reduced connectivity in the prefrontal and premotor cortex, correlating with acute brain desynchronization.
+ Increased connectivity and hyperintegration between the primary motor and sensory cortex regions.
+ Enhanced connectivity in the auditory and speech areas of the cortex.
+ Inhibited connectivity in the medial prefrontal and posterior zones, areas associated with the Default Mode Network (DMN).
Subjective experience:
+ Enhanced sensory vividness and bodily presence: The brain's top-down hierarchy, originating in the pre-frontal cortex, was attenuated. This reduced predictive filtering, leading to a flood of bottom-up sensory information and heightened bodily perception (e.g., a fascination with water and light dynamics in a jar, a restored, primal joy of touch and sensation).
+ Peak neuroplasticity and cortical entropy: A peak in cortical entropy and neuroplasticity contributed to a feeling of hyperawareness (e.g., heightened sensory perception, feeling "at one with existence," hyper-aware and hyper-alive).
+ Deeper appreciation of music and uninhibited movement and expression: Sharpened auditory senses and reduced top-down inhibition allowed music to be enjoyed on a profound level. Concomitant functional connectivity in speech-motor and auditory-motor integration areas facilitated uninhibited expression through both speech and movement (a restored, uninhibited, child-like joy of music).
+ Note: Full ego dissolution was not experienced, which may necessitate a higher dose to achieve more advanced desynchronization of the prefrontal and parietal cortices.
Time point 2 - 5 hrs post dose, end of trip
+ Intensified sensory and motor hyperconnectivity.
+ Continued increased connectivity in auditory and speech centers, with a relative restoration of connectivity to the speech understanding area.
+ Partial re-emergence of the prefrontal parietal coupling, while prefrontal context remains partially inhibited.
+ Partial re-emergence of connectivity in areas related to the default mode network.
Subjective Experience
+ High-order brain networks begin to restabilize, alongside persisting sensory, motor, auditory, and speech hyperconnectivity, suggesting neuroplasticity in action.
+ The narrative shifts from pure sensation and experience to meaning generation, accompanied by deep philosophical reflection (e.g., reconsidering the meaning of life and one's relationship with mortality in the time of AI, and pondering the future of human evolution).
Time point 3 - next morning (afterglow)
+ Persistence: Patterns from the acute phase continue, including general prefrontal cortex inhibition, ongoing neuronal plasticity, and heightened senses.
+ Intensified connectivity: Increased connectivity is noted in the speech generation area and the somatic sensory association area.
+ DMN inhibition: The default mode network remains inhibited.
Subjective Experience:
+ "Afterglow" effect: Characterized by continued sharpened senses, calm clarity, emotional openness, and low inhibitions. For instance, I felt more comfortable expressing uninhibited, self-deprecating humor (i.e. my post making fun of myself about the insane lengths I go for my Don’t Die experiment)
+ Integration of experience learnings: The heightened activity in the somatic sensory association area aligns with the process of integrating and "making sense" of the raw sensory experience of both the self and the external world.
+ Enhanced creativity: The intensified connectivity in the speech generation area contributed to the uninhibited bout of creative writing I undertook to report my experience.
Ok, here is my trip report from 4.67 grams of magic mushrooms, 24.9 mg of psilocybin. The dose used in modern clinical trials.
First, the experience was exhilarating. Positive in every way. I felt like a kid finding and exploring a new playground.
My sensory perception was dialed up to levels I must have felt as a kid but have been dulled with time. I experienced sense of touch with awe. Feeling my fingers rub together felt novel. Touching my skin and running my feet over the threaded quilt lit up my brain. It seemed that my mind was insatiably curious and wanted to deploy its sensors into the world and discover all things.
I felt the same sensory joy in moving my body. Rolling my joints, curving my back, curling up in a ball, flexing muscles and moving all about in a fluid fashion. My body felt nimble, supple, fit, and strong.
My sense of hearing was equally as elevated. It helped that I was also wearing my new hearing aids which restore frequencies I’d long stopped noticing. The music I listened to hit more fully than I have memory.
My facilitator gave me some water in a glass jar. The visuals of the light reflections, water dynamics and sensory experience of holding the glass were so fascinating that I forgot to drink. My brain wanted to stare, study and marvel.
One of the most satisfying things I discovered was taking huge, deep breaths. Inhaling life and fueling the body’s needs and wants. I did it over and over and over. This material of existence, all around us, was available and free to be mined. You just needed to breathe in.
(After peaking and coming down, I ate a salad. It tasted like the most delicious food I’d ever eaten. The flavor exploded in my mouth. I savored every bite.)
At one point, I felt like my entire body was still. I had a perceived sense of total body control. Like my heart had stopped. Complete stillness. This was surprising as I’m acutely tuned to my heart beat. I monitor my heart all day every day and can usually discern my heart rate by sensation. In that moment, I couldn’t feel my heart beat or any pulse pressure through my blood vessels. First time that’s ever happened. I asked Kate to check my heart rate on my wearable and it was mid 50s. I wasn’t worried. Just curious about my sensory experience.
With this heightened sense of sensory perception, it felt like my consciousness was dialed up to 10/10. I felt hyper aware and hyper alive.
It felt like mushrooms restored my perception to youthful levels, returning them to factory settings and dissolving my aged numbness.
Once my senses were reset, my attention sifted from the texture of existence to existence itself.
We spend most of our time playing games at the layers of people, dramas, companies, politics, jobs, money, ideologies, and status. Underneath these games is the knowing that physical death has been inevitable. Everyone before us has died.
When death is inevitable, people pick their game among a wide array of options including reincarnation, heaven, legacy, offspring, ancestral veneration, existentialism and many more. These frameworks make death soothing, a virtue, and something positive to be anticipated.
But what if death is no longer inevitable? I’m not suggesting immortality. I am suggesting a radical remake of human life. The speed of progress in AI, biology and medicine point to a new frontier of possibility. Are we cavemen-equivalent now compared to what we will be like in 50 years? It’s now harder to argue why we should limit our imagination.
With so much promise, why have we not shifted our societal attention to secure our own existence? To solve aging. To address existential risks. To care for our planet. Why are we still messing around with self destruction, war and ignoring preserving our own existence?
We work hard to be fit. To learn a skill. Build a relationship. To make money. When we identify an opportunity, we focus and work hard. It seems to me that we’re not yet aware or awake to the opportunity of what existence could become.
Whatever one’s life philosophy and belief of what happens after this life, the majority of us want to live to see tomorrow. We have stuff going on and things to look forward to. And when tomorrow arrives, we want to see the next day. Wanting tomorrow is functionally equivalent to wanting infinitely.
The want to exist is deeply embedded in all of us. Our actions prove this every day.
Humans have been the alpha form of intelligence for a while now, imposing our will upon all we can. Our powers have increased dramatically in the past few decades. We can edit our own DNA, design materials at the nano scale, and build thinking machines.
Our alpha status is now challenged by AI. Whether AI is friend or foe, and in what ways, and on what timelines is anyone’s guess. No one knows.
Mushrooms opened up my sensory awareness of this landscape to depths I hadn’t accessed before. My ability to see and understand felt like the movie Inception, where characters take a sedative to enter a different realm to carry out missions. A space as real as what we experience each day, but with different foundational pillars of reality.
It felt convincing that without the aid of a reality expanding intervention (like mushrooms), you can’t really see or understand this dimension, handicapping awareness.
While in this mushroom-induced dimension, it felt clear that we are about to start waking up from a slumber that has hypnotized us into accepting death. This will happen faster than people think. Once people see a practical path to extending a healthy life, they will adopt ferociously.
The body positivity movement came to mind. Most people don’t really want to be overweight and unhealthy. But when we want something we can’t achieve, we come up with moral frameworks about why we didn’t want it in the first place (i.e. sour grapes). Once GLP-1s came about, people’s attitudes changed overnight. The same will happen with aging. No one wants to be crippled and handicapped by age.
This awakening will also come about with the emergence of new ideologies.
Revolutions erupt when a civilization’s founding myth becomes incompatible with its reality. The system fractures, dissolves, and opens up space for new meaning to rush in and replace it.
This pattern has been repeated throughout history.
> The agrarian empires (800-200 BCE) ruled via tribal power and violence, creating a moral crisis that gave rise to Buddhism, Greek philosophy, Judaism and Confucianism.
> Feudalism (1600-1800) ruled via divine monarchy, creating a stagnation crisis that gave rise to rational inquiry, the scientific method, individual rights and democracy.
> Industrial capitalism (1848-1945) ruled via mechanization and labor exploitation, creating a crisis of alienation, mass poverty and urban chaos that gave rise to socialism, nationalism, regulation and collective rights.
> Liberal capitalism (1980-2025) ruled via consumer sovereignty and free markets, creating a crisis of attention capture, metabolic collapse and existential despair that will give rise to something new. Capitalism solved for scarcity. Its defining virtue was freedom to choose. Ironically and perhaps inevitably, compulsion replaced scarcity and freedom decayed into addiction.
Revolution is at our doorstep.
Our current systems are fractured, evolving, and opening up space for new meaning to rush in and replace it. Change has been a reliable feature of human society. It will happen on accelerated timescales given the pace of technological and scientific advance.
After journeying this terrain, I was left feeling unbridled enthusiasm for the future of existence. That we may be the equivalent of cavemen trying to anticipate a future that is unimaginable to our current minds. And that existence could be more exquisite than any can actually paint at this moment.
New archetypes will emerge: warriors and caretakers of existence. People who are defiant of death, and view self-destruction as primitive and low-status. Who take the continuation of human existence as seriously as profits, fame or power. They will emerge as our high-status societal idols.
The irony is that people thought this experience would collapse my interest in life and have me willfully kneeling to death.
To find truth though, one must always invert.
What seems more likely is that people use death to shield from the disappointment of not experiencing the potential of life without the limitations of death.
"I think it's possible for a machine to be conscious. The brain itself is a big machine.
If biology can do it, I don't see why Silicon cannot do it. "
~ David Chalmers, renowned cognitive scientist known for his work on "hard problem of consciousness"
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