John-Jon Steyn

MSc AI Student | BSc Computing | AI / XR Software Engineer

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

Lifting weights is linked to better academic performance.

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

IBM Training Manual from 1979.

[Aadit Sheth @aaditsh]

The most dangerous addiction today isn't a substance.

Research on 100,000 people confirms that heavy short-form video use is just voluntary cognitive decline. We are actively training our brains to fail at hard tasks.

If you can simply sit with a problem for 10 minutes without swiping, you have a massive competitive advantage.

Basically, boredom is the new IQ.

[alphaXiv @askalphaxiv]

Introducing quickarXiv

Papers are often written in convoluted language that is hard to understand. We're fixing that.

Swap arxiv → quickarxiv on any paper URL to get an instant blog with figures, insights, and explanations. Now extracted with DeepSeek OCR 🚀

[nature @Nature]

A new technique called ‘mind captioning’ generates descriptive sentences of what a person is seeing or picturing in their mind using a read-out of their brain activity

https://t.co/AyhnpPMk1m

[William A. Wallace, Ph.D. @WilliamWallace]

Your brain is rewiring itself right now.

What you’re seeing

This video captures neuroplasticity, the process where neurons form, strengthen, or prune their connections in real time. Electrical signals and calcium bursts act as guides, showing how experience physically reshapes the brain.

🟡 Strengthens active connections to form memories
🟡 Removes weaker ones to refine performance
🟡 Keeps neural networks balanced and efficient

These microscopic adjustments happen constantly, turning every thought, habit, and challenge into a structural change.

💡 The bigger picture
Neuroplasticity is how learning, adaptation, and recovery take shape. It is the biological record of your experiences; the brain building itself, one connection at a time.

Credit: Nicholas Fabiano

[Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus]

AI Turns Brain Activity Into Sentences

Researchers have created a “mind-captioning” AI that translates brain activity into full descriptive sentences, not just keywords.

Using fMRI scans and deep-language models, the system decodes what people see or imagine with surprising detail, effectively narrating mental scenes. Beyond its sci-fi appeal, the technology could unlock new ways to understand perception and help those with speech loss regain communication.

[nature @Nature]

A new technique called ‘mind captioning’ generates descriptive sentences of what a person is seeing or picturing in their mind using a read-out of their brain activity, with impressive accuracy.

https://t.co/RcPIYm2t0F

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

Neuroplasticity doesn't have an expiry date.

Go learn that new thing today.

This is a single neuron with countless connections.

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

The world is a reflection of your state of thinking.

No one is bothering you.

It's you fighting yourself.

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

Coffee consumption is associated with increased brain white matter integrity & cortical thickness.

[John-Jon Steyn @JohnJon_Steyn]

#Cognitive #Neuroscience helps us connect brain activity to behaviour - showing how #perception, #memory, and #emotion emerge from #neural circuits.

[John-Jon Steyn @JohnJon_Steyn]

Today, we can actually watch the brain at work.
Through #neuroimaging - #MRI and #CT scans - scientists can see how blood, energy, and activity move through living tissue, revealing the regions that come alive as we read, imagine, or feel.

[Nicholas Fabiano, MD @NTFabiano]

People with greater purpose in life have mitochondria optimized for energy transformation in their brain.

[elvis @omarsar0]

LLMs can get "Brain Rot"!

Continual pretraining on junk, high-engagement web text causes lasting "cognitive decline" in LLMs, reducing reasoning, long-context, and safety performance.

The main failure mode is thought-skipping, where models skip reasoning steps and adopt “dark” personality traits like narcissism and low agreeableness.

Even strong mitigations such as reflection or further fine-tuning only partially reverse the damage, making data curation a critical safety concern for AI training.

[Carnivore Aurelius ©🥩 ☀️🦙 @AlpacaAurelius]

negative thinking destroys your brain

being a silly goose and delusionally optimistic is the ultimate longevity hack

[alphaXiv @askalphaxiv]

Introducing NotebookLM for arXiv papers 🚀

Transform dense AI research into an engaging conversation

With context across thousands of related papers, it captures motivations, draws connections to SOTA, and explains key insights like a professor who's read the entire field

[Alex Veremeyenko @alex_verem]

ai scientists are here - and they’re already publishing research.

there’s a new AI system called AI Scientist-v2 - and it doesn’t just answer questions. it comes up with the questions itself. it forms hypotheses, runs experiments, analyzes the results, and then writes full scientific papers based on what it finds.

and here’s the part that should make you stop scrolling: one of those papers was submitted for peer review (the same process real scientists use) and it was accepted at the same rate as human-written research. no human steering the wheel. no shortcuts. it did the whole process alone.

this isn’t “ai helping scientists.” this is the scientist. it’s not a tool sitting quietly in the corner - it’s doing the thinking, the testing, the writing. it’s stepping into a role we thought only humans could fill.

think about what that means. hundreds of these AIs could be unleashed on physics, biology, medicine… proposing bold new ideas around the clock and running experiments faster than any human lab ever could. discoveries that might have taken decades could now happen in months.

and maybe the biggest shift isn’t technical - it’s philosophical. if machines can now generate new knowledge, if they can discover things… then what does it mean to be a scientist? what becomes of “human discovery” when intelligence itself is something we can scale like code?

this isn’t the future. this is happening right now.

[Fruitful Fig @Fruitful_Fig]

Urgent things shout. Important things whisper. 🌿

The urgent keeps the world spinning — but the important keeps you centered. 💜

☕ https://t.co/OE8QA9bCCB
🌿 https://t.co/JpdPm6Wp2A

#FaithfulMotherhood #FruitfulFig #IntentionalLiving

[MIT CSAIL @MIT_CSAIL]

Linear regression, as explained by @rfeers.