Michael Dow

Clinical psychologist interested in mind-body, pain, meditation, couples, psychoanalysis, neuroscience. Oh and bikes, gardens, poems, resisting fascism.

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@maxkshen Yup. Same.

[Fiona @Fionas_Story]

A thread full of recoveries from severe M.E using brain retraining. And this is just the tip of the iceberg of recoveries.

Sharing always in the hope this helps people. I never believed I would recover

https://t.co/NkcHiYyj8L

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@maxkshen Yes I have these too. People have no idea.

[Awais Aftab @awaisaftab]

Depends, if “related to” simply means “involved” in a general embodied sense, that’s true but it doesn’t privilege metabolism since one can also say that about genetics, neurochemistry, neurocircuitry, etc. It is, however, reductive to say that mental illnesses are disorders OF metabolism; you have taken a disorder attribution at a higher level (psychological-behavioral) and reduced it to a disordered processed at a lower level. When true, reductionism is a powerful scientific tool, but I don’t believe the reduction of mental disorders to disorders of metabolism is true.

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@ZacharyGrinDPT @Yrrepmot @tylerblack32 There is a middle ground here. Neuroplastic symptoms. The symptoms are real but not caused (or no longer caused) by a biomedical mechanism. There is a social component but to call them a fad is demeaning imho.

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@powellAtlantic Hey Michael! Can you DM me your email, or email me at [email protected], I have a geneology question for you.

[Sheila Macrine, Ph.D. @MacrinePhD]

Is categorization something the brain does after perceiving the world, or is it how perception happens in the first place?
A groundbreaking Perspective by Lisa Feldman Barrett and Earl K. Miller in Nature Reviews Neuroscienceargues that categorization is completely "baked" into our neural infrastructure.
Rather than a final-stage sorting process, categorization occurs from the very moment a sensory signal enters the brain. Driven by predictive feedback loops that start at the limbic core, the brain continuously constructs functional context to optimize energy and anticipate metabolic needs (allostasis).
In short: meaning and metabolism are deeply intertwined, and your brain is constantly grouping the world to keep your body running efficiently. @MillerLabMIT https://t.co/S3e5ag5nlI
#Neuroscience #CognitiveScience #BrainResearch #Categorization #Allostasis #PredictiveProcessing #Neuroanatomy

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

Another great book about recovery, this one regarding mental illness.

Most of Us Recover: Taking a Fresh Look at Extreme Mental States https://t.co/IM10cwk2Z1

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@Fionas_Story @cfs_research @supertri_ Way to go Fiona!

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@Fionas_Story Yes. X isn’t exactly a representative sample is it?

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@sanilrege Thank you so much Dr Rege. I appreciate you putting this framework/model together. Wow!

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@KemtrupTweets Are you familiar with PRT, EAET and the Association for the Treatment of Neuroplastic Symptoms? We’re all about this. Happy to chat more if you’re interested.

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@sbuehler This looks fantastic! Thanks for writing and I am bookmarking to come back and read and check out these books. I don’t know any of them and they all look good.

[Anna Gát 🧭 @TheAnnaGat]

Having run a conversation salon platform for 7 years, we've learned so much about human communication that I don't (yet) see LLMs get right.

1- Musicality:

Human conversation is incredibly musical in that it is all about the rhythm. After the entry point, people relax into the melody or get upset by it. The "music" can be a solo, a duet, or a symphony when it's a group conversation. A human discussion will be as positive or constructive as the "music" that it becomes allows.

As with music, a key element in human conversation is silence. When there is a gap, people can process, connect, think. In the 1970s the couple's therapist John Gottman tried to mathematize his sessions with patients, and found something similar. Esther Perel also told me that in couple's therapy (one of the highest stakes conversations a person can have), the rhythm and musicality are more important than what is being said. Counterintuitive but true.

Even in text messages, people have learned instinctively how to create silent gaps -- those moments of not-speaking which you can use to make a point, to show dissatisfaction, or emphasize love and presence. I don't see LLMs daring to do this yet.

On Interintellect, my salon platform, one of the main things we teach new salon hosts is how to encourage, allow, and manage silence. It is counterintuitive, even scary, for humans too. But to anyone with a body -- for the body is pure rhythm -- the musicality of conversation is viscerally obvious.

2- Priority:

A challenge for anyone hosting a conversation -- or sometimes just participating in one -- is how much people can stay in their own heads while seemingly engaging with another human. How many times someone is talking and you're already fully focused on what *you* want to say next!

On Interintellect, which hosts fixed time, fixed theme, intentional gatherings, we help people come out of their shell by fostering an atmosphere of "easy mic" -- everybody knows they will get the mic soon, and so the impatience element is completely gone. We also, in the case of online salons, use the chat a lot where people can leave notes for others or self. At IRLs salons, I see people taking notes to free up mindspace.

When we have a big celeb on, we ensure it is never 1:1 and then 50 minutes later we open to the audience. We tell attendees in advance that we will do only 10 mins of 1:1, then 10 mins audience, then 10 mins 1:1, ... etc.
This helps prevent the audience's mental constipation: everyone can just be fluid and present, playing with ideas, listening to each other real-time.

This I don't think LLMs got right yet. It happens to me a ton of times that Claude or GPT starts talking, and I am already at my next question, and just skip or stop them.

3 - Phatic love

"Phatic" communication is what we call all parts of speech that don't really convey information, they're just there to make us bond and feel better. From "how are you"s to jokes, small talk is not to be looked down upon! It serves an important physiological purpose: it puts us in the mood, it helps start the "music".

Phatic comms can be very formulaic, e.g., with a total stranger whose store you've just walked into. But with people we know it is full of context. Reminders, repetition, reassurance. The LLM experience would be much warmer if phatic elements were more integral to it. (Claude's warm, changing welcome is a good start.)

4 - Availability

The very first incarnation of Interintellect was an AI powered chat app called Ixy (after "mutual information") aiming at making written communication between loved ones better. The two years of research that I conducted for it independently (this was ancient GPT2 times) were instrumental for today's good vibes on Interintellect, and the fact that after tens of thousands of conversations (across lockdowns, elections, wars) we have had 0 toxic incident at any of our live public salons even though most attendees are strangers.

One thing my old research focused on was asynchrony. A lot of our data pointed at how text conversations can go bad because they simultaneously assume constant availability while cannot guarantee it.

In linguistics, we always look at alignment. Two people are talking in a living room, they will make efforts to speak the same language, find the same volume, use a similar vocabulary. In short, they will try to maximize mutual information.

This is far more complicated over text, where we are both more and less honest and more and less present than in real life. My sense is because LLMs are writing-based (even our audio is transcribed, and the AI "reads out" to us a text it generates in written form) they inherited some of these issues from human texting.

Of course, LLMs are always available. With that, humans cannot compete. But so much of human communication is physical -- rhythm, sensation, excitement, goosebumps, sweat ... and *absence* which makes presence valuable -- that right now I am not worried the literary salon where people can come together to think together could be replaced anytime soon.

But building better communication tools for humans to use with each other -- powered by AI or just plain good human thinking -- remains an essential task ahead.

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@sbuehler Nice reframe

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@DoctorPerin Could you say more about what you love about psychodrama? Would love to hear.

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@GrantHBrennerMD Strong agree

[Michael Dow @docmike8]

@maxkshen Well said!

[Cenk Uygur @cenkuygur]

Fuck. The war has started. Israel has pushed us into this asinine war. Everything that goes wrong is on them. America had absolutely no interest in this war. 8 out of 10 Americans are against it. No matter who we vote for, we get Israel and war. This is going to end in disaster.