A man confessed to a sex therapist:
"I've been married to my wife for 15 years, I fantasize about other women, but I don't want to leave my wife."
Here's what the therapist said…
Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. Right now, in this room, it is on.
The circuit predates primates. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continuity as a predator-detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of mammalian history, a forest full of song meant no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software.
The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. Six minutes of traffic noise raised depression with the same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check.
Birdsong sits in the 1,000 to 8,000 Hz range. Your brainstem reads continuous patterns in that band as a signal that nothing dangerous is currently moving through the environment. EEG data shows birdsong at 45 to 50 decibels boosts alpha wave activity by 14.1% relative to silence. Alpha is the brainwave signature of relaxed alertness. Push the same birdsong above 60 decibels and the response flips. Stress markers rise 29%. The circuit only trusts the signal at the volume of quiet conversation, which is exactly the volume birds sing at from a typical distance.
Three things happen simultaneously when the brain registers ambient safety. The amygdala downregulates. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over from the sympathetic. Heart rate variability rises, cortisol drops. The posterior cingulate cortex, which sits at the center of the rumination circuit, quiets down. King's College London tracked this through a smartphone study with over 1,200 participants and found the mood lift lasted hours after the sound stopped. People diagnosed with depression got the same response as healthy controls.
Most of what gets labeled mental fatigue is hypervigilance running in the background. Birdsong tells the circuit it can stand down, and the brain reallocates the freed compute everywhere else.
A quiet park feels different from a quiet office because the parks have sentinels.
SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell speaking about xAI's plans:
• xAI will build 1.2 gigawatts of power for its supercomputer now and for all future data centers
• Expanding the biggest Tesla Megapack system in the world — enough backup power for all of Memphis and more than Southaven needs (where the data center is)
• New water recycling plants to save about 4.7 billion gallons of water each year from the Memphis aquifer
• Thousands of new jobs mostly for people in Memphis, plus cheaper electricity for Americans
• Plans to put supercomputers in space (orbit) to use huge amounts of energy more efficiently
Quick pitch from a radiologist that wants to help :
In the US alone, approx 600 million medical imaging exams are performed annually, many billions worldwide, and the number is only growing with the aging population. There are only so many radiologists interpreting these exams and the backlog is getting worse by the day… people waiting weeks and months on cancer results that guide therapy and many other delays in diagnosis.
We need broad, generalist multimodal AI, like a “super-resident” excelling across all modalities, for efficient and timely reads. Current AI is very narrow use case and for only a tiny percent of possible diagnoses.
Happy to contribute expertise via annotations, feedback, or roles like Medicine Specialist! DMs open. @xai@elonmusk #Grok #Radiology #AIinMedicine @xAIMemphis
Quick pitch from a radiologist that wants to help :
In the US alone, approx 600 million medical imaging exams are performed annually, many billions worldwide, and the number is only growing with the aging population. There are only so many radiologists interpreting these exams and the backlog is getting worse by the day… people waiting weeks and months on cancer results that guide therapy and many other delays in diagnosis.
We need broad, generalist multimodal AI, like a “super-resident” excelling across all modalities, for efficient and timely reads. Current AI is very narrow use case and for only a tiny percent of possible diagnoses.
Happy to contribute expertise via annotations, feedback, or roles like Medicine Specialist! DMs open. @xai@elonmusk #Grok #Radiology #AIinMedicine @xAIMemphis
See! I told you he's racist!
^ Is exactly what people are rushing to conclude from the Trump post depicting the Obamas as monkeys.
But if you actually watch the video you'll see something different.
Rushing to conclusions is killing this country.
@dwarkesh_sp@collision@elonmusk At 49:18 2 of the beers were empty then 2 seconds later they are full with no gap in the conversation or someone refilling them 😳🤔