Philosophizing @WUSTL #Philosophy-#Neuroscience-#Psychology & @LindenwoodU on perception, memory, & AI. AI Consultant; Healthcare Admin; former VP, Data Science
St. Louis, MO
Joined November 2009
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"...we postulate the brain is a composite organ emanating from two lineage-restricted progenitors; these dual progenitors may be evolutionarily conserved across 550 million years from hemichordates to mammals." nature.com/articles/s41593-0…
Tomy Ames retweeted
Student responded to my joke with "is that another reference from before we were born?"
Tomy Ames retweeted
I'll never understand why people hold false beliefs. If it's false, just don't believe it. Problem solved!
"Our findings provide evidence that bumble bees can exhibit spontaneous problem-solving, challenging the notion that such advanced cognitive abilities are exclusive to large-brained vertebrates." science.org/doi/10.1126/scie…
Tomy Ames retweeted
Sci-Hub is an evil website that pirated 85M+ research papers and made them freely available
And now they've added AI to their database to make Sci-Bot.
It answers your questions using latest, full-text articles.
But DO NOT use it. We should all try to make billion-dollar academic publishers richer.
I'm putting the link below so you know how to avoid it.
Tomy Ames retweeted
We've uploaded a fruit fly. We took the @FlyWireNews connectome of the fruit fly brain, applied a simple neuron model (@Philip_Shiu Nature 2024) and used it to control a MuJoCo physics-simulated body, closing the loop from neural activation to action.
A few things I want to say about what this means and where we're going at @eonsys. 🧵
Tomy Ames retweeted
The Extinction Illusion. Your brain swears the right side has more dots — it’s actually exactly the same as the left. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs…
Tomy Ames retweeted
𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗘𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻
Annual reminder that the book is open access.
How do we think of the brain as a deeply interconnected system with highly distributed, non hierarchical processing.
Want to learn about the brain from a fresh perspective?
mitpress.mit.edu/97802625446…
Tomy Ames retweeted
This is the textbook I wrote to support the most advanced high school math/CS sequence in the USA.
It's freely available. Link in first reply.
In Math Academy's (former) Eurisko program, which ran from 2020-23, we scaffolded high school students up to doing masters/PhD-level coursework: reproducing academic research papers in artificial intelligence, building everything from scratch in Python.
We currently have all of Eurisko's math prerequisites available on the Math Academy system (which is where Matteo and other Eurisko students learned it).
Eurisko ended in 2023 when I relocated because nobody else in the district had the requisite knowledge to teach it.
But we will eventually have the entire Eurisko curriculum, and more, on the Math Academy system.
Can't think of a better way to close out 2025 than seeing the head of NASA ask my former student @matteopaz06 to apply, with a fighter jet ride as a signing bonus.
Matteo was one of my students in the Eurisko program, which, during its operation from 2020-23, was the most advanced high school math/CS sequence in the USA.
It culminated in high school students doing masters/PhD-level coursework (reproducing academic research papers in artificial intelligence, building everything from scratch in Python)
Matteo joined Eurisko as a 10th grader, during the last year it was offered, and worked hard to complete almost all 2-3 years’ worth of assignments in a single year. (Eurisko ended when I relocated; nobody else in the district had the requisite knowledge to teach it.)
This is exactly the position that we were trying to put students in with the Eurisko program – get them to a point of skill that they can capitalize on some math/coding-related opportunity and turn it into a chain reaction of fortunate events. And it’s been so great to witness some of these chain reactions get underway.
Well shit.
Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity. newyorker.com/magazine/2025/…
A truly beautiful display of emotion -- one that I fear is impossible in philosophy by its very nature, where our solutions never quite resolve but invite critique, inevitably deepening the question rather than closing it.
Tomy Ames retweeted
Ten years (!) after submitting the grant, NextBrain is published in @Nature . NextBrain is a brain atlas built from 3D histology that enables segmentation of 3D brain scans (MRI, Hip-CT, even photos!) into hundreds of regions.
Article, data, code, videos, & more in this 🧵 (1/3)
