Like many people, I appreciate the information on Twitter/X (despite all of the waves of exodus), but I don’t necessarily like the toxicity or the time sink.

So I (and my buddy Claude Fable) made a digest app that gives you the day’s news and science discussions.

The “science” section is based on links to journal articles, ranked by engagement and classified by field.

The “news” section is based on keywords related to “straight” world-affairs news topics, like “war” or “election”, clustered by story and ranked by engagement. The idea is to cover the sorts of things that would be on the front page of a traditional newspaper, as opposed to entertainment or opinion. Keywords are translated into the top non-English languages on Twitter/X (Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Indonesian) and posts in any language are auto-translated into English.1

Summaries of tweets and their associated articles use Sonnet 5; classification uses Haiku 4.5. Links to original tweets and associated articles are included.

Both Science and News sections are based on advanced search queries using the API. There are no cherrypicked accounts being followed except some wire services like AP and Reuters.

News stories link to newspapers, news sites, and wire services where relevant, but they’re explicitly not limited to topics discussed by the “mainstream media”; social-media-only “citizen reporting” is included, though flagged as “unsubstantiated” when there are no links to professional news sources.

The repo is here if you want to take a look; please do comment with any bugs or feature requests if you’re interested in trying it out.

I’ve done enough grant evaluations so far (for ACX grants and SFF) and been involved in philanthropy in various other contexts, at work and informally, that I have developed some idea of how my opinions and intuitions differ from other people’s.

I thought it might be interesting to share some of my “tastes”. Not everybody has to have the same tastes or funding philosophy, but these are mine.

#1: It’s The Donor’s Money

In my worldview, charitable donation is optional. Generally praiseworthy, but optional.

And the purpose of donation is to buy outcomes that the donor wants to see in the world. You donate to make the world more like the one you want to live in. Generally, a reasonable person’s values go beyond strictly personal consumption; one also cares about what kind of a society one lives in, what other people’s lives are like, what sorts of institutions exist, what sorts of things humanity has created or discovered, and so on.

As an agent doing research or evaluation on behalf of a donor, I try to find opportunities that fit in the intersection between my own values and the donor’s. If there weren’t substantial overlap in our values, it would be silly for them to take my advice in the first place.

Sounds obvious. But it is sometimes a point of disagreement, because I’m not using a utilitarian framework where there’s a single ranking of the goodness of causes. “Should” donors give to political causes, for instance? Well, it depends on the donor’s worldview — how useful do they think political action is, what kind, etc. I see it as inappropriate for the “peanut gallery” of public observers to claim the authority to tell donors what their values should be.1

#2: Importance, Neglectedness, Tractability

I think the old familiar “ITN” framework is pretty solid, and works even if you’re not using a utilitarian framework.

• importance = good done / % of a problem solved

• tractability = % of a problem solved / % increase in resources

• neglectedness = % increase in resources / extra person or dollar.

I don’t generally see much value in quantifying these numerically, since “amount of goodness” is often judged intuitively and there’s no principled way to put all kinds of goodness on a single numerical scale. But it’s still useful verbally when arguing the merits of one project relative to another.

To make it more “gutfeel friendly”, I generally think of it in a cruder way, without the percents.

• Importance: how much would I (or the donor) care if this project succeeded fully at its goal? How big a deal is this?

• Tractability: how likely do I think this project is to succeed at its goal? (Or, how far do I expect them to get?)

• Neglectedness: how much does this donation make the difference between the project happening and not happening?

#3: Yay Community Infrastructure

I tend to like proposals for “community infrastructure” projects, like coworking spaces and events, that serve a community that the donor is part of.

Somewhat controversially, I even like donations for “community infrastructure” that serves a social, aesthetic, or recreational purpose. (For instance, I think it’s good for opera-lovers to donate to their local opera.) Donation is buying outcomes; it’s good to invest in, and support, things that you and the people around you will enjoy. That’s how we get and keep nice things. It’s a form of responsible self-interest, which is good by my lights; you’re not passively hoping someone else will support the things you enjoy, you’re doing your part to contribute.

There’s a neglectedness angle too; nobody but members of a community has any reason to donate to community infrastructure. So “if not us, then who?” is an argument in favor of prioritizing “taking care of our own”.

Finally, I like community infrastructure because it’s often concrete, and thus harder to fake. If you’re operating a physical space or running an in-person event, people can come and evaluate it directly. It forces contact with reality in a way that doesn’t happen by default with theoretical research and writing. I place a lot of value on “doing a real thing” compared to doing a potentially-bigger but potentially-unreal thing.

#4: Yay Niche Topics

Sometimes, there’s a topic that’s only really interesting to a group that includes the donor and applicant.

For example, there’s a very small niche of people who know and care that psychedelics seem to treat cluster headaches. Psychedelics people, cluster headache sufferers, and people who are really interested in qualia, are much more interested in this topic than anybody else.

Unlike community infrastructure, the topic might objectively matter for many people outside the community, but maybe it’s not salient or familiar to them. (How many people are passionate about far-UVC disinfection?)

So that’s a neglectedness consideration, just like for community infrastructure; “if not us, then who?”

#5: Yay “Technical” Work

I have a bias towards projects that accomplish something “technical”, in the sense of demonstrating unfakeable, rare skill at structured processes.

Building something physical is “technical” in this sense. Experimental lab science is “technical”. So are math (and associated theoretical fields) and software to some extent, though they are becoming less technical with the rise of AI assistance.2 So are arts and crafts that are “technically challenging.”

It’s a little hard to explain why.

Some of it is that I respect skill, want to reward it, and think skill is a component of human flourishing; it makes some sense to me to fund the humans who are best at various things to keep doing what they’re excellent at.

Some of it is that skill is a resource that I’d like to direct to good ends.

Some of it is that skill (and effort) is a sort of indirect signal of caring weighted by credibility. The fact that a capable person invested a lot into a project means that it’s more likely that someone I have reason to respect, strongly believed it was worth doing, so maybe I should believe it’s worth doing too. It’s the opposite of a “YOLO” application where someone just thought they’d spend a minute to ask for money in case they get it, with no particular conviction or commitment. An investment of skill and effort is a bet that something is worth further investment, and that counts for something.

#6: Yay Straightforward Public Information Resources

Sometimes a project is just making a public organized compilation of information to answer a straightforward question.

Like, “What’s everyone doing in AI safety research?”

Or, “How many people die from every disease, worldwide?”

I almost always like these projects. They’re (often) cheaper to make in the age of AI, so the budget I’d allocate to each one is smaller than it used to be, but I still want lots more of such projects to exist.

The utility of an information resource is pretty obvious and not super contingent — information is valuable in a lot of potential world scenarios. Information resources also don’t take a ton of specialized expertise to evaluate, and it’s unlikely for them to fail to meet their goals. It’s easy to be confident these projects aren’t “fake”; they are what they say on the tin.

#7: Yay “Cool Shit”

I have a soft spot in my heart for projects that simply “glorify the human spirit”. Things like pure discovery or exploration (of space, nature, archaeology, etc) or artistic works that aim at genuine beauty, grandeur, or awe.

Not everything with this intention is effective, of course; quality matters; but in general I think these sorts of projects are underrated.

Any time you’d say “man, wouldn’t it be cool to” and somebody goes and does it, that falls in this category.

The Herculaneum Scroll Prize is a prime example of “cool shit” philanthropy.

#8: Two Cheers for Meta

I used to dismiss “meta” projects like fellowship programs, workshops, grant programs, etc. I thought “why not directly fund people who do the research itself? This managerial meta layer is make-work.”

I first got convinced otherwise by seeing the success of Laura Deming’s Longevity Fund. I remember thinking, “why would this brilliant young scientist start a VC fund instead of, y’know, doing science herself?” And then I grew to appreciate the (obvious) answer: because there was no money for the science, and no money for translating the science into biotech companies and taking it into clinical trials. It was genuinely too early to “just do the thing directly”. “Doing the thing” depended on institutions and communities and resources that didn’t yet exist. There’s much more money in aging/longevity now, and the Longevity Fund deserves a lot of credit for paving the way.

Another example I’ve come to appreciate recently is the success of research fellowship programs like MATS. A lot of good AI alignment research (in my opinion) has come from MATS graduates. There was a time in my memory when basically nobody with serious math/CS/machine learning chops was interested in AI safety/alignment/etc. (For that matter, there was a time in my memory when almost nobody in math/CS/ML seemed to be interested in AI, as in the mind-like nature of certain algorithmic processes, at all! Yann LeCun’s students were outliers there!) Training and talent development can make a big difference to a nascent research field.

In general, making a new or neglected research field “a thing”, making it comprehensible and attractive to strong researchers, via money, communication, convening, institution-building, etc, is valuable work.

Like all coordinative or managerial work, field-building can be make-work, and its value is indirect and hard to assess from the outside, but you’ll have a hard time getting things done if you don’t do any.3

I do tend to think field-building is most important where there’s very little of it. Fields that basically don’t exist outside a few underfunded individuals really need more coordination, communication, training, and fundraising. Established fields, not so much.

I also think it usually doesn’t make sense for me-as-grant-evaluator to recommend another grant-disbursing organization, unless it has specialized expertise or does things besides grantmaking. If you have more money than time, it can make sense to delegate grantmaking; if I have plenty of time and (obviously) agree with myself more than I’d agree with anybody else, I have no reason to delegate to another generalist.

#9: Gumption Counts

I would occasionally see someone apply for a grant to build a project around scaling and applying some innovation, and see the critique that it’s not novel, because some academics had also published about that method/technique.

My counterpoint was usually that, well, this person applied for a grant from us, to do the thing full time and at scale. That shows gumption: the person is entrepreneurial enough to seek out unusual sources of funding, committed enough to the project that they want to take it farther and devote more of their time to it, and visionary enough to believe in and articulate how it can be brought into the real world.

Just because other people have published papers on related topics doesn’t mean those authors are a.) still active in the field, b.) interested in using funding to pursue the idea further, or c.) energetic/ambitious/decisive enough to lead a new effort that Gets The Job Done. If you have time, it may be worth consulting the people who’ve done related work to see what they think of the applicant. But the applicant is the one in the arena, and that counts for something, all else equal.

#10: Yay Personal Relationships

Of course, it’s important to disclose conflicts of interest, and of course it’s healthy to avoid being too cliquish/insidery or only funding the “usual suspects” who are already well-networked in a social or professional scene.

But I personally don’t feel too many qualms about giving “bonus points” to projects where I already know and think well of the applicant. “I want to fund my friends” is bias. But “I know this person to be trustworthy” or “I know how they think and I like their style” is actually very strong evidence in someone’s favor, compared to what you can learn about someone totally unfamiliar, from only an application and public information, in a short time. There’s a reason why so many institutions tend to lean on personal networks! And while you do want to fight the temptation to bias or cliquishness, it would be just as wrong not to put a thumb on the scale for Known Good people.

Sometimes I think people are trying too hard to assume a View from Nowhere, and are uncomfortable admitting that they are particular people, situated in a particular place with a particular perspective and set of social relationships, and that this is fine. You can only do your best from where you are.

#11: Check For Ideological Orientation

One thing I wish more grant evaluators would do is to look up the people involved in a project, especially a project that has bearing on politics or society, and see what their political or ideological orientation is. Also, see who the other funders are, and what their orientation is. And then think about whether you want that.

This doesn’t mean you should be ideologically doctrinaire or refuse to fund anybody you disagree with about anything. Diversity of opinion is healthy. And paranoia about guilt by association is a fast train to Crazytown.

But. Look people up. Look up what they were doing before this project. Be familiar with what keywords are indicative of what worldviews. If there are belief systems you consider to be Bad News, you don’t want to fund them unintentionally.

#12: Filter Slop Aggressively

Low effort applications — AI-generated, or just good old fashioned manual halfassery — get more common the more visible your grant opportunity is and the less gatekeeping around it. I like having open applications and being open to being surprised by good ideas from anywhere, but the flip side of that is that you have to be pretty ruthless about not spending too much time deliberating over the low-quality, low-effort stuff.

I believe in using Pangram, for instance. And unceremoniously throwing incomplete applications in the trash.

I also believe in trying to quickly verify independently that the applicant is a real person with a LinkedIn or other professional profile that is at least vaguely in the right vicinity for being the sort of person who’d be qualified for a grant. You don’t want to be unfair to people with nontraditional backgrounds, but you do need to use some quick-and-dirty heuristics like “for a research grant, almost all qualified applicants will have a PhD and a job at a research institution, or be a student pursuing same.” Because people do fabricate identities, and people do apply for things they’re wildly unqualified for!

#13: Yay Outcomes

This one isn’t very controversial, but I have occasionally encountered disagreement: it’s a mark in a project’s favor when they can list concrete, legible accomplishments.

Some bullet points of what they’ve done, links to places I can read more or (especially) see the output of their work, are much better than not having those things.

I’m also a big fan, where possible, of giving the first dollar to “outsiders” who aren’t well networked or polished or working within prestigious institutions. But it’s a lot easier to gain confidence in those people if they can show results. Ideally, a results orientation and an open mind are complements, not opposites.

#14: Why Donate Rather Than Invest?

If an organization is a for-profit company, I think there needs to be a specific reason why funding should be a donation rather than an investment. Subsidizing unsuccessful businesses is a bad idea in general.

I do think there’s a place for investment that takes into account the impact or benefit of an organization as well as its financial ROI. When I make (very small) angel investments, I prioritize things that I think make the world a better place, and certainly don’t invest in things that I think make the world a worse place. I think it’s normal to care about both the state of the world and financial returns, and it’s kind of dysfunctional that some investors insist on only making investments based on maximizing financial returns while artificially disregarding all their other values.

But I do think there should be a defeasible presumption against donating to for-profits. Usually, for a for-profit company with a mission, success at the mission should correlate positively with business success. Also, if it’s possible for you to capture financial upside from your funding, why wouldn’t you want to?

There are exceptions, as when a donation would allow a company to do something that doesn’t maximize profits but does good, in a way they couldn’t otherwise do.

It can get complicated, and I’m not always sure of my opinions on this issue. But I am, by default, inclined to not favor donations to perfectly normal businesses that should be able to stand on their own two feet.

Several times now, I have listened to someone, usually younger than me, debating a big decision, and (explicitly or implicitly), looking for advice, in a certain way that follows a pattern.

In the prototypical case, this is a pretty normal kind of decision that people make all the time — whether to quit a job, get married, move to a new city, start a company, have a kid, etc. A major life change, but not a super unusual or inherently questionable proposition.

And again, in conversations that fit this pattern, what I notice is that everything the person expresses indicates they want to make this change. They only say positive things about it. They seem eager and hopeful. They give reasons in favor of doing it, and reasons against not doing it.

But they have not, themselves, noticed that they want to do it. They haven’t picked up on what they sound like from the outside, which is blazingly obvious even to someone who’s just met them.

So, pretty much every time, I say “Sounds like you really want to do this! You should go for it!”

And then they’re often like “but I’m not suuuuure.” And I have to kind of egg them on and tell them they should totally do the thing.

Why do I do this?

The thing is, I’m not a fortune-teller. I actually have no idea, objectively, if some person I’ve never met would make a good spouse for you. Or if quitting your job will work out well for you. In a few cases I have experience in a loosely analogous situation that I’m drawing from, but mostly I’m clueless. You know way more about your own life than I do. I only have one piece of information that you don’t — how you look and sound to me, as we’re having this conversation.

And, in a fair number of cases, you guys look and sound like you really want to do a thing, and are just hesitating for no good reason that you can think of.

This is dithering.

It’s not really doubt. If you seriously doubted whether this was a good decision, you’d be looking for information that could go either way. You’d be interested in learning how it might go wrong, or you might be weighing reasons to do the thing against reasons not to do it.

But often that’s not what I see. I see someone give a list of plausible reasons in favor of doing the thing, and a visible pull towards doing the thing, and there’s literally nothing pointing in the opposite direction. I guess they’re just looking for permission to do it, or seeking validation, or waiting for a sign for the universe that it’s time. There are no actual obstacles! They just don’t feel “sure” yet.

And dithering looks quite unattractive from the outside. It’s almost an irresistible compulsion to try to get someone over this hesitant phase, this mode where they’re obviously restraining themselves from what is obviously their natural impulse, and get them to Make A Decision Already.

You want to do the thing. You think doing the thing is the right move. I can’t promise you that you’re right! But I do have a sort of faith that people can’t, in practice, do much better than following their own integrated judgment and desire.

To put it more superstitiously, even if it is a bad move, it’s a bad move that you kind of “have to make”. It’s a necessary part of how your life must unfold, given that you are you.

And to put it less superstitiously, it’s important for development, learning, human flourishing, all that stuff, to move forward with your life, to take on the “natural” next challenge or opportunity that “advances the plot” and will require you to learn and change. You are not going to get out of life 100% unscathed; nobody is wholly untouched by regret or adversity. So you might as well make the decision you want to make.

In particular, I far more often see young people underrate experimentation than overrate it. And this makes sense; if you’ve had very few life experiences thus far, it’s easy to imagine “this is basically How The World Is; if I make a change in my life it probably won’t get any better than this.” Whereas actually, you have tried almost nothing yet and anything you’re dissatisfied with is probably fixable if you change something about the basic conditions of your life. (Like: where you live, what you work on, what your daily routine is like, who your close relationships are with, what medical interventions you’ve tried, etc.) I don’t want to downplay adversity that’s beyond people’s control, but in my observation “if you’re unhappy, make a change, no really, actually switch up what you’re doing and try something you’ve never tried before” isn’t just good advice for people with charmed lives — it can also work out well for people who have quite genuine problems.

Now, while I do genuinely think “don’t dither” is good advice, it’s admittedly a bit contaminated by the self-interest of the advice-giver; dithering just provokes so much impatience that we can’t resist telling you to get over it.

The thing is, dithering is unattractive because it’s tediously predictable from the outside. From the inside, as you yearn to do X but hesitate, there’s intense and meaningful tension; from the outside, it’s painfully boring watching someone slowly try to psych themselves up to do something that they’ve already on some level “decided” to do. It’s also awkward to watch someone try to hide a part of themselves that you can clearly see from the outside. The “full-fledged”, brazen version of almost any personality or disposition is more appealing than an incoherent, weak attempt to stifle it.1 Being yourself really is more charming than trying to be anyone else.2

Which is, itself, another reason not to dither!

Now, to some extent, it’s easier said than done. There’s a process you have to go through to make a decision, and if you can’t do it any faster than you’re doing it, then you just have to go at your own pace. But using “skip to the end” as a mantra can sometimes be helpful. If you get to the point where you actively prefer getting to the point quickly and Moving Right Along, rather than idealizing indecision as some sort of prolonged “innocence” that can keep you from being tarnished by Time; if you can empathize with the outside perspective that finds your dithering a bit annoying and the ineluctable desires of your heart entirely lovable; then you can sometimes hurry it up a little bit.

Consider the following situations:

• when you are a small, growing startup in a big market, standard advice is not to worry too much about your competitors or try to do anything adversarial “against” them, but just to focus on growing and providing value to your own customers.

• when you are a small trader in a big market, you don’t need to worry about your trades shifting the market price or revealing information to your competitors; in many contexts, your optimal strategy is simply to bid your true price, buying when an asset is cheaper than your “happy price” and selling when it’s more expensive.

• when you are in the early stages of a game, often your best strategy is to grow your “resources” (like developing your pieces in chess, trying to control more territory and have more value on the board), following a pattern that’s mostly independent of what the other players are doing and gets you more of something that’s valuable across many possible game states.

• when you are a species whose resource needs are much smaller than the carrying capacity of your environment, you are r-selected; your fitness is maximized by just having as many offspring as possible and not “worrying” about running out of resources.

• when you expect that you’re going to run into the same people over and over again for a long time to come, it’s wise to be consistently trustworthy and helpful even if you could get an advantage in the short run by betraying someone; the long-term costs to your reputation, and the costs of making a habit of doing something that’s usually destructive, vastly outweigh any short-term advantage you could gain this one time.

• when you are working on a hard technical problem that’s a long way from solved, and could have both benefits and harms to humanity if it were solved, you don’t really have to worry about “what if we succeed and it’s bad?” or “what if this information gets into the hands of the wrong people?” You’re a long way from winning, worrying about winning too much is silly, and heuristics like “do a good job on important work” and “share scientific knowledge freely” are more trustworthy than galaxy-brained arguments for why in this particular case the utilitarian calculus works out the other way.

These kinds of intuitions are what I’d call “big-world” heuristics.

What they have in common is that the world is “big” enough relative to you — the market is much bigger than you, the problem is much bigger than your progress on it, the game is very far from being over, the environment is much bigger than your resource consumption, etc — that your best strategy for achieving your goals is not to explicitly calculate how your action will affect the environment (including how your actions will affect other agents’ actions.) There are zones where the best move is non-consequentialist, in the sense that you do best by following heuristics (or principles, or virtues) that are good regardless of the exact specifics of the situation you’re in. You can neglect your (immediate) action’s (immediate and specific) effect on the environment.1

By contrast, if you are in the endgame of a game of chess, or in an oligopolistic competition, you absolutely need to think about how other players will respond to your actions. You do need to search through a tree of “if I do this, that will happen” and compute that specifically for the specific game state you’re in, and recompute it every time the game state changes.

Big-world intuitions feel a bit like “play fair, mind your own business, cultivate your own garden, do your best, and it’ll all more-or-less work out for the best in the long run”. Or like “keep your eyes on your own paper”, don’t try to manipulate people, just follow the same path you would if you were alone; whether you’re Robinson Crusoe alone on an island or one anonymous citizen in a big city, your “job” is pretty much the same, in that you need to work to take care of your own needs.

This came to mind because I noticed that I pretty much always rely on big-world intuitions. I don’t really know what to do about questions like “what if we win too much and it’s bad” or “what if I, personally, have the power to shape society, how would I choose to set it up”. And I don’t really even know where to begin with chains of adversarial strategic thinking like “if I do this, she’ll do that, so I’ll do this…” I’m always thinking of myself as one participant among many, with a small share of power/influence, working on problems hard enough that the only thing I have to worry about is doing the best job I can, and trying to follow universally sound principles/heuristics.

The nice thing about sticking to principles/heuristics is that it’s robust to uncertainty. What if you’ve misread the situation? What if you’re not as big a deal as you think you are? Behave in a way that’s usually for the best, even so.

Except, of course, if you really are super powerful, super close to winning, super close to the “endgame” in some sense, or in a really bizarre situation where the consequences of following generally-good heuristics happen to be very bad. Most of the time, for most people, this is not the case! But it is disquieting to notice that none of my grounding intuitions or usual ways of thinking about what “healthy” or “prudent” or “ethical” look like, are fit for such situations.

Previous entries: SS26, FW25, SS25, FW24, SS24.

Methodology Recap

As I’ve done before, I’m using my automated script for going through all the images hosted on Vogue Runway’s website for the current ready-to-wear collections, asking an LLM (currently GPT4o) to report all the colors in the outfit in each picture, and counting up the totals.

So this means the “count” for each color is the number of times GPT4o observed it, across all images; if it mentions a black hat and a black dress in the same image, for instance, that counts as two.

To save time, I didn’t do manual results this time around.

The Results

Here’s the top 30 colors:

and the top 30 non-neutral colors (not black, white, gray, brown, or shades thereof):

As you can see, there’s a lot of black. Well, there’s always a lot of black; black is always the #1 color; but this time around, the near-synonym “jet black” is also in the #2 slot, and “charcoal black” was #7, neither of which were top-30 colors in past years.

We also see burgundy as the most common non-neutral color (whereas it’s almost always red in that slot), and the new color “oxblood” (a dark, brownish red) in the #7 slot, as well as many other dark and muted tones.

The color theme for Fall/Winter 2026 is clearly darkness. Black, charcoal gray, burgundy, and other dark shades predominate.

Comparisons to Past Years

If you compare to FW25, we see a very stark difference:

In FW26, we’ve clearly moved away from white, beige, and brown, towards black and charcoal gray, and away from red towards burgundy.

Overall, we see a systematic movement towards darker colors, and away from pastels and brights.

Rising (significantly higher in rank than last year):

• mustard yellow

• peach

New (in the top 30 this year but not last year):

• jet black

• charcoal black

• taupe

• oxblood

• brick red

• wine

• dusty rose

• burnt orange

• olive

• sage green

• slate blue

• cobalt blue

• plum

• fuchsia

• magenta

Falling (significantly lower in rank than last year):

• red

• yellow

• light blue

• lavender

Lost (in the top 30 last year but not this year):

• light beige

• pale pink

• orange

• light green

• light purple

• purple

• deep purple

• dark purple

Or, visualized, we see a lot of dark and muted tones among the winners, and brights and pastels among the losers.

The overall prevalence of black in the collections isn’t just a retreat to “safe basics” due to economic caution — the luxury market seems to be improving slightly after several bad years, and is projected to strengthen further.

Rather, this looks like a stylistic change. Maybe a subtle commentary on the “gloom” of the world situation, maybe part of the “return to sexiness” and edgy, vampy styles that’s been prominent in Vogue’s fashion coverage, who knows.

It’s definitely the biggest color shift I’ve observed since I’ve started tracking color trends. The overall “arc” of this decade started with post-pandemic bright colors in 2021, followed by a retreat to neutrals over the next few years, and now this clear-cut shift towards darkness.

In the event of a late-2020s Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan, leading to a US-China military conflict, what would be the most urgent bottlenecks in military equipment?

Where is there the greatest need to scale up defense manufacturing?

I am not an expert in military matters, so take all this with a grain of salt. But I looked into this question and it seems to have a single clear-cut answer: energetics. (That is, explosives and propellants for munitions like missiles and torpedoes).

The US has extremely small manufacturing capacity for energetics, and in the event of a Pacific war, demand would rapidly exceed supply.

What Does a US-China War Look Like?

Military experts think there’s a substantial, but not overwhelming, chance that China will invade Taiwan before 2030.

Metaculus predicts an invasion at 13% by 2028, and 25% by 2030.

The “Davidson window”, named for retired Admiral Philip S. Davidson, refers to the view that China will invade Taiwan by 2027, which “gained widespread attention” following former CIA director William J. Burns’ 2023 announcement that U.S. intelligence had found that Xi Jinping had told the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for an invasion by 2027.

The “Davidson window” model is not universally shared within the US defense & foreign policy establishment. In a Defense Priorities survey of 51 experts, 85% rated a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as “somewhat unlikely” or “very unlikely.”

On the other hand, the 2025 Pentagon’s Annual China Military Report to Congress straightforwardly declares that “China expects to be able to fight and win a war on Taiwan by the end of 2027.”

The bottom line is that there is substantial uncertainty and disagreement about the chance of a near-term Chinese invasion of Taiwan — but that still puts it as enough of a possibility to be worth planning for.

What will the US do in case of an invasion of Taiwan?

Here, we have an actual official answer, from the US’s 2026 National Defense Strategy. The strategy is known as “deterrence by denial”: that is, deterring China from invading Taiwan via a credible threat to sink the Chinese fleet before it crosses the strait.

This involves setting up defenses along the First Island Chain, which runs from Japan through Taiwan and the Philippines to Indonesia. Accordingly, this is where US forces in the Pacific are currently stationed: mostly in Japan, Hawaii, South Korea, and Guam.

Recent CSIS wargames represent the best non-classified information about how the US expects a conflict to play out. They present the US deploying submarines in and around the Taiwan Strait and Philippine Sea, as well as bombers launched from Pacific bases like Guam and Kadena. Bombers and submarines would launch missiles against Chinese ships and ports, with the goal of preventing an invasion of Taiwan.

The invasion always starts the same way: an opening bombardment destroys most of Taiwan’s navy and air force in the first hours of hostilities. Augmented by a powerful rocket force, the Chinese navy encircles Taiwan and interdicts any attempts to get ships and aircraft to the besieged island. Tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers cross the strait in a mix of military amphibious craft and civilian rollon, roll-off ships, while air assault and airborne troops land behind the beachheads.

However, in the most likely “base scenario,” the Chinese invasion quickly founders. Despite massive Chinese bombardment, Taiwanese ground forces stream to the beachhead, where the invaders struggle to build up supplies and move inland. Meanwhile U.S. submarines, bombers, and fighter/attack aircraft, often reinforced by Japan Self-Defense Forces, rapidly cripple the Chinese amphibious fleet. China’s strikes on Japanese bases and U.S. surface ships cannot change the result: Taiwan remains autonomous.

Munitions Shortages

Fundamentally, this is a situation where the US (and its allies like Japan) has a roughly fixed supply of ships and aircraft, which are continuously delivering munitions (precision-guided missiles and torpedoes) to the Chinese fleet. The munitions are “consumables” that get used up; the ships and aircraft are (hopefully!) more durable. So a priori you’d expect the limiting factor on supply to be munitions.

In fact, that’s exactly what national security experts have been observing for years. (See e.g. this 2025 piece from the Foreign Policy Research Institute.) The US has shortages of artillery shells, THAAD anti-missile defenses (which are themselves missiles), and precision-guided missiles.

The key munitions likely to be used in a US-China war over Taiwan include:

• AGM-158C LRASM, a bomber-launched anti-ship missile.

• AGM-158B JASSM-ER, also a precision-guided long-range anti-ship missile, and also suffering from low production and stockpiles.

• Tomahawk cruise missiles, launched from submarines, used against ships

• Mk 48 ADCAP torpedoes, also launched from submarines and used against ships

The Heritage Foundation reports that the US only has 250 LRASMs, against a requirement exceeding 1000. We are estimated to have only enough precision-guided munitions for a few weeks of combat, with some specific types, like LRASMs, only lasting for one week. Torpedoes are estimated to be exhausted in months.

It’s not easy to make more of these, either. Two-year lead times are typical. “Annual production rates—115 LRASMs and 79 to 120 MK 48 torpedoes—are orders of magnitude below projected weekly or monthly wartime consumption.”

One thing to keep in mind is that defense contractors are oligopolistic: the same few suppliers make just about everything. LRASMs, JASSMs, and ADCAP torpedoes are manufactured by Lockheed Martin; Tomahawks are manufactured by Raytheon. LRASMs and JASSMs share the same turbofan engine, manufactured exclusively by Williams International.

But what is the fundamental bottleneck in manufacturing munitions? Why can’t Lockheed and Raytheon simply make way more of them?

There are several difficult-to-manufacture components, including radiation-hardened electronics and carbon-fiber motor casings, but the most extreme bottleneck is energetics.

The Energetics Supply Chain is Tiny

Say what you will about American manufacturing, there are still lots of things we’re great at making at scale.

US domestic production of materials like plastics, oil and gas, concrete, and fertilizer is excellent. So is production of high-tech, mass-produced finished goods like pharmaceuticals, automotives, and airplanes.

Even where we’re weaker, at intermediate products like fabricated metal parts, there are still machine shops across the country that are capable of doing the work, they’re just fragmented and inefficient.1

Energetics are not like that.

Explosives and propellants, and their precursors/inputs, are often made exclusively in one facility in the US — or not at all.

• There are zero TNT manufacturers in the US.

• One facility in Louisiana, GOEX Industries, is the only domestic producer of black powder — and it only recently reopened in 2022 after a shutdown due to an industrial accident.

• Only one US company, AMPAC, is certified to provide ammonium perchlorate, an oxidizer used in rocket propellant. (Again, AMPAC scaled down in the wake of a catastrophic industrial accident — the largest non-nuclear explosion in US history, in 1988).

• Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia is the only manufacturer of military-grade nitrocellulose, “the key ingredient in the manufacture of all propellants.”

• Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Tennessee is the only manufacturer of RDX (cyclonite), the active ingredient in the polymer-bonded explosives used in JASSMs, LRASMs, and similar weapons. Mixing the polymer with the explosive filler, and loading the warheads with the mixture, are similarly only done at a handful of GOCO (government-owned, contractor-operated) facilities.

• The Naval Surface Warfare Division facility in Indian Head, Maryland is the only manufacturer of Otto II fuel, which is used in torpedoes.

Why so sparse?

Well, many of these compounds do not have civilian applications, so there is little demand in peacetime.

Sometimes the recipes themselves are classified and require employees to have security clearances.

It can take 2-5 years to qualify a new facility’s output as “milspec” (up to the military’s specifications.)

Also, explosives manufacturing is really dangerous. Industrial accidents happen every year or so, most dramatically the 2025 Accurate Energetic Systems explosion that killed 16 employees. The Holston Army Ammunition Plant is a Superfund site, as are many other army ammunition plants; RDX has contaminated soil and drinking water around the US.

A typical chemical manufacturing facility isn’t good enough for explosives manufacturing; for instance, you need special concrete-reinforced bays to stop potential explosions. There’s substantial regulatory restrictions, due to the unusual safety and environmental hazards of making energetics. So there’s extra expense and expertise involved in making a new explosives plant, compared to other kinds of manufacturing.

Modernizing or constructing new explosive plants seems to cost high tens to hundreds of millions of dollars — $435M to construct a new TNT plant, $93M to restart M6 propellant manufacturing at Radford, $600M to triple production at Holston, etc. (These are all military budget allocations; the actual minimum costs are likely smaller).

Fundamentally, the reason energetics manufacturing has dwindled is that the US military is a monopsony. There is essentially only one buyer; in peacetime, demand is limited; and after the Cold War ended, the US DOD deliberately slimmed down the defense industrial base and shut down “idle” facilities, cutting costs to produce the “peace dividend” budget surplus of the Clinton years. Until recently, manufacturing lots of explosives was simply not a priority for the only buyer of military-grade explosives.

Is There A (Tech) Business Here?

The energetics industry looks really gnarly for new entrants: dirty, dangerous, highly regulated, with volatile demand and an absolute requirement for rare forms of domain expertise.

On the other hand, if you ask “in principle, could new technology help us make energetics more efficiently?” the answer is obviously yes. We’re using a lot of the same processes — in the same facilities! — that we did in WWII. There’s a ton of room for modernization.

First of all, if you ever want to make much higher volumes, you’d want to do as the pharmaceutical and chemical industries do, and switch from batch processing to continuous flow processing.

Second of all, mixing polymer-bonded explosives without causing defects (or accidents!) is fundamentally the same kind of composite manufacturing that you see in the plastics and ceramics industries, it’s just that the “fill” is highly chemically reactive. Like a lot of these materials manufacturing processes, it’s exactly the sort of messy, sensitive process that often doesn’t behave the way the hard-coded physics models say it will — which means it’s heuristically a great candidate for an AI application.

Take a lot of process data to train on, and a big, nonparametric time series model (which is really what a Transformer is), and you can plausibly do a lot better than SOTA on estimating the quality of the final output and what you can do to improve it. Which, in this case, includes the chance it will go boom too soon or not at all.

When it comes to unstable chemistry and complex, non-uniform materials, we do not know with full mechanistic certainty what factors affect process failures — that’s why there are so many industrial accidents in this business. And that’s precisely why “learn from lots of data” and “detect anomalies, even subtle ones that don’t count as “failures” by the official rubric, and try to remediate them” is likely to be a good strategy here.

Admittedly, this is a little bit pie-in-the-sky compared to the challenge of building new manufacturing plants at all. It’s just a pointer in the direction of “yes, going high-tech here could be a substantial improvement in productivity and safety.”

So is anyone starting new companies in this space?

Turns out, yes!

• Critical Materials Group came out of stealth in 2026 to make C4 at a new facility in Texas.

• Deterrence raised $10.1M in a seed round in 2025 to make explosives with robots.

• Supply Energetics, founded in 2025, is manufacturing nitrocellulose in Kansas.

• Firehawk, founded 2020, is manufacturing 3D-printed propellant in Oklahoma for solid rocket motors.

• X-Bow Systems, founded 2016, makes solid rocket motors, including propellant, in Texas

It’s not a ton, but it’s some evidence that new entrants into this field are viable at all.

It May Be Too Late

If there’s a war in the 2020s, with China or anyone else, that consumes large quantities of munitions, there’s a very serious time crunch for scaling up energetics production.

(And the conflict in Iran definitely isn’t helping the stockpile situation.)

If it takes over a year to get a new facility (or an expansion) built and ready to begin operations, and another year to get the process development optimized and production ramped up, and several more years to get qualified as milspec? Then the timeline doesn’t work for a war before the end of the decade.

The military would have to streamline and speed up its procurement and qualifications process. Or loosen its prohibitions on sourcing energetics from allied foreign nations. Or substitute inferior but more abundant materials. Or cannibalize munitions from elsewhere in the world to focus on an active conflict. None of these are comfortable, business-as-usual choices.

It’s an unfortunate situation. One could make a rah-rah American Dynamism defense-tech pitch here, but it would ring a little hollow; I’m honestly not sure if this problem is going to get solved at all.

Let’s just hope for peace.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything lately, and that doesn’t feel good. My writing voice has always been loadbearing to my identity, and if I don’t have anything to say, if I’m not “appearing in public”, it’s a little bit destabilizing. Invisibility can be comfortable (and I’m less and less at home with the aggressive side of online discourse these days) but it’s also a little bit of a cop-out.

The fact is, I’ve been hiding. It feels like “writer’s block” or like I “can’t think of anything to say”, but obviously that’s suspect, and the real thing is that I can’t think of anything to say that’s impeccable and beyond reproach and definitely won’t get criticized. Also, it’s clearly a vicious cycle; the less I participate in public life, the fewer discussions I’m part of, and the fewer opportunities I have to riff off of what other people are saying.

Life Stuff

So what have I been up to?

Well, for one thing, I had a baby.

For another, I’ve been job hunting.

Solo consulting was fun, but I wasn’t getting many clients, and I’m eager to get back to working on a team again.

What kind of am I looking for? Mostly AI-related stuff, on the research or applications side. Bonus points if there’s an AI-for-science connection.

Stuff I have experience doing and would be interested in doing again:

• running analytical, statistical, or ML experiments

• building “wrapper” tools around LLMs

• working with coding agents

• lit review and due diligence, particularly in life sciences

• financial analysis, market research, and associated business strategy

Stuff I’m frequently told I’m good at:

• learning fast

• taking initiative

• writing

• being honest and operating in good faith

I’m looking at some opportunities at the moment, but I’m also interested to hear about new things, if you know of anything that might be a good fit.

Projects

Messing around with Claude Code continues to be fun; a lot of what I’ve been doing lately has been tools for personal use.

I have my little life-tracker app:

which is an all-in-one diary, to-do list, mood tracker, and place to keep track of other things I log (books I read, dishes I cook, notes from meetings with people, etc). It’s largely replaced my Roam and and Complice to-do app.

I also made a personal CRM from my email contacts:

and used Claude analysis of email text and web search to identify all contacts by how we know each other, their current profession and employer, and their current location.

So now I can search for things like “who do I know who’s a software engineer” or “who do I know in NYC”.

The personal CRM project has actually been really helpful for getting me off my butt to reach out to more people to meet in person for lunch or coffee.

Other stuff includes analyzing my Claude use:

and my personal finances (not as helpful as some people have found; I did find some unnecessary expenses I could cut, but overall it turns out I don’t do much overspending).

25 Miscellaneous Opinions

Some things that are top of mind, not necessarily brilliant or original, just as a way of priming the pump about sharing my point of view.

1. I’m mostly not doing high-level AI predictions any more; it’s hard enough to keep up with the present without trying to foretell the future.

2. I’m an enthusiastic AI user but I’m more sympathetic than you’d guess to hardcore anti-AI people. IMO every proposed use case for AI should have a grognard insisting that it’s terrible and going to ruin everything, and that will force enthusiasts to think harder about where it adds value and where it just adds error, degrades quality, or enables bad behavior at scale.

3. I hate AI-assisted writing and am increasingly disillusioned with AI art; I do value the human touch, both for social reasons (I want to hear from someone in particular; part of what I value in a piece of writing is the fact that I now know what John Doe’s opinion is) and for reasons of diversity/originality.

4. The DOD ordering Anthropic to remove safeguards is indeed terrible.

5. I think Claude has better ethics than the average person on Earth.

6. I don’t buy the Citrini post. When has any technology caused a recession by being too good? Job loss, yes. Inequality, yes. Social upheaval, even to the point of war, yes. But an aggregate demand shock, where the tech makes goods so much cheaper that it causes a financial crisis? Without people buying more of something else with their newfound spare cash? I don’t know that this has ever happened.

7. I do see a possibility that custom software (made by you + coding agents) becomes a new competitor to mass-produced software sold by SaaS companies. I’m not sure how much this kills SaaS, though, or if they even find a way to turn this to their advantage (cutting their own costs? adding more customizability now that it’s so cheap?)

8. I think closed-loop “AI scientists” where the AI proposes experiments, implements them automatically, analyzes the data, and does it all over again, are probably not already happening at scale today. They are doing R&D and early experiments in startups, and I expect we’ll see unambiguously “closed loop” processes announced, at least at demo scale, this year or next; my impression is that startups are farther ahead on this than big pharma, which seems to still be hiring the first members of their in-house teams for this sort of thing. I continue to think fully automated, closed-loop experimentation makes more sense for biological HTS than anything else, including materials.

9. I think eventually we’re going to saturate artificial benchmarks and for continued AI progress we’ll need some kind of real-world ground truth that makes “superhuman performance” even meaningful. In math and code that can mean RL against proof assistant and compiler feedback, for instance. In forecasting it might mean RL against true outcomes. In natural science it ultimately might mean problem-solving/troubleshooting/world-modeling a real physical environment.

10. I’m genuinely uncertain whether I’m more in the “harness” or “model” camp, in terms of what’s more important; for some things, the right “harness” (system prompts, product scaffolding, hard-coded details) makes a less powerful model more useful than a more powerful model “out of the box”, but for other things, the “out of the box” default choices are actually great and the “harness” is irrelevant. (And there’s a third case where the “harness” is basically “a way to turn way more tokens into way better results”, which is sometimes worth it, sometimes not.)

11. I think universalism has a particularism all its own. For example, “cosmopolitanism” as opposed to nativism, being favorably disposed towards foreigners, is often informed by specific life experiences (in my case, living in a port city; being raised in the highly international culture that is academia; being descended from millennia of traders and travelers). It’s not abstract or bloodless; it is grounded in very specific, concrete places and people, and I like those places and people! It is fine to have ingroup loyalty; why should our ingroup be any different, just because we’re also objectively correct?

12. I think it’s impossible to both be “confident” and never be annoying to anyone. Strong, bold people usually get on someone’s nerves.

13. I think a root cause of the problems with healthcare in developed countries might be that we’re pathologically unwilling to admit to healthcare scarcity. It takes a long time and a lot of bureaucratic hoop-jumping to find out that a particular form of healthcare is not available to you, as a patient.

    In my grandfather’s day, when he was a country doctor, poor uninsured patients often had to go without healthcare that they couldn’t afford. Today, thankfully, more people can afford more healthcare…but it is much less straightforward to find out what you can’t afford, or can’t access at any price, and that means nobody can do any planning around the scarcity that does, in fact, still exist.

    “Healthcare abundance”, as an agenda of building more hospitals, licensing more healthcare practitioners, producing more drugs and supplies so we’re not in shortage all the time, etc, is very important, but it is harder to communicate than housing abundance, in part because most people don’t know healthcare scarcity is a thing. And people don’t know about healthcare scarcity because we hide it.

14. We’re also really weird about death. That’s mostly a problem with the general public, though medical professionals sometimes contribute to it. People are really way less frank than they should be about situations like “Grandpa will never get well”, “you are dying and additional treatment will extend life weeks, not months”, “you probably want to die at home not in the hospital”, “here are some tips and tricks for having a good hospital stay if you’re ever severely ill, because statistically speaking one day you will be”, etc. People don’t want to think about the bad outcome! And doctors aren’t necessarily straightforward about telling you the bad outcome!

15. I think analytical, “optimizer”, spreadsheety people get a lot of hate that’s undeserved. You do, in fact, want to get the facts right, pursue goals, and simplify away what’s extraneous. A lot of processes get better when someone more “spreadsheet-brained” comes in and reforms them.

16. Since I’ve had kids, I’ve become more pro-video game, more anti-TV (including and especially YouTube), and more pro-incentives (rewards more so than punishments, but both are fine IMO when reasonably implemented).

17. I think “preparing your kids for an uncertain future” primarily means getting them good at fully general skills — reading, writing, and arithmetic, plus social skills and physical fitness — and being flexible about the rest, and building a good enough relationship with them that they might ever listen to you as young adults. Also, it turns out that most parents and schools don’t really care how good kids are at the “3 R’s”, and if you care, you have to treat it like a niche preference and get creative about making sure it happens.

18. I think freedom is good, for kids and adults. All else equal, if somebody wants to do a thing, and there’s not a good reason to stop them, they should be allowed to do as they please. There are all sorts of exceptions and edge cases, but “things are allowed by default, forbidden only for good reasons” is a core principle for me (and one that disappointingly few people share!)

19. There’s some concept of “wholesomeness” that has become a bigger part of my life as I’ve gotten older. Some combination of “do things you’re comfortable being transparent about to a general audience, including children and people significantly older than you”, “do things that don’t cause a lot of negative consequences”, “stay on the ‘light’ side more than the ‘dark’ side aesthetically and tonally”, “avoid actions motivated by hostility”, etc.

20. I really prefer history and social science books written in the 19th or early 20th century. There’s a point where it started to be taboo to editorialize too much, to describe personalities or give authorial opinions; but an opinionated guy telling stories about individuals is a much more entertaining and clear way to learn an otherwise dry subject than interminable abstraction.

21. To the extent I have been developing software “taste” it’s really just caution. Use common languages and frameworks. Try not to build anything elaborate if you can avoid it. Write comments. In principle (though I have less experience with this myself) it seems obviously better to use systems that make it harder to produce bugs (e.g. type-checking.) Remember, Thou Art Mortal.

22. For the most part I have uncreative tastes — I like prestige TV, fancy restaurants, swanky-but-mainstream graphic design. Books and music are the only place where I’m actually far away from “generic coastal elite” taste.

23. I think more people should donate to stuff based on personal taste, “seems cool to me”, “I know the guy and he’s neat”, those kinds of casual considerations. There’s no shame in it! You don’t have to only donate when there’s an impeccable Process in place! You can donate small amounts (relative to your income/wealth), that you can comfortably afford, as almost a consumption good. Buying stuff you want to see more of in the world.

24. Macrophages are my favorite immune cell and I have a good feeling about any tactic that works with em. The innate immune system in general is underrated.

25. Simplicity, generally, is underrated as a heuristic in biology — “we should work with this biological system because we have any hope of understanding it.” Evolutionarily ancient things (the innate immune system, the hypothalamus) are going to be more tractable to study in animals, and simpler overall.

One thing I’d been wondering about for a while was predictors of biotech startup success. Turns out, at least for publicly traded companies, SEC filings and stock data can go a long way towards answering those questions.

My repo is here — as always, please do let me know if you see any problems with the code.

Methodology

I used API access to SEC EDGAR for filing data on publicly traded biotech companies; SIC codes 2834 (“Pharmaceutical preparations”) and 2836 (“Biological products”) are the relevant ones for biotech.

Filtering for companies that have ever filed an S-1 form (the preparation for IPO) and had a founding date after 2000, I got a dataset of 803 companies.

S-1 filings come with information including founding date, founding location, stock ticker symbol, and stock exchange.

Cross-correlating this with Yahoo Finance data (using the yfinance library) gives additional information on the stock price over time.

Other SEC filings from EDGAR, like the 8-K, give information about whether companies were acquired, went bankrupt, or were otherwise delisted from stock exchanges.

The “business” section of the S-1 filing gives information about the company’s pipeline at the time of IPO. Here I used Claude to extract categories including:

• modality (small molecule? biologic? both? neither?)

  • and modality sub-type (biologics can include peptides, oligonucleotides, antibodies, vaccines, etc; “other” can include natural products, radiotherapies, drug formulations, etc)

• disease areas (cardiovascular, oncology, rare disease, immunology, CNS, etc)

• drug targets

• lead stage (preclinical, Phase I, Phase II, Phase III, or approved)

Then, I classified company outcomes into four categories:

1. Acquired

2. Failed (including bankruptcy, delisting, or other keywords relating to going out of business)

3. Trading+ (currently trading on a stock exchange, with a higher stock price today than at IPO, indicating that the company became more valuable over time)

4. Trading- (currently trading on a stock exchange, with a lower stock price today than at IPO, indicating that the company became less valuable over time.)

Basic Outcome Stats

About half of the startups in the dataset are still trading, and half have exited. Failures (31%) somewhat outnumber acquisitions (22%). Among currently trading startups, very few of them have positive CAGR (7%), while the majority (39.7%) have lost value.

This might reflect the high rate of clinical trial failure. Most biotech startups will IPO while their most advanced candidate is in clinical trials, and their stock will lose value if they get bad news in the clinic. Unsuccessful companies eventually fail; acquisitions are probably a mix of successful companies (acquired on good terms) and moderately unsuccessful companies (acquired on bad terms).

If you look at founding dates, you can see that failed companies skew earlier, while negative-CAGR companies skew later. In other words, the data supports the hypothesis that poor-performing currently-trading companies are just companies that haven’t failed yet.

Also notice that acquisitions stay pretty steady except for a drop in the past five years, which makes sense (the newest companies haven’t had time to be acquired yet).

Predictors of Outcome

If we run a multinomial logistic regression with the variables in the dataset, we get some striking results.

1. More recently founded firms are more likely to be still trading (vs. acquired or failed). This makes sense; firms have a life cycle.

2. Don’t be from a flyover state. Companies founded in states other than CA, MA, NY, NJ, or PA — that is, outside California or the Northeast — are much more likely to fail. The benefit (or the selection effect) of being located in a biotech hub is huge.

3. Don’t pick a modality “other” than biologics or small molecules. The most common “other” modalities are natural products and drug formulations — these are typically lower-value than novel compounds and biologics.

4. Do pursue rare disease and immunology indications. Companies with a rare disease focus are more likely to be acquired and more likely to trade with positive CAGR; companies with an immunology focus are more likely to trade with positive CAGR.

5. Do IPO at Phase III. Companies that IPO at the last phase of clinical trials are more likely to be acquired than companies that IPO earlier (more risk) or later (perhaps, more likely to be generic?).

Looking in more detail at pipeline information gives a largely consistent picture.

Rare diseases and immunology are good (less likely to fail, more likely to have positive CAGR).

Antibodies are good (less likely to fail, more likely to have positive CAGR).

And PD-1 (the target of immune checkpoint inhibitors for cancer) is by far the best target (more likely to be acquired, less likely to fail.)

All of this is pretty much conventional wisdom in the modern biotech world. The immune system (immuno-oncology, antibody therapies, immunology indications) is an exciting place to work these days. Rare diseases generally have unmet medical need, clear genetic causes, and an easier path to approval. And locating your company in a biotech hub region is generally the recommended thing to do.

No huge surprises here — but it’s nice to know when the data can back up the conventional wisdom.

I’m mildly surprised that cell therapies, CAR-T, and peptides aren’t outperforming the baseline, despite conventional wisdom being that some of these novel biologic modalities are “the way of the future.” Maybe it’s still too soon to tell, or maybe exciting science hasn’t translated sufficiently into financial returns.

I’m also a little surprised that oncology (the most popular disease category) isn’t outperforming the baseline, despite its easier path to approval than most disease types. But maybe there’s a lot of variance in company quality; lots of firms are drawn to oncology, but treating cancer is easier said than done.

One thing these stats aren’t very informative about is very recent trends. Anything that’s mostly happening in pre-IPO companies isn’t in this dataset, and the most recently-IPO’d companies are too young to really have outcomes. So, “should you continue betting on these trends or are they played out?” is something you’d need more domain expertise (and a bit of luck) to assess.

But, while it’s hard to use the past to predict the future, I think it’s a decent starting point in making sense of the present. Basically, the data backs up the buzzwords; the “cool” locations and research focuses do also tend to be the financially successful ones.

Back in June, I proposed that it would be a good idea to look for broad-spectrum cancer treatments — i.e. therapies that work on many types of cancer, rather than being hyper-specialized for narrow subtypes.

There’s nothing fantastic about this notion. After all, some of the oldest cancer treatments (chemotherapy and radiation) are broad-spectrum, and while in some cases it’s possible to outperform them, cytotoxic chemo and radiation are still mainstays of treatment today.

The first thing I proposed was a systematic search for “pan-essential” targets — genes which, when knocked out in cancer cells, cause cell death, but which don’t kill healthy cells.

What I hadn’t realized at the time is that it’s not necessarily tractable to screen genetic knockouts of true “healthy cells”, which don’t grow well in culture. You might be able to do something with short-lived patient-derived samples, or organoids, but we don’t have big public datasets of these.

What we do have is DepMap, an atlas of genetic cancer dependencies (i.e. genes without which cancer cells die). It spans 2119 human cancer cell lines, and also has 13 “normal” cell culture lines and 45 fibroblast lines as controls.

Now, granted, an immortalized cell culture line is not that representative of a healthy cell in a human body, but it’s a starting point.

We can look for gene knockouts that have a strong growth-inhibiting effect on the majority of cancer lines, with little inhibiting effect on the “normal” lines, and rank them by selectivity. We can then filter this list of genetic targets further for their likely druggability, rule out the ones that are already known targets of cancer drugs, and end up with a list of targets worth investigating.

Claude Code

This is a straightforward data analysis project that in principle I could have done myself — but it would have been a lot of work, and I might not have gotten around to it.

Instead, I had the bot do it.

And what a bot it is!

I am, as the kids say, “feeling the AGI.”

I’d coded with LLM assistance before, but I was always trying to mostly write stuff myself or at least carefully read every line; I wasn’t truly letting the machine off the leash. This time, I did; every line of code in my pan-cancer repo is 100% Claude-generated.

The experience is addictive, to the point of being a bit scary. It would be all too easy to let a lot of programming skills atrophy and let the bot do everything for me.

On the plus side, it means there’s no longer such a thing as a “someday project”, at least when it comes to code. If it can be done with a laptop and public data (or your own data), you can do it right now, frictionlessly.

Dean Ball’s list is an inspiration:

In the past month I have:

1. Automated invoice creation, sending, and tracking;

2. Created scientifically realistic simulations of hydrological systems as a learning project;

3. Automated my research process of gathering and analyzing all proposed state legislation related to AI (though this is no substitute for reading the bill for anything I am going to write about);

4. Orchestrated a complex chain of autonomous data collection, processing, analysis, and presentation steps related to manufacturing and industrial policy;

5. Created a machine-learning model capable of predicting US corn yields with what appears to be very high accuracy (the proof will be in the pudding), based on climate, soil, Earth-observation satellite, and other data sources;

6. Replicated three machine-learning research papers and modified the approach to suit my own research ends;

7. Performed hundreds of experiments with Byte-level language models, an emerging interest of mine;

8. Created an autonomous prediction market agent;

9. Created an autonomous options trader based on a specific investment thesis I developed;

10. Built dozens of games and simulations to educate myself about various physical or industrial phenomena;

11. Created an agent that monitors a particular art market in which I am potentially interested in making an acquisition;

12. Created a new personal blog complete with a Squarespace-style content management system behind the scenes;

13. Other things I cannot talk about publicly just yet.

If you (like me) have a long wish list of things to do, and are bottlenecked on the gumption or programming skill to do them all, Claude Code is a gamechanger.

So far, it’s been two days, and I’ve already had it make a little mood-tracker app and then overhauled all my web-app-based to-do list and journaling/logging systems and replaced them with a Claude Code-based system on my laptop. And this pan-cancer project.

I notice that I am much less interested in toggling between a bunch of different web apps when Claude Code can just extract their data via an API and let me combine it all seamlessly.

I also notice that I care, suddenly, about efficient and repeatable processes in my daily life, in the way that software engineers always have and I historically haven’t.

You know how playing a video game for several hours makes you see the world around you in terms of the moves in the game? Like playing a first-person shooter and seeing everything as a target? After using Claude Code for hours, everything looks like a protocol to be optimized and made repeatable. Down to “what’s the most efficient set of moves for changing a diaper?”

Your systems can now be your systems. Configured how you like em. Exactly the way command-line wizards have always rolled their own systems, except that now it’s trivially easy.

“But is the code trustworthy?”

In the case of this pan-cancer project, I’m inclined to believe it’s okay. I read through the python scripts and they looked sensible, and (more importantly) I’ve been looking in more detail through the top-50 list of targets and those look sensible.

This is, of course, not enough assurance for a serious piece of software. For that, we’d need a bunch of tests, at a minimum. But as a personal experiment, I’m satisfied. Please do let me know, however, if you see anything fishy in the repo.

ETA: As a helpful commentator pointed out, there WAS a problem in the repo; Claude wrote a function to exclude DepMap’s list of “pan-essential” targets, which damage all cells, but then quietly did not actually implement this exclusion in the final results, because it would have resulted in an empty list of results.

This is a particularly alarming failure mode of agents — they’ll spontaneously “fix” code that returns something disappointing, even when you actually need to know the “bad news”. I was too overwhelmed by the speed and abundance of the autogenerated output to notice the problem, which I now see was a dangerous oversight.

(As always, my blog posts, and anything else I sign my name to, are written by me, not by any AI. When I share model output it will be clearly labeled as such.)

The Results

Cell line “dependency” on a gene is measured by the abundance of CRISPR-modified cells relative to wild-type; a negative value for a gene means that the cells became less abundant when that gene is knocked out. This could be due to the knockout causing cell death, slower proliferation, or both.

Here, we define the cutoff for an “pan-cancer essential” gene as having a negative dependency score (effect size) of at least -0.5 in at least 50% of cancers, and of a gene that isn’t essential for normal cells as one that doesn’t have an average negative dependency score of more than -0.3 in the 16 normal cell lines. This gives us a list of “cancer-specific pan-essential genes.”

ETA: DepMap also has a list of “pan-essential genes” which, it claims, kill all cells, healthy and cancerous, and all the genes returned by my selectivity cutoff are classified as pan-essential. Arguably, this means that there are no good hits at all, rather than 1556.

From a devil’s advocate perspective, we might say instead that DepMap’s creators encoded this list based on an assumption that “pan-essential” genes across cancers are inherently bad targets — i.e. that by definition the kind of selective broad-spectrum anti-cancer agents I’m looking for cannot exist.

At any rate, for better or worse, all the genes in the following analysis are on the “pan-essential” list.

If you really wanted greater confidence that these genes could be targeted without killing healthy cells, you’d need to experiment with (genetic or pharmacological) inhibition in more realistic models of healthy cells, perhaps something patient-derived.

Selectivity is defined as (cancer dependency - non-cancer dependency). More selective is better; it means that targeting that gene relatively harms cancer cells more than normal cells.

We look at the top-50 “cancer-specific pan-essential” genes, ranked from most to least selective.

We also cross-reference these top genes with the OpenTargets database to get an estimate of their “druggability.”

OpenTargets has, for each target, a list of criteria that point towards it being druggable with small molecules (things like “high-quality pocket”), with antibodies, or with PROTACs — as well as whether there are approved drugs or clinical-stage drug candidates with that target. We assign a simple scoring rubric (for each drug/biologic type, we assign the target a score of 1 for any structural druggability criteria, 2 for clinical-stage drugs, 3 for approved drugs).

The resulting top-50 targets are as follows:

Notice that the targets of some classic chemo drugs are on here:

#8 is DHFR (the target of methotrexate), while #41 is TOP2A (the target of doxorubicin and etoposide), and #49 is BUB1B (one of the targets of paclitaxel.)

Other chemo targets (for gemcitabine, capecitabine, and 5-fluorouracil) are also somewhat selective, but not enough to make it into the top 50.

There’s generally a fairly high density (18%) of targets with clinical or approved cancer therapies in the top 50, which suggests we’re on the right track and we are indeed looking at a set of cancer targets.

But we’re here to look for new targets. Hopefully, targets that have additional evidence of relevance for cancer, which haven’t yet been subject to a lot of drug development attention, but which are reasonably tractable as drug targets. Especially high selectivity might mean the potential for drugs that work as widely as chemo but have fewer side effects; novel mechanisms of action might suggest drugs that aren’t redundant with existing therapies.

In the rest of this post, I’ll look at a few interesting candidates.

YRDC — Not Yet Pursued

YRDC has the top selectivity score, of 0.456, and it is essential in 84.1% of cancer lines.

It is involved in tRNA modification.

Interestingly, “loss‐of‐function mutations in YRDC have been linked to severe developmental disorders—including variants of Galloway–Mowat syndrome and neonatal progeroid phenotypes—that feature telomere shortening, genomic instability, microcephaly, and renal dysfunction”. That suggests that knocking out this gene is killing fast-dividing cancer cells through interfering with genome maintenance.

It localizes to the mitochondria, and it’s especially highly expressed in bone marrow.

It’s overexpressed in a variety of cancers1 and targeting it (with a genetic knockdown) in glioblastoma can reduce tumor growth.2

There are antibodies that target it.

But so far YRDC does not appear to be the subject of a drug development effort.

I don’t know of a reason it should be impossible to target (though the mitochondrial location might present some challenges, and its concentration in the bone marrow suggests standard chemo side effects such as neutropenia would be a concern.)

TFRC — Clinical

TFRC had the #2 selectivity score, at 0.369, and was essential in 67.2% of cancers.

TFRC encodes the transferrin receptor, which enables cellular iron uptake.

Conveniently, it’s a surface protein, and it’s overexpressed in many cancers.3 It seems that cancer cells can be unusually iron-hungry, and starving them of iron can prevent growth and/or progression.

An anti-TFRC antibody-drug conjugate, INA03, recently completed Phase I trials in relapsed/refractory leukemias, where it was “well tolerated” (a phrase which here means “not vastly worse than chemo”) and showed some early signs of efficacy. 4 French company Inatherys was behind the trial.

PHF5A — Preclinical

PHF5A has the #3 selectivity score, with cancer selectivity of 0.369, and it’s essential in 100% of cancer cell lines.

It’s a nuclear protein, a component of the spliceosome protein complex. Like YRDC, it’s involved in genome repair.

It’s also overexpressed in many cancers, and sometimes its expression is associated with worse survival prognosis. Almost all immune checkpoint genes (which protect cancers from the immune system) are positively associated with PHF5A expression.5

And it can apparently be pharmacologically inhibited, with pladienolide B.6 And targeted with antibodies.

I have no special reason to believe it’s either tractable or impossible to make drugs to target PHF5A, but it seems to be an open problem and one that people are working on.

ADSL — Preclinical

ADSL has the #3 selectivity score, at 0.318, and is essential in 70.5% of cancer cell lines.

It’s an enzyme involved in making purines, and thus obviously involved in DNA synthesis/repair.

Conveniently, there exist antibodies that target it.

It’s a cytosolic protein, mostly expressed in muscle.

Knocking it down in cancer-prone mice prevents the growth of liver tumors.7 Lots of other studies, all preclinical, find causal effects of ADSL inhibition or knockdown on multiple cancer types’ proliferation or invasiveness, eg. in breast cancer8.

This seems like a fairly tractable target, though not especially neglected.

SEPHS2 — Not Yet Pursued

SEPHS2 has the #5 selectivity score, at 0.316, and is essential in 54.9% of cancers.

It’s an enzyme involved in selenium metabolism.

It lives inside the nucleus, in the nucleoplasm, and is especially highly expressed in the liver and colon.

Cancer cells, especially breast cancers, take up a lot of selenium, which can be toxic, and needs SEPHS2 to detoxify it.9

Knocking out SEPHS2 can delay or prevent leukemia in mice10.

There are antibodies that target it, but so far no small molecules. It may be difficult to target due to its nuclear location.

NMT1 — Clinical

NMT1 has the #6 selectivity score, at 0.314, and is essential in 71.1% of cancers.

It is an enzyme that adds the fatty acid myristate to certain proteins, a post-translational modification that prepares them for cell signaling roles (that might be involved in cancer’s abnormal survival and proliferation signaling).

There are lots of associations between NMT1 and cancer progression in various cancers (breast11, liver12, bladder13, etc).

There are also compounds that inhibit it; one of those recently completed a Phase I trial for advanced solid tumors and relapsed B-cell lymphomas,14 led by Canadian company Pacylex Pharmaceuticals.

What’s interesting here is that this seems to be a novel pathway, not based around genome repair/synthesis, and thus potentially non-redundant with older chemo drugs.

ELL — Not Yet Pursued

ELL has the #7 selectivity score, at 0.310, and is essential in 95.1% of cancers.

It’s involved in gene transcription and lives in the nucleus. It’s a transcription factor that affects oncogenes like Myc. 15

It may be difficult to target due to its nuclear location, and there don’t seem to be any drug development programs targeting it.

GUK1 — Not Yet Pursued

GUK1 has a selectivity score of 0.294 and is essential in 94.9% of cancers.

It’s an enzyme involved in guanine metabolism.

It’s particularly highly expressed in skin, and it’s a plasma membrane protein.

It’s been found that you need GUK1 activation for lung cancer cell growth.16

There are compounds that inhibit GUK1 activity.17

So far it doesn’t seem to have been considered as a cancer drug target.

CFLAR — Preclinical

CFLAR has a selectivity score of 0.259 and is essential in 52.4% of cancers.

It’s a regulator of apoptosis that prevents CASP8 from killing cells.

Its expression is a predictor of cancer drug resistance and poor prognosis; mild heat shock can suffice to cause it to aggregate and be removed from the cell; there are also programs underway to develop direct small molecules that target it.18

DNM1L — Preclinical

DNM1L has a specificity score of 0.259 and is essential in 57.2% of cancers.

It’s an enzyme that regulates mitochondrial fission. Normally it’s a cytosolic protein.

Its expression is associated with progression in stomach cancer19, pancreatic cancer20, endometrial cancer21, and others. Many DNM1L inhibitors have been developed, but they’re not specific enough to be good cancer therapies yet.22

TRPM7 — Preclinical

TRPM7 has a specificity score of 0.229 and is essential in 64.5% of cancers.

TRPM7 is a calcium ion channel on the cell membrane.

TRPM7 is necessary for breast cancer metastasis, via its effect on cell-cell adhesion; it makes cells less stiff and thus less able to stick together, loosening them so they can migrate.23 It does the same in ovarian cancer24 and prostate cancer.25 Interestingly, it is itself a mechanosensor that detects stretching of the cell membrane.26

Work is currently being done on developing selective inhibitors of TRPM7.

In about September 2025, I decided to go on a self-help kick, mostly revolving around stuff like “self-esteem”, “confidence”, and “guilt/shame”.

Basically, I wanted to no longer feel bad about myself (when unwarranted).

This has been working really well. In fact, I almost want to say I’m “done”, though I think it’s probably too early to be sure.

I wanted to log what’s been working for me, in case any of it is helpful or generalizable to other people.

Feel entirely free to skip this post if you’re not interested in the gooey details of my psyche.

On the other hand, I don’t actually believe that self-help is a shameful or uninteresting topic. How to handle your own psychology is a huge part of doing anything. And while my Substack isn’t mostly about me, it is something of a record of the things I’ve been interested in or working on at any given point, to the extent I’m free to talk about them in public. Self-help has been one of my “projects” lately, and I finally feel like I have justified, grounded opinions worth sharing about what works and what doesn’t (for me).

Thingness

A crucial heuristic I use for self-help is “thingness”, which is a bit hard to explain.

“Have you really had a breakthrough or not?” is a tough question — sometimes the feeling of “breakthrough” doesn’t last and you go right back to your old habits. But it takes a really long time to assess that you’ve made publicly demonstrable, long-term progress. So what are some early signals that something is fruitful?

Introspectively, I need to experience some kind of discrete, unambiguous change; a new thought or state, a place I can tell I’ve literally never been before in my life. “Change” doesn’t imply “permanent change”, but lots of self-help doesn’t even pass the sniff test of “whether you can prove it to a third party or not, but being 100% honest with yourself, did you feel anything clear-cut happen inside you?”

For instance, I don’t believe IFS has “thingness”, at least not for me. I went into that trance state, came up with a bunch of “parts”, wrote them down, and then even a few months later looked back at my writing and was like “what? heck no, i don’t have those as sub-personalities”. Stable sub-personalities just don’t seem like “natural categories” for describing what’s going on inside me, and nothing particularly changes or improves when I try on that conceptualization. There’s no “thingness.”

Usually, “mere intellectualization” doesn’t have that property of “thingness”. It’s “just” words and ideas and it doesn’t click into your more basic emotional, behavioral, or motivational systems. But I’ve found that if you go back and forth between intellectually analyzing and emotionally/bodily “feeling into” ideas, then even rather abstract concepts can create that discrete “click” of change, that chunky “thingness”.

Years ago, I used to think “goals” were also sort of a “wrong concept” for what was going on inside me — too abstract, too removed from the roiling chaos of raw sensation and semi-raw impulse, and thus talking about “my goals” would always be in some sense fake — but now I’ve changed so that goals are actually closer to being bona fide parts of my inner machinery, so goal-oriented paradigms work much better for me. They “have thingness” for me now, though they didn’t earlier.

The following insights and tactics, which came in part from me, in part from talking to a lot of (both customized and default) LLM bots, and in part from talking to a few friends, are, I’m pretty confident, “actual things” in the sense I’ve been talking about. How big and how long-term an impact they’ll have on my life remains to be seen, but I’m optimistic.

Insight #1: (Irrational) Guilt Is Actually Due To Fear Of Facing Someone’s Disapproval

This sounds pretty obvious, but it’s not. It’s a claim about what’s the cause and what’s the effect (and therefore what’s the right point to intervene).

One could imagine an equally plausible statement that reverses the cause and effect — “You only feel afraid of other people’s opinion because you have low self-esteem” — but I think that, at least for me, that would be false.

The causality definitely goes {fear of a bad social reaction} → {beating up myself preemptively, as a defense mechanism}.

Why am I so confident of this?

Well, first of all, the fear is a very concrete, physical flinch reaction. I get startled easily when someone comes in the room and “catches” me goofing off, for instance. That feels very concrete and basic, close to the “bare metal” of the body and mind. Whereas “self-esteem” seems a lot more complex and cognitive, and a lot more unclear what it even means.

Secondly, I can notice a certain “soothing” effect from self-condemnatory thoughts like “I’m a terrible person.” I feel a tension, which is relieved when I denigrate myself. That’s suggestive that my “low self esteem” is a strategy that I instinctively reach for to solve some other problem, rather than a “primary” phenomenon.

This is great news, because it suggests a tactic.

Tactic #1: DIY Exposure Therapy for Social Disapproval

There’s a known, evidence-based way to deal with phobias: graded exposure therapy! You start with the mildest version of the thing that triggers fear, and then sit with it until the fear goes away.

For me, this means vividly visualizing the experience of the person in front of me showing disapproval of the thing I say or do.

I’m pretty sensitive about social disapproval, so even simulated/imagined “exposure therapy” is productive for me. I can get a lot out of going through a mental “journey” where I imagine that someone whose opinion I care about has a negative reaction to what I’m doing, and simulate how I’d react and what would happen afterward, and find that it turns out okay.

“Mere” imagination is a bigger deal than most people think. Vivid, wholehearted imagination can do a lot of work towards allowing me to do new things in real life. I’ve been able to have conversations I was afraid of, simply by imagining them vividly ahead of time.

A real-life version of this exposure therapy I’ve also found useful is just making myself look at another person’s face, look into their eyes, and become highly aware of whether they seem to be “okay with me.”

Are they happy I’m here, with them, right now? Do they like what’s going on in the conversation?

The answer could be no!

Would I be able to mentally tolerate it, to not flinch away, if the truth was “actually I’m impatient for you to go/annoyed by what you just said/not a big fan of yours in general”?

The handful of times I’ve gotten into a state where I’m really prepared to see the truth whatever it may be — not defending against the worst-case scenario or bracing for it or distracting myself from it, but actually okay with it — it’s a strange, intense, hyper-present altered state, and really conducive to heightened intimacy and warmth.

It’s not possible to fully feel that someone likes you unless you are fully open to the possibility that they don’t. Once that “fluttering” of anxiety “stabilizes”, once the flinchy zapping around of your mind settles down into calm, some very odd (and good) things start to happen.

I actually haven’t done this tactic that often and I think there’s still a lot of room for improvement, but the experiences I’ve had have convinced me that it’s fruitful.

Tactic #2: Positive Exposure Therapy

There are some things — often they’re compliments people have given me — where thinking about them gives me a sense of mingled fear and excitement. Sort of like “it can’t be!!!” vibrating against “but wouldn’t it be wonderful???”

You can do exposure therapy against these things too. It’s an unusually fun and rewarding process, because you’re increasing your tolerance for an intensely pleasant stimulus. The end result is you keep the excitement but extinguish the fear.

You just keep going back and forth between your fearful “but it can’t be this good!!!” reaction and a calm “yes, it can, because XYZ, this is actually perfectly normal and comprehensible” perspective, until you can sort of hold both at the same time, and you watch the fear burning itself out like a guttering candle.

If you ever have a “special interest” that gets you so excited that you get overwhelmed and can’t talk about it, and you want to be able to “be normal” about it without losing your enthusiasm, that’s another candidate for positive exposure therapy.

Among other things, positive exposure therapy got me to:

Insight #2: It Is Good That I Have Wants/Desires/Choices/Opinions/Etc

One of the things I’ve historically felt bad about is that I’m not particularly self-effacing; I want stuff, I go after what I want, I have a lot of opinions, etc. I’ve been accused that “You just do as you damn well please,” and it’s not wrong.

And in the past, a big part of me would feel “it’s impossible for me to be a good person; I’m tainted with this willful nature!”

On the other hand, you could also describe this trait as motivation. Motivation, arguably, is essential for goodness. Anything valuable or worthwhile in this world is ultimately produced by people who are personally motivated towards it. So there can’t be anything wrong with the mere fact of having one’s own motivations!

And I have met people who thought my motivation was an admirable trait.

On some level I even have to admit that I like my will and always have. It is me, after all; how could I not?

So a few rounds of back-and-forth with positive exposure therapy got me comfortable with the idea that I’m a person with will/motivation/desire/etc and that this is a good thing.

Tactic #3: Positive Visualization

I got this one from my friend Stephen Long, who’s a life coach.

Before you do a high-stakes or difficult thing, you literally visualize it going as well as possible. Vividly. In detail.

This helps a lot with coming into meetings with the kind of attitude that makes them more likely to go well.

It also helps with motivation issues. When I procrastinate, often it’s simply because I haven’t taken a moment to think through how I want/intend the thing to go, or because I anticipate something going wrong. (“I’ll show up at the DMV and there’ll be some kind of mysterious bureaucratic snag that keeps me from getting my ID card” → I never get around to going to the DMV). If instead I visualize “I’m going to do A, then B, then C, and they’re all going to go smoothly and painlessly” then I often find I’m eager to get started.

Positive visualization isn’t magical thinking like “if you imagine winning the lottery, you will win the lottery.”

It’s more like planning, but in the sense of “motor planning”, the kind of vivid inner simulation that connects directly to behavioral output.

I find it entirely believable, for instance, that if a basketball player vividly imagines shooting the ball into the hoop, he’s more likely to make the next basket. He has real-life experience with both making and missing baskets, and he’s choosing to simulate (and prepare for) the motor path that in his experience actually leads to making more baskets.

Likewise, if I vividly visualize a meeting going well, I’m visualizing myself behaving in ways that, in the past, I’ve behaved when meetings did go well. If I visualize myself going to the DMV, I’m drawing from experiences when going to a new location and filling out forms did go smoothly. If you do it in a well-grounded way, derived from your own real-world experience (and vividness will help with that), imagining good outcomes is effectively planning to behave in ways that, in your experience, tend to lead to good outcomes.

This post is also a good woo-free explanation of why “manifestation” can work. People help you more, and you are more motivated and creative, when you know what you want and focus on it.

Positive visualization is arguably the generalization of both “positive” and “negative” exposure therapy; if you’re habitually too pessimistic, you force your imagination to engage with the possibility of things being really good — or the possibility that they’ll go “wrong” in some way you’re afraid of, but that you’ll survive just fine.

Insight #3: The God’s-Eye View Is Fake; Only The First-Person Perspective Is Real

In order to fix emotional and practical problems, sometimes I think you have to venture into the philosophical realm.

I’d historically had a problem with being overly dependent on external validation (praise and criticism). And when I introspected about it, it was because I didn’t feel I had access to what was “really” good or not, but other people might. It was if I were trying to peer into some invisible realm that was akin to “what God’s opinion would be” or “the universe’s-eye view”: an inherent, eternal judge of what “counted” as sufficiently good or not. But I couldn’t see into that “realm” of Platonic essences myself, so I could only hope that other people had access to it.

Now, if you don’t believe in the supernatural, and you don’t believe that other people are somehow fundamentally or ontologically superior to yourself, then this doesn’t make any sense.

Why should someone else’s opinion of me matter, while my own opinion is meaningless? What have they got that I haven’t?

And if ordinary logical thinking is insufficient to access the True Universal Right Answers, why is trying to “peer into the void” with intuition any better?

How do I know that anybody has access to the True Universal Right Answers? Or that they even exist?

But there’s a real psychological need here, which I don’t think people can do without, for non-arbitrary, non-trivial, reachable standards.

On some level I wanted my standards to be non-arbitrary — for instance, I’d only want to feel pride if I had really done something worth being proud of.

On the other hand, no standard I came up with seemed “legit” enough to qualify as “really worth being proud of” — since it was tainted with my choices, my judgment calls, and of course I’m fallible.

But on the other other hand, “then you just never get to fully feel proud of yourself; everything is provisional” was unsatisfying. There are people, I know, who believe in this sort of eternal dissatisfaction on principle; and I don’t envy the unhappiness and chronic exhaustion that tends to build up in their lives.

I’ve always needed a “win condition”. I need to know it’s possible, even if only someday at the end of my life, to be confident and secure in the feeling that I’ve done a good job. I’m fond of triumph, of trumpet fanfares and celebrations, and I need to believe that under some conditions, if I did certain sufficiently awesome things, I’d have earned a triumphant celebration. A glorious state, free of worry, completely exultant. And, as a more immediately practical matter, I need conditions under which I’d let myself completely physically relax — constant straining literally hurts my back.

I don’t think I’m unique here. People need it to be possible to “win”, and they need the “win condition” to be a real challenge that really means something, something they can take seriously as deserving of pride and celebration; if it’s too much like a “participation trophy” it won’t work.

But I’d wound up with some implicit beliefs that made it impossible for me to judge on my own that anything attainable in the real world “counted as a win” for me.

So I had resorted to the much less rigorous default “strategy” of feeling elated when other people praised me and deflated when they criticized me, almost regardless of how credible I actually found them.

The big insight was deciding that I could do better by deciding on some halfway reasonable criteria for what I care about, and then observe empirically whether I’m meeting my own standards.

And then, I could just choose not to worry any more about the “God’s eye view” and whether I’m congenitally “blind” to it. I could just take a first person perspective, a Sarah’s-eye view, all the time; go about my business, pursue my goals, measure my success by whether I’m meeting them.

Sure, I’m the one picking my goals, so I could have just picked trivial ones. But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to pick goals that reflect my best judgment and whole self, such that I wouldn’t later on expect to regret “letting myself” fully relax and celebrate after completing them, or “letting myself” fully believe they’re a big deal.

“Your own best effort at making reasonable judgment calls” isn’t infallible, but it’s clearly better (and more grounded in reference to reality, i.e. genuinely closer to truth and objectivity) than the patterns you’ll fall into if you insist that your own best effort can never be good enough.

This leads into a new tactic.

Tactic #4: Self-Evaluation

Yes, it’s possible to do an honest self-evaluation, that is actually more credible, to you, than pretty much anybody else’s evaluation of you.

You evaluate “am I a good parent?” or “am I a good person” or “am I brave?” or “am I a good writer?” with pretty much the same procedure.

1. Think of some examples, of other people, and decide how you’d classify them. Would I say that, on the whole, George Washington led a good life? My mother? Think of clear-cut “yes” and “no” examples, and ambiguous cases.

2. Based on these examples, notice what sub-criteria you’re considering as important to your understanding of “a good person”, “a good piece of writing”, “good parenting”, etc.

3. Identify what population it seems reasonable to compare yourself to.
   For instance, as a writer, I’m comparing myself to the set of people who have blogs, or who write a substantial amount for work; it would be cold comfort to know I’m a “better writer” than a five-year-old or someone who never had access to an education. As a parent, I’m primarily comparing myself to my friends and acquaintances with kids, my kids’ classmates’ parents, and to some extent my own parents and my peers’ parents.

4. On each sub-criterion, try to think fairly about how you stack up compared to your reference population.

On each of these steps, you’re necessarily making debatable judgment calls. You don’t know you’re getting the “right answer” in the same way you know 2+2=4. It’s not a turn-the-crank algorithm.

But it’s also a structured process. You’re building a narrative that hangs on a number of facts. You’re sincerely trying to give a measured best-guess estimate of your performance, and you’re breaking that down into enough small pieces that you can think about them somewhat concretely.

It’s a lot better than “I’m in a bad mood and I just saw a negative Internet comment so I think I’m a bad person.”

In fact, it’s probably a lot better — stabler, more grounded in knowledge about your life, more consonant with your long-term priorities — than most other people’s impressions of you can possibly be.

Having done self-evaluations and knowing they’re possible, I no longer feel at all like there’s an open question or anything mysterious about “am I any good?” or “do I deserve to be proud of myself?” I have justified opinions of my own about the matter.

I can still be surprised by other people’s evaluations of me — e.g. when an expert says I’m qualified for some kind of job that I had honestly believed I wasn’t — but even when that happens, my old opinion wasn’t based on nothing, it was just based on a limited set of facts that apparently didn’t include the full picture.

I doubt I’m immune yet to emotional (over)reactions to praise and criticism, but something feels like it’s fundamentally changed here. Other people are no longer my only source of trusted guidance about how I’m doing. My closest approximation to “ground truth” is, instead, something I build myself.

Historically, many drugs were discovered empirically, before their mechanism of action was known. Some drugs, like penicillin and aspirin, were identified as the active ingredients in natural products found to be effective (against bacteria and pain, respectively). But today it’s more common for drugs to be intentionally designed to target a specific molecule (often a protein) that’s already known to be causally involved in disease.

Often, drugs turn out to have different or alternative mechanisms of action than researchers initially supposed.1 But you'll lose all credibility if you try to advance a drug without a proposed mechanism; for better or for worse, molecular mechanisms of action are how we think about drug discovery.

So, where do drug targets come from? How do researchers decide which mechanisms to target?

Most of the time, drug development focuses on tried-and-true targets that have already proved successful in other drugs.

For new targets, there’s a range of types of evidence.

Sometimes, there’s genetic evidence. Mutations in a target gene might correlate with incidence or severity of the disease in human populations.

Sometimes there’s animal evidence. Mutations or knockouts/knockdowns of a target gene might affect an animal model of the disease, or a drug with that target might show efficacy in an animal model of disease.

Sometimes there’s in-vitro evidence. At the cellular or molecular level, something is abnormal in the disease state2, and we can trace this micro-abnormality to abnormal levels, activities, or variants of a particular biomolecule.

“Validating” a target means assembling a body of evidence, of any of these types, that’s suggestive that if you alter the target you might alter the symptoms or course of the disease.

So a natural question is, are some targets better than others?

Can we do anything to predict drug success based on mechanism of action?

As Ruxandra Teslo and Jack Scannell have recently pointed out, almost all the cost of developing a drug is spent in clinical trials. And most drugs fail clinical trials.

So the only ways to increase the ROI of drug development are to

1. make clinical trials cheaper (an important policy goal and the focus of the article), or

2. get better at “picking winners”, i.e. choose drug candidates early on that are more likely to succeed in the clinic.

The article also points out that once-great hopes of “picking winners better”, like rational drug design, have not actually resulted in higher clinical success rates. The odds are against the a priori approach.

I fundamentally agree. There’s a reason we test drugs in humans, and it’s because most drug candidates that look good at a preclinical stage don’t turn out to work on human disease! There is no substitute for clinical experiment. And from an efficiency/abundance perspective, the case for making clinical trials easier and cheaper is overwhelming.

However, even at the preclinical stage, some drug candidates are better than others.

Drugs with genetically validated targets are more than twice as likely to succeed in the clinic.345

Also, and unsurprisingly, drugs with the same mechanism of action as those that have failed in the clinic before, are more likely to fail.

(The phenomenon of “me-too” drugs is evidence of this in the other direction; when one drug succeeds, many other similar drugs with the same target tend to be pursued and often approved.)

Plausibly, there are “good targets”, which are causally essential to the disease, and “bad targets”, which aren’t; and plausibly, there is some signal available before a drug program goes to the clinic about how good the target is.

Target Data From ClinicalTrials.gov and ChEMBL

The first step in investigating this question is simply to look at all the clinical drug trials, and all the drugs and their targets, and get some descriptive statistics.

Read more

This whole consciousness sequence (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 , part 6, part 7 ) has taken a long time, and I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. I may have bitten off a bit more than I can chew.

But it’s time to move on, and time to make a few looser and more speculative statements. What did we learn here? How do I view consciousness now that I’ve done some reading about it?

Clearer Definitions, Informed By Examples

Going back to Eric Hoel’s three “things we talk about when we talk about consciousness”:

1. perception/awareness/noticing things;

2. the waking state, rather than deep sleep/coma/anaesthesia

3. the sense of a self

I think #1 is really the primary concept and #2 and #3 are derivative.

I might try to define (2) and (3) in terms of (1) as follows:

The waking state (2) is a state in which you notice/perceive/are-aware-of (1) anything, while total unconsciousness is a state in which you are conscious of zero things.

The self (3) is the subset of your experiences where you can directly notice/perceive/be-aware-of (1) the process of action, including the mental planning events (choices) that precede and correspond to voluntary actions.

To expand on the “self” idea; while you can perceive the behavior of an external object — a falling rock, or another human being — you cannot yourself perceive the whole process of their behavior including internal experiences. You can see someone else raise their hand; you do not feel the hand motion as they do, or experience their choice-to-move prior to moving.

Is this “enough” for a sense of self? Necessary and sufficient?

That’s where I think the experimental evidence is suggestive. In cases where people lose or gain a sense of “self-ownership”, “volition”, or “agency” — rubber hand illusions, distorted virtual reality environments, neglect and asomatognosia, depersonalization, out-of-body experiences, etc — mostly when the “sense of self” is disrupted there’s some evidence of a problem with this kind of “inspectability of action.” Either some of the sensory/motor data in the process of action is missing, or there’s an inconsistency in it, or it’s not getting sent to the relevant parts of the brain.1 And when we present people with a rubber hand illusion, or a tool or user interface they can manipulate dexterously, they can acquire a “sense of self” over objects that aren’t literally part of their own bodies, just from being able to coherently perceive and predict the process of action and all its immediate sensory consequences.

Now, going back upstream, can we define “conscious perception” in a non-circular way? Not referring to any synonyms of “conscious”, “awareness”, “subjective perception”, etc.

Maybe it goes something like this:

A stimulus is consciously perceived (1) if the agent’s behavior not only depends on the stimulus, but also depends on a “hidden variable” known as the perception of the stimulus, such that the perception varies with the agent’s empirical ability to behave in ways that closely track the stimulus.

In other words, if you are conscious, you can “bet harder” on more confident, clearer, more unambiguous perceptions, and be more hesitant or cautious in cases where you actually have less accurate control over the end result. Your perception encodes an assessment of how good your perception is (and what you expect to be able to do with it.)

A person with blindsight, most commonly, expects to perform at chance on visual tasks and is surprised to find that “somehow” he knew where the visual stimulus was; a sighted person not only sees but knows he sees (and, thus, would notice and change behavior if his vision faltered).

Similarly, a person whose behavior is “subconsciously” influenced by some experience, cannot accurately predict in what way she is influenced, and will have wrong anticipations about her own behavior and how likely it is to succeed at its aims.

You can even cash this out empirically as performance on a calibration task.

Why Consciousness?

Why do we “know we know” things, instead of just responding appropriately to stimuli?

Why didn’t we evolve to be like the vampires in Peter Watts’ Blindsight, who have no conscious experience, only perfectly efficient stimulus-response patterns? Why are we wasting precious metabolic resources on navel-gazing?

This “calibration” angle suggests a practical benefit; when adaptive behavior is sufficiently complex, as in humans (and likely some other animals, I’m not making a strong cutoff claim here), it’s useful to have calibrated confidence, to be more cautious when information is ambiguous and to take bigger bets when it’s clear. It’s useful to be able to detect, and adjust behavior to, how competent your own body is in various ways — to notice when you’re blind or lame, for instance. This requires some functions that keep track of one’s own state.2

Being able to switch to a more cautious strategy is probably more useful for some organisms than others; e.g. more K-selected organisms have big, expensive bodies, long lives, and few offspring, so they’re more likely to evolve the capacity to switch strategies within a single organism, rather than just having a lot of offspring each with a different hard-coded strategy.

Being able to tell “self” from “other”, likewise, is useful for deciding where to invest effort.

You can, to some extent, try to learn a fully general, nondual, “optimize the entire world into a state I prefer” function. But in reality, you have much more control over yourself than the whole world, and it’s going to be more efficient to “factor” that function into “control my own behavior to get desired outcomes” rather than trying to directly “will the world to be better”.

There might be situations where the nondual strategy works better; these are probably the same sorts of situations where “flow states” lead to better performance, like physical dexterity tasks in domains where you’ve had a lot of practice. I expect that’s less true in more open-ended and unfamiliar contexts. In a novel virtual reality environment, I’d strongly predict that figuring out which item on the screen “is you” (aka is controlled by your joystick) will lead to better performance than never drawing that distinction.3

This is especially true given that the evolutionarily “desired state of the world” for any organism involves its own bodily survival and reproduction. Self-other distinctions help with self-preservation!

How Does Consciousness Relate To Sentience?

Pain, pleasure, and other valence-laden feelings are examples of perceptions you can be conscious of.

Could you have pain and pleasure without being conscious of them?

I think this is a bad question; an unconscious pain or pleasure would be so different from the ordinary conscious sort that it’s misleading to use the same word for them.

You can certainly classically condition individual neurons, when the organism is anaesthetized and clearly not conscious, or in a petri dish, and you might refer to the stimulus used for conditioning as a “reward” or “punishment”, but that’s really an abuse of language, in my opinion. Single neurons, or single-celled organisms, or anaesthetized mammals, do not plausibly like or dislike things.4

Could a being be conscious without having any equivalent of (conscious) pain or pleasure?

That one’s not as clear.

If an animal is conscious of some aspects of its own state (the acuity of its senses, its physical condition, etc) then one of the most obviously useful states to be conscious of is injury. Conscious perception of nociceptive signals is probably present in any animal that’s conscious of anything at all.

On the other hand, this might not be quite the same thing as consciously suffering, finding the “pain” signals aversive, or disliking the “pain.”

After all, there are many things humans know to be dangerous that aren’t directly aversive. You can tell just by introspection that “ow that hurts” feels different from “if I stay out here much longer I’ll get hypothermia.” And people can be calm in a crisis, with no aversive feelings, just an intense drive to take appropriate life-saving action.

Humans, and, I believe, mammals, do have basic emotions, and do “dislike” or “suffer from” pain. They’re similar enough to us behaviorally and anatomically that I think we can generalize from the fact that we suffer from pain and enjoy pleasure. (Though, if you believe Temple Grandin, some mammals like sheep and cows find pain less aversive than humans do, and find startling/frightening experiences more so.)

But could an organism consciously perceive signals of injury and react appropriately, without having the aversive, unpleasant experience we know as “pain”? Yeah, I think it’s possible, and I don’t know enough to rule it out in non-mammals.

I don’t have a great non-circular definition of valence, the sensation of liking/enjoying or disliking/suffering.

Like the sensation of choice, valenced feelings are mental events that people can directly introspectively perceive, and which (in humans and probably mammals) has a tight match to certain types of brain activity in certain regions. And most of the time, we’d expect more positive valence around situations that an agent seeks out, and more negative valence around situations that an entity avoids — but not always! (It’s possible to intentionally do something painful, and that doesn’t mean the pain isn’t unpleasant.)

What about AI?

A thermostat is not even “slightly conscious”, by my definition. It does not represent its state; it is its state.

What about an LLM? There, it gets complicated.

Are there “parts” of an LLM that represent itself? Well, certainly you can find neurons or circuits associated with language about LLMs, but that’s probably not enough to count.

Are there “parts” of an LLM that vary with the state of the LLM’s knowledge? Can an LLM make calibrated bets? Sure, to some degree, sometimes.

That would seem to suggest that either my definition is wrong or we need to bite the bullet that an LLM can be conscious of nonzero things. It can “know it knows” or “know it doesn’t know.”

Can an LLM tell you about “internal experiences” that match up well to what a “digital neurosurgeon” would inspect about its weight activations? I actually have no idea.

Is there a “global workspace”, some subcomponent of the LLM that represents the “contents of its consciousness”, such that it will do better at tasks related to what’s currently in its workspace, and also predict its own better performance? Again, I don’t know.5

Does an LLM “represent itself” in the sense of representing having a set of actions and consequences that it knows it can control, as opposed to a set of sensations that it can’t control? I don’t think this is possible in the chatbot context; it might be possible for a digital agent that autonomously explores a space, taking actions and observing their consequences. A chatbot has “user” vs “assistant” hardcoded in; it didn’t autonomously discover through experiment that some messages in a context window are its own and some are the user’s, the way a baby discovers its hands are its own and Mama’s body isn’t.

Can an LLM feel an equivalent of pain or pleasure (or enjoyment/suffering if you prefer)? I have no idea how you’d begin to go about answering that question for arbitrary computer programs, but I strongly doubt it for present-day chatbots.

I expect you need a self-model, and a representation of your own “welfare” (aka injured or not, in danger or not), as a necessary but not sufficient condition for valence; at any rate, that’s what mammals have. And it’s pretty clear that LLMs don’t have these things.6

I don’t think it’s impossible for a machine intelligence of some sort to be conscious and have a “sense of self” or even valence, the way we do, but I’m pretty sure that a chatbot instance doesn’t have most of this.

To my surprise, though, I find myself saying “most”, not “any”. Transformers have a lot of capacity for self-referential loops, and it’s pretty clear that chatbots do “model” some things about “themselves” (or at least about what they’re saying, about to say, etc). It’s not all blindsight.

Which is weird. We’re dealing with things that are surprisingly like us in some ways, and more primitive than mice in others.

I’ve always found it advisable to relate to LLMs as tools rather than as people (even if they are tools that can effectively simulate people), and I still endorse this. I don’t think they behave like people, I think you will make wrong predictions if you anthropomorphize them, and I don’t think you’re morally obliged to treat them like people.7 But I do think it’s interesting and worthwhile to devote some thought to what would make that no longer true.

We have a “sense of ownership” of our own body, which can be disrupted or lost in cases of body perception disturbances, somatoparaphrenia, out-of-body experiences, or depersonalization.

Likewise, we have a “sense of ownership” of volitional actions; intentionally moving a part of one’s body feels like a choice.

We might speak of an intentional choice as a conscious choice. Volition relates to consciousness because it relates to the self. There is “somebody” who has perceptions, who is in a body, and who does things.

If you simply “find yourself” taking actions, without deliberate choice, you may be consciously aware of the actions and their results but not of the decision; the cause, the generator, is “invisible” to you. Unconscious. You can feel your heartbeat, but you have no way to perceive your heart “deciding” to beat. By contrast, the decision to lift your arm is “visible” to your conscious mind; you have a direct experience of perceiving choice. In fact, if you didn’t have that transparency, your sense of “embodiment” or “ownership” would probably be shaken; an arm you couldn’t control wouldn’t feel like your arm.

Neural Correlates of Volition

There’s a whole philosophical debate on free will, obviously, and I’m not entirely up to speed on it. But from a more practical perspective, we can certainly point to the thing humans mean by a decision/choice/volitional act.

When you move your hand, it ordinarily feels like you “decided” or “chose” to do it. It does not, by contrast, feel at all like a choice when your heart beats, when your intestines churn, when your leg jerks reflexively from a rubber hammer hitting your knee, or when a neurological patient experiences motor tremors (e.g. in Parkinson’s.) We have the internal experience of choice for some motions and not others.

Also, we can see from the outside that behaviors we’d ordinarily call volitional (brain-directed skeletal muscle movements in healthy individuals) are capable of much more flexible and complex control than non-volitional ones. Sure, your thoughts, emotions, and perceptions can affect your heart rate or digestion. But you can’t get your heart to beat out the Gettysburg address in Morse code, whereas you can easily learn to type it out with your fingers or say it with your mouth. There’s a qualitative difference.

Regardless of whether there’s some upstream cause behind volitional actions, we can point at movements that are central examples of “volition” in the colloquial sense, and central examples of “involuntary motion”, and try to understand how they differ at the neurological level from each other and from more ambiguous edge cases.

Libet Experiments and W-Time

Back in 2023 I looked at one neural signature of volition; the “readiness potential”.

The famous “Libet experiment¹” asked subjects to choose to move at any time they want, and to recall the position of a revolving spot at the moment they made the decision to move. The “readiness potential”, a slow rise in voltage detectable on the EEG, precedes the action by about 550 ms; the self-reported conscious decision to move only happened at 200-150 ms before the motion.

The Libet experiment has popularly been taken as a “proof that free will doesn’t exist”, because the brain is “preparing to move” before we are even aware of making a choice to move.

But Libet himself never interpreted his experiment as a proof of the nonexistence of free will. And in fact a later experiment he conducted points to the contrary.

When subjects were asked² to wait for a visual signal and then move their hands, a “readiness potential” detectable with the EEG arises about half a second before their hand actually moves. If they’re also asked to “veto” the movement just prior to moving, they also display the “readiness potential” about 500 ms before the 0 time, but it suddenly shifts direction at 200-150 ms.

This means that the actual difference between brain activity between people who choose to move and people who choose not to move happens, not at the onset of the readiness potential, but later, at the same time that the subjective “decision to move” happens.

…

Schurger also replicated the same phenomenon that Libet himself did — when you compare subjects asked to move spontaneously with subjects who don’t move at all, the brain activity of the two groups only diverges significantly 150 ms before movement, not the 500 ms before that would be expected if the readiness potential represented the decision to move.⁴

The “point of no return”, the 150-200 ms pre-movement when subjects say they decide to move, is also known as W-time.1

I view it as a better correlate of volition than the readiness potential. W-time is both the time when people say they make a decision, and the time when people in fact do make their final decision whether or not to move.

It may be that the readiness potential corresponds to a sort of “inner impulse” to move, a potential possible movement, but the “decision whether or not to commit” happens later, at W-time.2

W-time is affected by perceptions of movement. If you give people a video delay or audio delay that makes it appear that their hand moves several tens of milliseconds later, then their self-reported W-time moves later by the same amount. In other words, the perception of volition may be “made of” the combination of a motor signal and the sensory observation that one has in fact moved as intended.3

You might interpret this as a sign that W-time is a bad metric — people are retrospectively confabulating the time at which they “made a decision”, in ways affected by later information, rather than accurately reporting the moment at which they first had the internal sensation of choice.

However, there is some evidence that there are neurological changes at W-time, localized to particular brain regions, and thus that it’s not just a retrospectively imagined, subjective timestamp, but also an objective moment at which decision-relevant events happen in the brain.

Interestingly, patients with parietal lesions don’t report experiencing a W-time decision preceding their actual movement; they first “intend to move” almost exactly when they do move. These parietal lesion patients also didn’t show the usual slow-rising readiness potential; their EEG was flat for the ~2s before movement. 4

Likewise, Parkinson’s patients show delayed W-times; they also don’t notice a decision to move until shortly before they do.5

In a study on epileptic patients with implanted electrodes, there’s a population of neurons in the anterior cingulate cortex and supplementary motor area (both in the frontal lobe) whose firing rates change significantly at W-time. By contrast, temporal neurons didn’t exhibit this kind of significant change.6

The supplementary motor area seems especially important in urges to move. Stimulating it electrically (in epileptic patients) induces what patients report as urges to move, even if they don’t actually move at all. 7

Neurons in the primary motor cortex, M1, also show a spike in activity coinciding with the timing of self-reported intentions to move, in the case of a tetraplegic individual equipped with a brain-machine interface that measures M1 activity and translates it into signals to the nerves and muscles to generate movements. In cases where the BMI was programmed to generate involuntary movements, M1 activity only spiked after the movement; while in cases where the BMI was programmed not to send a neuromuscular signal in response to M1 activity, M1 activity spiked at precisely the same time as the self-reported (and ineffectual) choice to move.8

In ordinary voluntary motion, we perceive two events, sequential rather than simultaneous: the choice to move and then the sensory perception that we are in fact moving. It’s possible to dissociate the choice to move from actual movement; we can detect something in the brain happening before intentional movement, which doesn’t occur in involuntary movements, and which matches up temporally with the perceived moment of choosing-to-move.

Perceptions of Agency

The classic “comparator model” of agency is that we feel in control of an action when we accurately predict its sensory consequences.

That is, somewhere in our brain we’ve made an “efference copy” of every motor command, and we run a “forward model” of what we expect to perceive from it. Predicted sensory effects of self-generated actions are thus distinguishable from stimuli coming in from the environment; for instance, you can’t tickle yourself, because being tickled is surprising and using your own fingers to make tickling movements is not.

In fact, if people remotely control a robot to tickle them, the ticklish sensation is proportional to the (artificially programmed) delay between the human’s guidance and the robot’s motion. Using fMRI, it’s possible to detect neural correlates of this effect; there’s less activity in the somatosensory cortex and the right anterior cerebellar cortex from self-generated touches than from external touches.9

The cerebellum is a good candidate for the seat of the “forward model” that rapidly simulates the sensory consequences of self-generated action, and compares it to actual sensations, resulting in “surprise detection.” Then, elsewhere in the brain, activity representing sensory perceptions (such as touch perception in the somatosensory cortex) may be attenuated if those perceptions are “unsurprising”.

Introducing distortions and time lags in virtual reality contexts can lead experimental subjects to no longer think they are viewing “their own” movements.10 Analogously to the rubber-hand illusion, if you observe data consistent with you controlling your own movements predictably, they’ll feel like “your own”, whereas too many inconsistencies will make them read as “other.”

If you let subjects navigate a cursor to complete a computer task, impeding their agency (adding turbulence so the cursor doesn’t move with the subject’s motions) increases activity in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), and stimulating the rTPJ with transcranial magnetic stimulation decreased the (self-reported) sense of agency.11. Remember that stimulation to the TPJ can also induce out-of-body experiences; it may be involved in “not-me, not-mine, not-my-body, not-caused-by-me” types of judgments generally, possibly due to mismatches of different types of sensory information.

Distorted Perceptions of Agency in Schizophrenia

Subjects with schizophrenia may perceive themselves as having more agency than normal subjects, even to the point of believing they “caused” responses that preceded their actions12.

Clinically, schizophrenics make errors about agency in both directions — they both believe that their own thoughts and actions are under external control (delusions of influence, thought insertion, hallucinations) and believe that their minds remotely/acausally control events in the world (delusions of control.)

In lab experiments, schizophrenics have less sensory attenuation from self-generated actions (the normal effect where e.g. auditory signals from your own voice are weaker than those from external sounds). Schizophrenics hear their own voices as sounding more like someone else’s voice; they can tickle themselves; essentially they “surprise themselves” more than non-schizophrenics do.

Separately, schizophrenics also tend to be less sensitive to discrepancies (like time delays) between their actions and sensory responses, leading to them over-attributing self-agency (i.e. too frequently believing it was their own actions that caused a response.)

These two observations work in opposite directions; to oversimplify a bit, it’s like schizophrenics perceive everything as not-self, so they have to infer what’s “their own” agency using external cues, and often (but not always) overestimate how much is “theirs.” Thus, you get both symptoms of too much and too little “sense of agency”. 13

Involuntary Movements

Various motor disorders involve involuntary movements. How do these differ neurologically from ordinary voluntary movements?

It depends on the kind of involuntary movement.

Reflexes (which are an example of involuntary movement in healthy people) do not reach the brain at all. Reflexes only pass through the peripheral nerves and spinal cord.

Problems with the basal ganglia, aka “extrapyramidal hyperkinetic movement disorders”, can result in various unintentional movements such as resting tremor (repetitive trembling), chorea (“dance-like” jerking), ballism (violent flinging), or dystonia (clenching). Unlike voluntary movements, these don’t originate with motor planning activity in the cortex; these are “bottom-up” movements where the basal ganglia don’t provide enough inhibitory input into the thalamus, so the thalamus stimulates the primary motor cortex abnormally, causing unplanned movements.

Then there are “semivoluntary” motor disorders, like Tourette’s. Tics look almost entirely like voluntary motions neurologically, and they’re preceded by resting potentials and even “urges” to tic, but they’re experienced as a loss of control from a psychological perspective. OCD compulsions, some stereotypies (as in autism), and functional movement disorders, are similarly in this “semivoluntary” bucket; there is a sense in which the patient “can’t control them”, or does not reflectively endorse them, but there is some sort of motivation to move, and the “higher” cortical motor planning regions are involved, just as they are in ordinary voluntary movement.14

In the rare “alien hand syndrome”, often a symptom of epilepsy or stroke, one hand (usually the left) seems to move “with a will of its own”, seemingly goal-oriented but contrary to the patient’s wishes. In an fMRI study, alien hand movements (but not normal voluntary movements of either the left or right hand) were associated with the precuneus and inferior frontal gyrus, as well as all the areas usually involved in motor control. 15

In alien hand syndrome, there’s typically damage to any of various cortical regions involved in motor planning and sensory integration, leading to disinhibition of movements, and/or failure to perceive one’s own hand movements, leading to the perception that the hand has “a mind of its own.”1617

It seems that it’s less that any one neural phenomenon is involved in involuntary movements, and more that everything has to be working perfectly and well-integrated for movements to be confined to the voluntary ones.

Conclusion: What Is Voluntariness?

Very roughly, the evidence looks consistent with: “we perceive action as “our own choice” when we can perceive an inner experience, which precedes action, which we infer causes action, and whose results are coherent and match our predictions.”

The “inner experience” we know as volition probably lives somewhere in the cortex, maybe frontal or parietal.

When there is no “plan to act” in the cortex preceding a motion, it is clearly not willed, like reflexes or extrapyramidal involuntary motions.

The “plan” or “decision” to act really is a measurable phenomenon that really does precede motion itself, and objectively happens pretty much at the same time we internally perceive it.

We have a monitoring system (involving the cerebellum and some parietal regions, at least) for determining whether actions are “self-generated” or “other-generated”, via whether their results are predictable or unpredictable from our own motor signals, and whether their results are coherent across different sensory modalities. This system can get confused via artificially induced distortions, TPJ stimulation, sensory and motor disorders, and schizophrenia.

I don’t totally understand the relationship between the “self-other monitoring” system and the decision-to-move. Are we tracking the final M1 motor signal that initiates motion (sending a signal that ultimately goes to the spinal cord and muscles), or a preceding cortical decision-to-move, or both?

But basically it seems that “the self” relates to “consciousness” through the fact that we consciously perceive the internal mechanisms of the self’s actions, whereas we only perceive the “outside” of external phenomena. If we can “inspect the gears” directly, if we can see/feel the decision being made, and if the results are consistent with what we predict happening because of that decision, then it’s perceived as “self-generated” or “volitional”; otherwise, not.

It’s also a nice little occasion to reflect on the passage of time, pick a theme for the year ahead, and suchlike personal meditations.

Past posts: FW25, SS25, FW24, SS24.

Methodology Recap

Designer fashion collections are released several times a year, but the ones I track are spring/summer and fall/winter ready-to-wear, which come out in fall and spring respectively. Twice a year there’s essentially a fashion industry trade fair lasting several weeks — New York Fashion Week, London Fashion Week, Milan Fashion Week, and Paris Fashion Week.

These are for both men’s and women’s clothes (or unisex; lines are blurred these days), but generally slant female; there’s a separate menswear season that I don’t track.

Vogue Magazine generously hosts a lot of free images of these fashion collections; this season there were over 13,000 pictures.

This year I did both manual counts, where I counted how many “looks” a given color (as subjectively determined by me) appeared in, and automated counts, where I asked an LLM (currently GPT-4o) to identify all the colors in the outfit in each image and aggregated the counts across images. I’m using the same code and prompt as I have for the past several years for the automated counts.

As in past seasons, I only manually count non-neutral colors (=not black, white, gray, brown, beige, etc) in order to save time; automated counts include neutrals and non-neutrals.

There are a couple reasons why manual and automated counts might diverge:

• Color lumping/splitting effects; for instance, LLMs tend to lump many shades of green into the word “green” while I differentiate more finely, leading to the LLM scoring green as more common than I do.

  • This tends to bias the automated counts towards more general color categories vs. the manual counts.

• Repetition effects; the LLM will often repeat a color name multiple times per image, for instance if there is a red belt and red shoes that might be counted as two instances of red, whereas I’d manually count that as one instance of red.

  • This will tend to bias automated counts towards colors that appear more in accessories; it also just adds noise.

• Ambiguous cases; e.g. I might identify a color as khaki that the LLM considers olive green.

  • This just adds noise, except to the extent that LLMs have a systematic color categorization bias. (They do seem to be slanted towards greens and purples, in my experience.)

• Synonym effects; the LLM may separately count “gray” and “grey”, or “light” vs “pale” vs “pastel” shades of a color.

  • This will lead to biasing automated counts to lower counts but more different instances of synonymous or nearly-synonymous colors.

Results

As in previous years, we see black, white, and other neutrals top the chart, and red is the top non-neutral color.

What especially pops out in the manual color counts is the prevalence of pastel yellow, right after perennial classics like red, pastel pink, and pastel blue:

In fact, if you compare to last year’s spring season (SS25), you see a systematic movement towards soft pastels and away from brighter shades.

• Rising (significantly higher in rank than last year):

  • pastel yellow (#29 → #4, manual)

  • lavender (#26 → #13, manual)

  • tan (#21 → #11, automated)

• New (in the top 30 this year but not last year):

  • light tan (automated)

  • dusty rose (manual)

  • coral (automated)

  • blush (automated)

  • medium pink (manual)

  • dark pink (automated)

  • brick red (manual)

  • mustard yellow (manual)

  • mint green (manual)

  • sage (manual)

  • light purple (automated)

  • dark purple (automated)

• Falling (significantly lower in rank this year than last year):

  • hot pink (#9 → #18, manual)

  • bubblegum pink (#17 → #30, manual)

  • true orange (#12 → #25, manual)

• Lost (in the top 30 last year but not this year):

  • ivory (automated)

  • dark red (automated)

  • coral pink (manual)

  • spiced orange (manual)

  • tangerine (manual)

  • mustard yellow (automated)

  • lime green (automated)

  • medium blue (automated)

  • Dutch blue (manual)

  • royal blue (automated)

Or, visualized, you can see that there are a lot of muted, coolish, pale shades among this year’s winners, and hot, bright colors among the losers:

Economic Trends

To the extent that there are recurrent themes in the SS26 season, we’re looking at pastels, preppiness, and generally cautious/conservative choices; these are both visible to me and echoed in Vogue’s editorial coverage.

It makes sense that the fashion world would pull back from the edge; these are bad times for the luxury goods market.

2024 saw total luxury goods spending down 2%, with many brands seeing profit drops:

The final 2025 numbers aren’t in (and preliminary numbers are not representative because Christmas-season purchases are so big a percentage of the whole) but this is expected to be a weak year too, particularly because of tariffs in the US and the real estate bust in China.

When consumers pull back on luxury spending, fashion collections tend to reflect a swing “back to basics” — safer choices, less eccentricity. We are definitely not in the post-pandemic spending boom of 2021 when wacky, tropical-hued party clothes were ascendant. We’re also not seeing a lot of explicit political-statement collections, despite the Trump presidency; if anything, the fashion world seems to be in retreat from current events.

My Pick For 2026 Color Of The Year: Pastel Yellow

Pastel yellow is the most unobtrusive of the pastels. It’s a gentle, mild, fluffy color; think daffodils, baby chicks, fresh butter, warm sunshine.

If pastel pink evokes a romantic ingenue protagonist, then pastel yellow is the “supportive best friend” side character. Grounded; cheerful; not calling attention to itself.

The whole pastel range, from pink to peach to mint green to pastel blue to lavender, makes a strong showing in the SS26 collections, but pastel yellow is the biggest “winner” in this year relative to past years, mostly in classically feminine and preppy contexts.

We see it paired with other pastels:

balanced with neutrals:

complemented with pops of color:

or all by itself in a head-to-toe flow:

Pastel yellow is peaceful, restful, hopeful.

It’s not the abstract, contemplative, distant-skies calm of pale blue (which was my pick for 2023’s color). Pastel yellow belongs to the earth; its peacefulness is material. The comfort and contentment of butter and flowers and sunshine. Mellow yellow.

Unlike the spiky freshness of spring green (my pick for 2024) or, even more so, the frenzied fun of hot pink (my pick for 2025), pastel yellow isn’t trying to be even a little bit edgy or intense. It’s soft and slow-paced; it lends itself easily to touchable textures and a buttery, sunlit feeling of indulgence in the senses.

Looking Forward and Back

Since I’ve been doing these fashion stats projects, I’ve used the “color of the year” as a sort of theme to inspire me in the year to come.1

2023: Sky Blue/Spaciousness

This was a year when I was kind of coming out of a turbulent phase of being dissatisfied with the work and family responsibilities of a thirtysomething, and just starting to get into a set of habits that were more functional and “wholesome”. My goal was to “make space” — have enough time for myself as well as have a calmer outlook on life.

That basically worked, I think. If you look over my 2023 blog posts, that was when I was starting to get more interested in LLMs and in neurotech. In my work life, I was learning a bunch of new skills on the “business side” (marketing, financial analysis, sales process optimization, etc) and starting to get the hang of adding value, and at home, things got into more of a rhythm as my older kid started school and learned to read.

2024: Spring Green/Freshness

My theme for 2024 was about “poking my head out from under a rock”, trying new things, looking for aliveness and newness.

Well, I did that, pretty much: full-time writing/consulting was new to me, as was some of the playing around with LLM wrappers and finetunes I tried out, and scientific program management (as a fellow at Renaissance Philanthropy.)

2025: Hot Pink/Fun

My theme for 2025 was “fun”, to match the raucous energy of hot pink.

Now, I really don’t have a wild-party life these days, and I also got pregnant with kid #3, so “fun” in that sense wasn’t really the most practical for me. But I did have fun in the sense of getting opportunities to travel and time for personal projects (during my freelancing/consulting periods), and the biggest positive step change in my overall mood I’ve ever experienced (thanks to an effective antidepressant.)

Seriously, check out this PANAS score graph and how negative affect just plummets in spring 2025 and mostly stays way down from the previous baseline. If not “fun” exactly, then definitely 2025 was a banner year for happiness.

2026: Pastel Yellow/Optimism

I don’t expect 2026 to be especially slow, easy, or mellow, what with a new baby and the prospect of some new work adventures. And I don’t particularly like the “mentally escape from the troubled state of the world” theme.

So I think I want to emphasize the cheerful side of pastel yellow, and its groundedness; taking small, steady, real steps in a positive direction. Adding up to something. Finding enjoyment along the way.

Part of the felt sense of self is perceiving oneself as having a body, or being embodied, or being in one’s body.

Here, I don’t want to talk about embodiment as opposed to “being in one’s head” (the head is part of the body, after all) but embodiment in the sense that you feel like there’s a “locus of identity”, a “you”, somewhere within the boundaries of your body, as opposed to feeling like you’re floating outside yourself or like you don’t exist at all.

People can have these unusual “disembodied” perceptions during near-death experiences, while under the influence of dissociative drugs, or in dissociative disorders, or in some meditative states.

How does this relate to consciousness? A disembodied state is not total unconsciousness — the person can still describe having had an experience — but it’s not the usual relationship of self, body, and experience, where people feel there’s a “me” on the “inside” of the body, and an “outside world” surrounding me.

So, we can ask: what is going on in the brain when this ordinary “inside self/outside world” relationship is disrupted? Are there neurological commonalities between different types of such disruption? How does the brain construct that inside/outside relationship?

Autoscopy and Out-of-Body Experiences

An out-of-body experience is just what it sounds like: the perception that one is floating outside the body, e.g. seeing the world as though looking down from above.

Autoscopy is the related phenomenon of seeing your own body as if “from the outside”, or seeing a “double” of your body. It’s possible to experience autoscopic phenomena while still feeling that you’re “inside your own body” and the “double” is the illusion.1

In out-of-body experiences, there are frequently vestibular sensations (flying, floating, rotating) as well as visual perspective distortions (seeing the world as though from an angle that would be impossible from within your own body).

These experiences can occur in epilepsy, particularly when seizures affect the angular gyrus2 in the inferior parietal lobule, or other regions near the temporoparietal junction.3 Electrical stimulation in the same location as the seizures can, in some patients, recreate the out-of-body experience.

In one case, a patient who didn’t ordinarily have out-of-body experiences consistently had them when electrically stimulated in the angular gyrus and nearby supramarginal gyrus (as part of treatment for tinnitus.) He felt he was about 50 cm behind his body and off to the left.4 Another patient undergoing surgery for a brain tumor repeatedly had out-of-body experiences when stimulated subcortically near the temporo-parietal junction — “she felt as if she floated just below the ceiling and saw her own body lying on the operating table”.5

One speculation is that out-of-body experiences are the result of discordant information from different sensory modalities (visual, tactile, vestibular, and proprioceptive). The temporal-parietal junction that is so often disturbed in out-of-body experiences is a major site of multisensory integration.6 Accordingly, patients with vestibular disorders are more likely (14% vs 5%) to have had an out-of-body experience than controls with no history of dizziness.7

Ketamine, a dissociative NMDA-inhibiting drug, was by far the most correlated recreational drug with out-of-body experiences in a sample of recreational drug users.8 A statistical study of ketamine users supports the theory that the causality goes from “illusory movement” (the feeling that you are moving when you’re not) sometimes causing “out-of-body feelings” (the kinaesthetic sense of not being inside one’s own body), which in turn sometimes causes “out-of-body autoscopy” (visually seeing one’s own body as if from the outside.) Illusory movement is the most common of the three phenomena, and out-of-body autoscopy is the least common.9

Autoscopic hallucinations, like out-of-body experiences, are also associated with seizures or brain lesions, but sometimes in different places than the ones associated with out-of-body experiences, like the occipital lobes, which are sites of visual perception.101112

This localization makes prima facie sense — you get purely visual hallucinations of a “double” when there’s damage to visual regions of the brain, while you get kinaesthetic or multisensory “out of body” sensations when vestibular and sensory-integration regions are disrupted.

This also corresponds well to the theory that the feeling of an “embodied self” emerges from predictable and coherent multisensory integration; when there’s illusory motion, dizziness, or other sensations inconsistent with a fixed or predictable location in space, people are more likely to experience their “locus of identity” drifting outside the physical body.

Ipseity Disturbance and Depersonalization

It’s possible to have a sensation of detachment, strangeness, or remoteness from one’s own body or self; not quite an out-of-body experience but still a quasi-perceptual abnormality.

Some quotes from two schizophrenic patients13:

“In general, I didn’t have a sense of my body anymore; this completely vanished at some time. My face became increasingly strange to me, as it still is today. My voice, too, because I talked much less. Just an extreme self-estrangement.”

“I feel as if I am sitting on some distant planet and there is somehow a camera in my head and those images are sent there. As if I am completely far away from here, where I am sitting right now.”

“For me it was as if my eyes were cameras, and my brain would still be in my body, but somehow as if my head were enormous, the size of a universe, and I was in the far back and the cameras were at the very front. So extremely far away from the cameras. And I walk, and I look around … and I’m dizzy, and all is like a machine …”

Parnas and Handest observed that in early or prodromal schizophrenia, before “positive symptoms” like hallucinations or delusions form, there’s often an experience of dissociation or depersonalization, which they term “ipseity disturbance” — not feeling like oneself.14

Some more quotes from patients:

“my first personal life is lost and is replaced by a third-person perspective”.

“I am no longer myself (. . .) I feel strange, I am no longer in my body, it is someone else; I sense my body but it is far away, some other place. Here are my legs, my hands, I can also feel my head, but cannot find it again. I hear my voice when I speak, but the voice seems to originate from some other place…One might think that my person is no longer here (. . .) I walk like a machine; it seems to me that it is not me who is walking, talking, or writing with this pencil. When I am walking, I look at my legs which are moving forward; I fear to fall by not moving them correctly.”

“I feel a simultaneous implosion and explosion” (as though his body was simultaneously very small and very large.)

“it feels as if my thoughts were slightly behind my skull”… her “point of perspective” was felt “as if displaced some centimetres behind.”

“something in me has become inhuman,” “no contact to his body,” “feels empty”.

The authors hypothesize that certain classic schizophrenic hallucinations or delusions (like thought insertion) are simply consequences of the loss of the feeling of selfhood.

Other delusions, regardless of their bizarre details (reincarnated extraterrestrials and the like), may be interpreted as a process of re-personalization, where the patient hits on some magical/metaphysical thing as a solution to restore the perception of “aliveness”, “realness”, “meaningfulness”, “specialness” that was lost in the prodromal period.

Depersonalization is defined in the DSM as feeling detached from, or like an outside observer of, one’s own mental or bodily processes. People who meet criteria for depersonalization disorder, in a sample of 117 cases, were particularly likely to agree with statements like “my surroundings feel unreal”, “I’m looking at the world through a fog”, or “my body does not belong to me.”15

Some quotes from depersonalization patients16:

““It is as if the real me is taken out and put on a shelf or stored somewhere inside of me. Whatever makes me me is not there. It is like an opaque curtain . . . like going through the motions and having to exert discipline to keep the unit together.”

“I am disconnected from my body. It is as if my body is not there.”

“a feeling of unreality and distance, like I am a spectator of my own movements and of what is going on.”

Patients with either depersonalization disorder or schizophrenia might experience perceptions that their thoughts are not their own (“Thoughts running through his brain again seemed somehow foreign”), that their self is gone (“as if I ceased to exist”), or that their self is somehow unreal or false (“like an actor in a play”, “going through the motions”).17

Despite this subjective feeling of disembodiment or unreality, patients with depersonalization symptoms have intact interoception — they are just as accurate and confident as healthy controls at perceiving their own heartbeats.18

Depersonalization can occur in epilepsy, especially temporal lobe epilepsy, which often coincides with feelings of unreality before and after the seizure. Temporal lobe seizures can go with feelings that one “isn’t there”, “isn’t real”, “is in a dream”, “loses the sense of oneself” or “goes outside oneself.” Out of 47 cases of depersonalization associated with neurological disorders, epilepsy is by far the most common, and in many cases surgical treatment for epilepsy improves the depersonalization symptoms.19

I don’t see a great deal of consistency or clarity across accounts of neural correlates of depersonalization. Some fMRI studies point to decreased activity in the insula20, others to the anterior cingulate cortex21, in depersonalization; an epilepsy study associates depersonalization with activity in the dorsal premotor cortex;22 a PET study finds reduced metabolic activity in the superior and middle temporal gyri in depersonalization23; etc. It’s possible that depersonalization symptoms are too diverse to have a common cause in the brain, or that they aren’t localized anatomically at all — or it could just be that this particular research literature hasn’t successfully come to replicable conclusions yet.

Nonetheless, what we do know is that people can lose the “sense of being oneself” that most of us take for granted, and that this is usually distressing. Depersonalization or “ipseity disturbance” symptoms generally come with an unpleasant sense of falsity, meaninglessness, or troubling strangeness.

They’re not clearly associated with sensory deficits the way out-of-body experiences, rubber hand illusions, neglect, asomatognosia, or somatoparaphrenia are. Disturbances in the “sense of self” might be higher-order or more abstract than sensory processing per se, even though they do involve subjective perceptual distortions (in particular distortions of size, distance, and solidity/boundaries).

In further posts I’ll try to get a sharper picture of what’s going on in the “sense of self”, and also look at what underlies perceptions of agency or volition.

In past posts, we talked about two of the three things neuroscientists consistently mean when they talk about consciousness:

• subjective perception; what we are aware of as opposed to what we are unaware of

• awake states (as opposed to deep sleep, anaesthesia, or coma)

The third element is the self.

It is I who am conscious; I subjectively experience things happening to me.

Some aspects of the “sense of self” are complex, hard to measure, and debatable whether they’re well-defined or universal among humans — things like “self-image”, “ego”, “first-person narrative”, and other psychological concepts.

But we can also talk about more basic, more perceptual aspects of the “self”, which may be easier to test experimentally, and which may be shared with some animals.1

Sometimes psychologists and philosophers speak of the “minimal self” or “ipseity” to refer to this basic sense that things are happening to me, in a first-person sense. It is this seemingly self-evident “me-ness” that gets distorted in dissociative disorders.

For instance:

• The experience of proprioception or self-other boundaries, the feeling that one’s body is “one’s own” in the sense that the external world isn’t.

  • as opposed to certain body-map distortions in which a limb may feel like a foreign object

• The experience of one’s body being embedded in surrounding space, or “egocentric coordinates”2, as opposed to autoscopy3 or other spatial perspective distortions

• The experience of volition or agency:

  • the feeling that it was I who moved my body, as opposed to being puppeteered by some external force

  • and the lack of any feeling that I am (telekinetically) controlling the movements of things separate from my body

• The experience of autobiographical memory; not only the ability to recall events in one’s past, but also the feeling that they happened to me.

The connection with consciousness is that, ordinarily, we are conscious of things, and we are also conscious of being the conscious perceiver, the “I”.

The nature of that “I,” and what’s included in it, may vary in different mental states, without consciousness being absent. For instance, someone with amnesia, with impaired autobiographical memory, may not remember his own name or much of his past, but we wouldn’t say he isn’t conscious; he has a first-person perspective, just one that’s confined to a limited span of time.4

But looking at the borders of what people identify as “me/mine” vs. “not me/not-mine”, we can see what characterizes the felt sense of “me-ness”, and extrapolate what it would be like to have no “me-ness” whatsoever. Arguably, without a subject, there is no subjective experience.

Body Perception Disturbances, Asomatognosia, and Somatoparaphrenia

In Oliver Sacks’ autobiographical book, A Leg To Stand On, he describes how a severe leg injury left him with the curious feeling that his “bad” leg was not part of his own body, as though it was somehow an amputated leg that some prankster had sewn onto him.

Today, the term “body perception disturbances” refers to this sort of altered relationship to an injured body part, “encompassing negative emotions toward the limb, perceived size distortions, reduced sense of ownership and in some cases, even a desire for amputation.5” Usually, this is associated with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), an unusually long-lasting painful inflammatory response to tissue injury.

Now, obviously, it’s natural to have “negative emotions” about a painful injured limb, or even to hope that amputation will relieve the pain, but is there more to it than that? Is there actually a perceptual distortion or alteration in the “body map”?

Yes. Despite the pain, patients with CRPS often neglect the affected limb, forget to care for it, and they’ll often position it outside their field of view. They may describe it as “foreign” or “strange”, or estimate its size as larger than it really is. Even when it hurts acutely, they may feel as though they can’t tell where the limb is. The “negative emotions” can go beyond frustration with pain and disability into an extreme sense of disgust at the limb; one patient compared her feelings upon even thinking about her arm to how she felt about pedophilia.6

There are also a lot of objective measurements showing that CRPS patients have impaired ability to sense the movement and position of the affected limb, as well as impaired motor control.7

The perceptual distortion is suggestive of a neurological, as opposed to a purely psychological, problem. But brain tissue is not directly injured in CRPS; only the damaged limb is.

Still, we can see anomalies in brain function in body perception disturbances. The somatosensory cortex contains a “body map” with different regions sensitive to different body parts; in CRPS, this map is “blurred”, with more overlap between regions in the affected limb, consistent with distorted internal representations of the body. Indeed, people with CRPS may have “referred sensations”, feeling it in their injured limb when they are touched on some other part of the body; and these effects are consistent with which body part representations are adjacent on their (distorted) cortical “body map.”8

More broadly, asomatognosia refers to the feeling that a body part is “not one’s own.” It can happen as a result of stroke, alongside hemispatial neglect.9 When this manifests as a literal delusion that the limb is not their own (such as believing someone has put a cadaver’s leg in their bed and trying to kick it out), it is known as somatoparaphrenia. For both asomatognosia and somatoparaphrenia in the context of stroke, the most commonly damaged area is the right posterior insula, in the parietal cortex near the temporo-parietal junction.10 11

In rare cases, patients with stroke-related somatoparaphrenia can have intact sensory and motor abilities in the limb (usually the left hand) that they don’t believe is their own. Interestingly, the “sense of ownership” of the hand can fluctuate if the experimenter moves it to a new location. 12

This suggests that something about the sense of body ownership is related to predictability. If the hand is where we expect it to be, it feels like our own hand; if the hand suddenly appears where we don’t expect it, it feels foreign, and we may confabulate a story where it’s really someone else’s hand.

Seizures in the right parietal lobe can also cause an “alien hand syndrome” where the left hand feels like it’s not one’s own and engages in involuntary motions.13

In particular, somatoparaphrenia patients, compared to stroke patients with neglect but no delusions about body ownership, were more likely to have damage to subcortical structures in the right hemisphere — the thalamus, the basal ganglia, and the white matter tracts.14

Anatomically, the brain regions involved in asomatognosia and CRPS-related body perception disturbances are connected, and are known to be involved in proprioception.

The posterior insula (frequently damaged in asomatognosia) connects to the posterior parietal cortex (also frequently damaged in asomatognosia and responsible for the “body schema” representing the body’s orientation in space), as well as to the somatosensory cortex (altered in CRPS, and involved in early processing of tactile sensory input from the body and proprioceptive signals from the muscles).

In general, when a part of your body doesn’t feel like “your own”, you’ll generally also have a perceptual deficit, particularly in recognizing the position or motion of that body part, though you don’t necessarily need to have both sensory and motor impairments.

The problem can start peripherally, with injury to a limb, or centrally, with damage directly to a proprioception-related brain region, usually in the right parietal lobe or temporo-parietal junction, but potentially also “lower” in the subcortical regions like the thalamus.

It’s interesting that more severe delusions of non-ownership are associated with damage to regions “earlier” in the ascending proprioceptive pathway like the thalamus, suggesting that sensory signals aren’t reaching the cortex at all in such cases. (This rhymes with the suggestive fact that even subconscious skin-conductance responses to stimuli are absent in somatoparaphrenia, but not in asomatognosia or neglect.)15

Regardless, whether the problem starts in a limb or the brain, we see evidence of distortion in the brain’s “body map” or “body representation”. When the sensations from the body part aren’t “as expected”, it may feel foreign, alien, or even disgusting.

The Rubber Hand Illusion

Just as, in some circumstances, people can perceive parts of their own body as “not mine”, they can perceive objects not part of their body as “mine.”

The famous “rubber hand illusion” shows that, if a subject’s left hand is hidden out of sight, while a realistic rubber hand is stroked with a paintbrush at the same time the real left hand is stroked with an identical brush, then the subjects will begin to experience the rubber hand as “their own.”

This tells us that a close match between visual and tactile sensations is crucial to the brain’s inferences as to where our body is. When the touch of the brush on the hand doesn’t match up with the sight of the rubber hand being brushed, the rubber hand illusion goes away.

Primates also show a rubber hand illusion, and mice have an analogous “rubber tail illusion”16, suggesting that nonhuman mammals do have at least some basic, bodily “sense of self.”

Interestingly, the rubber hand illusion is stronger in patients who have less sense of ownership of their actual body.

A patient with post-stroke somatoparaphrenia had a stronger rubber hand illusion on the affected hand (which she ordinarily felt was “not hers”) than on the normal, unaffected hand.17

The rubber hand illusion is also stronger in schizophrenia18 (which, as we will see, involves distortions in self-other perception), and during ketamine use19 (which induces experience of dissociation or disembodiment) and weaker in pianists20, who might be expected to have a more “embodied” sense of their own hands.

These examples point towards a consistent picture where the illusion of body ownership (in the rubber hand experiment) is induced more strongly when real perceptions of body ownership are weaker or more ambiguous.

Relatedly, the rubber hand illusion is more robust to slight asynchrony between brushstrokes to the rubber and real hands when noise is added in the form of tactile vibrations21, and in Parkinson’s Disease patients, who often have sensory deficits and hallucinations as well as the more famous motor deficits.22 In other words, the synchronization may need to be less precise for the rubber hand illusion to work, if the underlying sensory perception is itself “noisier” or more error-prone.

What’s going on in the brain when the feeling of ownership transfers to the rubber hand? The most direct evidence comes from epileptic patients implanted with brain electrodes, where high-gamma-band neural activity in the premotor and intraparietal cortexes is present during periods when the rubber hand illusion is working. 23

This is pretty much as expected — these are sensory integration regions. The intraparietal sulcus is known to be involved in connecting visual and tactile sensory data to guide movement. If a close match between visual and tactile data drives the rubber hand illusion, it makes sense for sensory integration regions to be active when the illusion works.

The Sense of Body Ownership Depends on Predictability and Consistency

Whether we’re looking at gaining the “sense of bodily ownership” (as in the rubber hand illusion) or losing that sense (as in CRPS, asomatognosia, and somatoparaphrenia), one pattern is that we need predictable and logically consistent evidence about where our body is, in order to feel like it’s “ours”, and that may be all we need.

Perfectly healthy people can feel that a rubber hand is “theirs” if all their senses are presenting them data consistent with that hypothesis. But the illusion vanishes if there’s a mismatch (like out-of-synch stroking between the real and rubber hand, or the real hand being visible.)

Likewise, noise or uncertainty in ordinary sensory perception strengthens the rubber hand illusion; more possibilities are potentially consistent with noisy data!

When it comes to loss of the “sense of body ownership” in stroke or limb injury, there’s more uncertainty about how it works, but we see similar suggestions that the inability to feel, move, or track the location of a limb seems to make it more likely (though not inevitable!) that the patient will disown or reject that limb as “not-me”.

If the limb turns up in an unexpected location (because of impaired proprioception), or feels “hot” on the inside but is cool to the touch (due to nerve damage), or feels “big” and swollen but is visibly normal-sized (again due to nerve damage), then the inconsistency between different sources of sense data seems to sometimes lead to loss of the body-ownership feeling.

And this makes sense. You have more, and more tightly integrated, sense data about your own body than about anything else in your environment. You can see and touch a chair, but you can also move your body and feel sensations on and inside it. And there are predictable, consistent relationships between how your movement affects your sensations. It might be possible to define “my body” in terms of some of those predictable relationships, which don’t obtain with regard to external objects.

In further posts, I’ll want to talk about other “disturbances of the sense of self”, from out-of-body experiences to dissociation, and also what underlies the sense of volition/agency.

For the past month or so, while I’ve had some free time between consulting projects, I’ve been building my first ever web/mobile app, with a lot of AI assistance.

You can try it out at https://fairenough.netlify.app/ or check out the repository at https://github.com/srconstantin/dispute-resolution/. It still has a few bugs to iron out, but at this point the basic functionality is there.

I’m eager for feedback from beta testers — if you see a bug or have a feature request, please leave a note in the comments or raise an issue on GitHub.

What It Does

FairEnough is a dispute resolution app.

It’s intended for anything from “r/AmITheAsshole” types of interpersonal conflicts, to less-heated intellectual or professional disagreements.

A user can create a dispute and invite contacts to participate. Then, all dispute participants (including the dispute creator) get to tell their side of the story: what happened, who did what, how you feel about it, how you want the conflict to be resolved.

Then, a call to an LLM (currently Claude Sonnet 4) generates a “verdict” — an analysis and conclusion of who’s in the right (if anyone) and what steps should be taken to resolve the dispute.

Participants can either accept the verdict as-is, or reject it and add a follow-up response — adding details for more context, responding to other participants’ points, arguing against the LLM’s “verdict”, etc.

When all participants have either accepted the last round’s result or added a new response, the “round” ends, and the LLM again returns a “verdict.”

This keeps going until all participants accept the latest “verdict” as-is, at which point the dispute is marked concluded. (Of course, it’s possible for a dispute to stay open indefinitely.)

Why a Dispute Resolution App?

Mainly, because I’d been thinking about something like this for a long time and wanted at least one version of it to exist.

It’s one of the “AI for Epistemics”-esque projects I’d covered earlier this summer in Tech for Thinking and a year ago in LLM Applications I Want To See.

I’ve also been thinking for longer about how structured disagreement is better than unstructured, e.g. in Science Court.

A “debate”, with orderly rounds in which everyone has a chance to speak their piece and a (putatively) neutral arbiter assesses whose arguments are better, tends to produce better-quality thinking than an unstructured dump of whatever opinions happen to get expressed and argued with, as we tend to see in social media or informal verbal conversations.

Why? Unstructured disagreement tends to favor the talkative and pugnatious, and to focus on what people happen to find emotionally salient, instead of assessing the issue as a whole and deliberately considering all sides.

The original strategies for thoughtful group deliberation, from town halls and courts of law to the Delphi Method, tend to start with “let’s let people take turns talking, and let’s have a moderator.” Basic stuff, and certainly no guarantee of desirable results, but a lot better than not doing that. And yet, we rarely do it in everyday life!

So I thought it would be nice to build a very simple app, as a behavior flow to make it frictionless to have structured disagreements with an artificial “moderator.”

Responses to Criticisms

I got a lot of negative responses when I posted this to Twitter/X originally.

Some were pretty outlandish (I was accused of summoning demons and of being the strongest ever “bear signal” for the survival of the human species) but some were actually worth responding to, and I’ll cover them here.

Q: Isn’t this just encouraging people to abdicate judgment to the AI? Why are you building the Torment Nexus?

A: The narrow counterargument is that we are nowhere near the point where people need to worry that everyone will use FairEnough instead of having real conversations with people and thinking for themselves.

This is a hobby project. I pay for hosting and API calls out of pocket. I have no plans to make it a business, raise funding, charge fees, or anything like that. I seriously doubt that as many as 50 people will ever use it for practical purposes. I’m just hoping for enough beta testers to help me whip it into a state I’m fairly happy with.

It’s not going to take over the world by accident — first of all, that doesn’t happen, and second of all, if it somehow went viral, I’d probably shut it down for cost reasons anyhow.

I suspect that some internet commenters have no sense of scale; they make no distinction between a trillion-dollar software company and one person’s learn-to-code project, or between a movie studio and a hobbyist’s fan art. If you’re a “creator”, you’re automatically presumed responsible for nobody ever being “harmed” by your work, whether or not you actually have a large user base, or whether you have a large enough team to prepare for every eventuality. This is a crazypants attitude that pushes people away from ever trying to make things themselves, and towards the kind of passive, mindless consumerism the complainers wanted to combat in the first place.

That said, I do believe that even a hobby/open-source creator has (scale-sensitive) responsibilities to the users they have; if I saw signs that people were using the app in a concerning way, or if I got complaints that it was harming their relationships, that would be my cue to pull the plug.1

My point here is that the scale is tiny, and I think it’s fine ethically speaking to let people try out the app and see how it goes. We have time to find out if it’s starting to get Torment Nexus-y.

For safety’s sake, I’d recommend creating disputes for fictional or low-stakes scenarios rather than anything high-stakes or confidential.

In general, I do worry that it’s bad for people to use AIs as all-knowing oracles or as an excuse to avoid thinking, and it’s possible that if something like FairEnough were to become widely used, it would be contributing to the problem.

How can one design AI tools that require the user to think critically rather than subtly encouraging them to turn their brains off? I don’t know; there are people thinking about this, but I’m not a human-computer interaction expert and don’t really have opinions here myself.

In the meanwhile, I think personal responsibility is a good idea. Think about what you use AI for, and why, and whether you’d be better off in the long run doing that particular task on your own. Also, treat responses as “what the LLM came up with, which may be wrong”, rather than some kind of ground truth.

If by some chance you actually needed to hear this, this is me telling you not to worship my app, or anyone’s, as an omniscient God. C’mon, people.

Q: Can’t a dispute resolution AI be easily prompt-engineered to favor your side of the argument?

A: yeah, probably.

I wanted to get enough beta users experimenting and sharing their results to get some sense of what the failure modes are, and maybe build in some safeguards. I am one person with no special skill at red-teaming, so I basically haven’t tested that aspect.

I did notice in early testing that if we allowed only one round and one verdict, participants who responded later had an obvious advantage (they could respond to earlier participants’ points) so the LLM was more likely to judge in their favor. The hope is that multiple rounds will correct for this.

But basically I expect that for the app to be even close to “fair” we’d need many iterative attempts to restructure the prompt to correct for various things of this kind (and more adversarial types of hacking/prompt-engineering), and it probably wouldn’t ever be fully robust to everything because even big commercial AI labs can’t do that.

Q: Won’t dispute-resolution apps inherently favor the more verbally fluent or “therapy-speak-using” dispute participants?

A: Maybe. You know what else? So does real life. So does couples therapy. So does the Internet.

Being able to articulate your point of view effectively and sound reasonable makes all bystanders more sympathetic! Because it’s actually a positive signal! (Even if there are some terrible people with the gift of the gab). You can’t pin this one on AI.

Q: What about security? Why should we trust your “vibe-coded” app with our personal information?

A: Emails, names, and dispute contents are stored in an encrypted database, hosted on Railway. So, they’re as secure as Railway and the AES-256-GCM algorithm are.

Now, I have access to the decryption keys, and they’re stored as environment variables, which is necessary because Claude needs to be able to take in user-generated responses in plaintext as inputs to the LLM prompt.

So, this isn’t end-to-end encrypted like Signal; like most web apps, someone on the development side (=me) has the in-principle capacity to read everything you write on the app. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I have no intention of doing this.

Plus, there may be unknown-unknowns that I haven’t considered; I don’t know very much about security.

So, for safety’s sake, don’t put any sensitive or confidential information into the app.

How I’ve Been Using LLMs to Code

As a programmer, I’m pretty much at the same level as Alex Telford — I’m comfortable writing python scripts for data analysis or training ML models, but I’ve never written anything with a large (>1000 line) codebase, and I’ve never done anything with web or mobile development at all.2

So, this project has been an exercise in “see if I can learn modern web development with the help of AI”, and I think it’s been pretty successful on that front.

I tend to believe the many, many software engineers (eg George Hotz) who claim that AI-generated code is worse than what a skilled engineer can produce, particularly when you’re trying to do something uncommon and specific.

After all, to the extent LLM output is basically interpolated from its training data, it’s only as good as the human-generated content on the internet3. In areas where I’m strong (writing, literature review), I’d never choose an LLM over doing it myself, because I wouldn’t delegate writing or research to almost any human beings.

However, I am not a web developer at present, and “the distilled aggregate of what’s on Github” is a hell of a lot better than what I’d come up with on my own.

Some people, by “vibecoding”, mean trying to get the AI to work as autonomously as possible. That wasn’t my goal; I wanted to actually learn something myself. So I’d ask Claude to generate code that does a thing, and copy-paste it into my own editor, and test it bit by bit. I’d also ask a lot of follow-up questions about any code I didn’t understand. (Remember, this was my first time working with JavaScript, React, and lots of other libraries and frameworks.)

I think this kind of “vibecoding” is somewhere on the production possibilities frontier between efficiency at actually getting a working app built and effectiveness at learning programming skills. If I had just learned from tutorials and written everything myself, I’d be stronger at web development, but I definitely wouldn’t have a minimum viable app in two weeks and a mostly-satisfactory one in six. On the other extreme, if I had hired a web developer, the app would be perfect and I wouldn’t understand it at all. “Vibecoding”, I think, strictly dominates older intermediate methods like “mostly copy-pasting combinations of half-understood stuff from Stack Overflow” — it both produces better code and teaches me more.

It’s worth mentioning that I found the React documentation exceptionally clear and useful — often more useful than Q&A with Claude. Claude will answer any particular question I happen to have, which is incredibly helpful, but a good tutorial will explain concepts more clearly and completely.

And I’ve also been chatting a lot with software-developer friends, which has been very helpful and I’m grateful for their assistance. (It is astonishing how many bugs I miss if it’s just me testing on my own, vs. what pops up with even three beta testers.)

Things I Learned From the Process

• I got to encounter a lot of new basic concepts, from “lifting state” to asynchronous functions to browser storage to database connections.

• And learned how to use modern tools/services to do things like “send emails”, “host a database and backend”, “host a web frontend”, “test mobile apps”, etc.

• Claude was really essential for how to structure a web/mobile app codebase, in the sense of “separate mobile from backend in different folders”, “each screen UI gets its own file”, “you need a database.js to make all the changes to the database”, “you need a frontend API to call the backend functions”, etc.

  • Basically I’m using the LLM as a substitute for the “social onboarding process” of learning how other people usually structure their code. I assume people usually learn this on the job, but it’s mostly not made clear in tutorials, and it would have been extremely hard for me to DIY.

• Working with Claude is really good for curing me of bad habits, like “ugh do I have to make a new file for this?” and “do I have to write console logs and unit tests?” Maybe it’s an aversion learned from being scared of making the project “too big” (in terms of number of files or lines of code) or thinking about organization/modularity “prematurely”, but it’s counterproductive, and hard to completely get over on my own. Whereas Claude is just like “nope, we’re doing this properly, right from the beginning”, so I get used to that being The Way. None of this “start with a Jupyter notebook full of disorganized garbage code and then grudgingly rewrite it later” business.

• Claude has perfect syntax and a very impressive “working memory” for what part of the codebase does what.4 Where it trips up is usually on basic logic:

  • eg when the whole point of function A is to call function B under certain conditions, Claude may just…forget to call function B. and not fix this, after repeated reminders.

  • it will also go down increasingly elaborate rabbit holes trying to figure out where a bug is coming from, hypothesizing very complex and subtle things going wrong, rather than…look at the very next line to find a trivial problem there.

• I also notice a tendency for Claude to introduce more bugs on things that aren’t front-end UI stuff. Encryption and SQL database calls took more tries to get right.

• I don’t find Claude overly sycophantic in a coding context; if anything it’s really helpful at correcting my misconceptions.

In the past 3 entries in my consciousness sequence I was focused on conscious sensory perception — the difference between sense data that we subjectively “notice” or “are aware of”, vs. sense data that we are exposed to, and which may affect us, but without our knowledge.

This is one of Erik Hoel’s three common-sense characteristics of consciousness. We are conscious of a thing when we have a subjective experience of noticing or perceiving it; we are unconscious of the same thing when we have no such experience.

Another common-sense characteristic of consciousness is awakeness (or “arousal”). Ordinary waking life is a conscious state; dreamless sleep, anaesthesia, and coma are unconscious states.

In unconscious states, the individual is largely unresponsive to outside stimuli, cannot communicate, and will wake with no memories of having experienced anything while unconscious.

As far as we can tell, in an unconscious state, the individual has no conscious/subjective perceptions of anything. If being conscious “of something” means that it enters a sort of “workspace” or “field of awareness” where we can notice/perceive it, then an unconscious state means an empty workspace or field of awareness.

So, what’s different in the brain during an unconscious or less-conscious state?

At a first approximation, it’s the thalamus, stupid.

During less-conscious states, the thalamus is less active, more inclined to slow synchronized firing than fast desynchronized firing, and less “functionally connected to” (i.e. activity correlates less well with) other brain regions, particularly in the cortex.

Interestingly, my last (imperfect) candidate for a brain region critical for conscious sensory perception was a particular nucleus in the thalamus.

Neural Correlates of Disorders of Consciousness: It’s The Thalamus (and Friends)

“Disorders of Consciousness” (DOC) is a catch-all term that includes things like coma, minimally conscious states, vegetative states, and so on.

Interestingly, there are two axes on which disorders of consciousness differ from the normal healthy waking state: arousal and awareness.1

In a vegetative state the patient is unresponsive to their surroundings, but still has open eyes and sleep-wake cycles. They are, in some sense, awake…but appear to not be aware of anything around them. (Typically, a coma that doesn’t end earlier will turn into a vegetative state after a few weeks.)

Similarly, in an absence seizure, some degree of wakefulness is still present (open eyes, standing, etc) but no response to their surroundings. In both absence seizures and vegetative states, patients typically have no memory of the experience after they recover, consistent with them having no conscious subjective experiences during the “low awareness state.”

While lesions in many places can cause disorders of consciousness, the thalamus is a common lesion site, as well as a network of fronto-parietal cortex sites known as the default mode network (which is typically active during self-related thought processes like mind-wandering and autobiographical memory.)

In a meta-analysis of fMRI studies of disorders of consciousness, covering a total of 687 patients and 637 healthy controls, activity in the DOC patients was significantly reduced in regions within the default mode network, including2:

• bilateral medial dorsal nucleus of the thalamus

• left cingulate

• posterior cingulate

• precuneus

• middle frontal and medial temporal gyri

A subsequent study similarly found that clinical measures of awareness, in disorders of consciousness, correlated with the degree of damage to the thalamus.3

The vegetative state, in particular, is overwhelmingly likely to coincide with damage to the thalamus (80% of patients).4

Interestingly, you can get brain activity in response to painful stimuli and sounds in vegetative state patients — but only in brainstem, thalamus, and the “primary” somatosensory and auditory cortices, not in the “secondary” sensory-processing areas that typically correlate with conscious sensory perception and more complex pattern-recognition.5

From an EEG point of view, patients in comas or vegetative states usually have only very slow-wave activity, delta or theta waves, similar to deep sleep. Brain-dead patients have no EEG activity; “locked-in” patients, who are conscious and can communicate by thought alone, but can’t move, have normal EEGs.6

Neural Correlates of Anaesthesia: Yep, Still The Thalamus

During propofol anaesthesia, EEG waves slow down and increase in amplitude, first to alpha waves, and then to delta and theta waves.7

Under PET imaging, lots of regions in the brain show lower metabolism and blood flow during anaesthesia, but particularly the thalamus and cortex.8

You get the same results with fMRI imaging: reliably, less blood flow to the thalamus, with a strong dose-response relationship — the more anaesthetic, the less thalamic blood flow. 9

Neural Correlates of Deep Sleep: Once Again, That’s The Thalamus

The classic neural correlate of sleep is the EEG.

Beta waves for alert (or dreaming) states, alpha waves for calm or drowsy states, and delta and theta waves for deep sleep.

These are brain-wide patterns of electrical activity, averaged across the whole brain volume and measured with scalp electrodes.

But there’s some evidence that the thalamus leads the whole-brain transition from fast uncorrelated spiking (and thus high-frequency EEG patterns) to slower and more synchronized brain waves (and thus the lower-frequency delta and theta waves.)

During the normal waking state, neurons in the thalamus spike “tonically” (at a sustained, high baseline rate). By contrast, during sleep, the thalamus “sets the pace” for the slow “sleep spindle” oscillations characteristic of entry into deep non-REM sleep. It’s actually T-type calcium channels in the thalamus, specifically, that entrain these sleep spindles, and you can induce them artificially in rodents with optogenetics.10 Both sleep spindles and slow-wave oscillations in sleeping humans happen first in thalamus and only afterwards in the cortex.11

Other regions, like the brainstem and hypothalamus, are also highly involved in the transition between sleep and waking. You can induce sleep in a cat with pulsed electrode stimulation to lots of parts of the brain, including the basal forebrain12 , the cortex13, and the thalamus14.

But, for instance, there are particular neurons in the thalamus active during the process of loud sounds awaking animals from deep sleep, and optogenetic stimulation of those neurons will wake the animal up.15

It seems that “lower” regions like the hypothalamus and brainstem connect to the thalamus, and have some of their effects on sleep through the thalamus. So while it’s not the only region important for sleep, it might be the proximate controller of sleep and slow-wave firing patterns in the rest of the brain.

Upshots

This is a very high-level overview; we haven’t touched on where or how the thalamus affects states of consciousness, or any DOC-adjacent conditions like confusional states.

But we do have a very clear and consistent signal that virtually all unconscious states involve alterations in the thalamus, which is intriguing because the thalamus is also the connecting hub that integrates between different sensory perceptions and the cortical regions that process them.

Unfortunately, we don’t (yet) seem to have reliable results at bringing people out of comatose states by stimulating the thalamus1617.

But we might learn more about how consciousness works by zooming in on this region. As a rough heuristic, the (human) cortex tends to be very flexible, while subcortical brain structures are less so; if any function is going to be anatomically “hard-coded”, it’ll probably be subcortical. It’s also more likely that more “ancient” subcortical structures will be similar between humans and animals. So if the toolbox of neuroscience is to be helpful for making sense of consciousness, we should be more hopeful about subcortical sites. And luckily we seem to have one!

Back in Part 1, I found an interesting candidate for a cross-sensory region of the brain (aka used for sight, hearing, touch, etc, alike) that might be active when we consciously perceive sensations and inactive when we only do some kind of subconscious sensory processing.

Both V2 and V5 project back down to the pulvinar nucleus in the thalamus, which is a huge hub for multisensory processing (auditory and tactile as well as visual). The pulvinar is responsible for attentional control, and lesions to it can cause hemispatial neglect (the phenomenon where, often after stroke, a patient might be wholly unaware of a whole half of their body or any sensations coming from that side.)

A summary of my current working model of conscious sensory perception is:

• There’s lots of sense data that the brain receives, processes, and uses to guide some behavior, but which we don’t subjectively, consciously perceive.

  • blindsight, numb touch, deaf hearing: subconscious processing of residual sense data in people with sensory disabilities

  • subthreshold sensations: subconscious processing of stimuli too faint or ambiguous for us to consciously register

  • inattentional blindness: subconscious processing of stimuli we aren’t consciously aware of because our attention is otherwise occupied

• Conscious sensory perception, compared to unconscious sensory processing, correlates with greater activity (by various metrics) in some brain sensory processing regions (V2 and V5 for sight, the temporal gyrus for hearing, S2 for touch).

  • Interestingly, in all these cases it’s not the “primary” sensory processing region, i.e. the first to receive inputs from the sensory nerves, that is specific to conscious perception, but rather regions devoted to more complex sensory pattern recognition.

• Clearly, since these are different regions for different senses, they don’t constitute a single necessary-and-sufficient neural correlate of conscious sensory perception. There might still be one, though; we gotta keep looking.

So, is it activity in the pulvinar nucleus?

Well, it’s hard to tell for sure.

People (and monkeys) can have damage to a pulvinar nucleus and be almost completely normal in their capacity for everyday life activities, which doesn’t fit well with the idea that the pulvinar is necessary-and-sufficient for conscious sensory perception. On the other hand, maybe the damage in those cases is incomplete. We don’t have a lot of examples of complete bilateral destruction of both pulvinar nuclei.

But there is some suggestive evidence that the pulvinar is at least involved in attention and conscious awareness.

I don’t have a really clear-cut conclusion here, unfortunately, but I’m posting it anyway for the sake of transparency about my learning process.

Neuroscientists who are all “you can’t talk about the “function” of “brain regions”, that’s modern-day phrenology!”, feel free to point and giggle…this time.

I still think I believe in the power of neuroanatomy, especially subcortically. But to some extent that’s layman’s bias — I have to gravitate to simple, old methods because if you do some sort of complicated Big Data functional-connectivity wizardry I won’t be able to tell if the whole thing is concocted out of statistical shenanigans. I am limited by what I can understand, and if the best options are out of my reach, so it goes.

At any rate, it looks like the pulvinar is one of the regions where activity looks different between conscious perceptions and their absence…but it’s hard to say more than that.

Pulvinar Anatomy

The pulvinar nuclei are clumps of neurons located in the thalamus, at the top of the brainstem. You have one on each side, left and right.

They receive both neuronal input from, and project neuronal output back to:12

• the retina

• the superior colliculus (another brainstem region and the “first stop” in the brain for visual signals from the retina)

• the striate visual cortex, or V1

• the extrastriate cortex, or V2-V5

• other cortical regions (parietal, temporal, frontal, temporal, cingulate)

• the striatum/basal ganglia (a deep structure in the limbic system involved in motor responses and motivation)

• the amygdala (also limbic, involved in reactions to threats)

Basically, it’s a major hub. In primates most of it seems to be devoted to vision, but it connects everywhere, especially to the cortex.

Pulvinar Lesions

We can learn a lot about a brain region from lesion studies — what happens to the organism when it’s damaged? (Through disease or injury in humans, or through experimentally destroying it in animals.)

One thing pulvinar stroke lesions do (compared to stroke lesions elsewhere in the brain) is cause spatial neglect. 3

This is the phenomenon where a patient “neglects” a part of the space around them — maybe their left or right side. Someone with left-sided hemispatial neglect, for instance, might not eat the food on the left side of their plate, might not shave or make up the left half of their face, might copy only the right half of a drawing, or might bump into objects on their left side.

So that’s promising for the pulvinar as a site of conscious sensory awareness; patients with spatial neglect are unaware of pretty much every sensory perception on their “bad” side.

But not all pulvinar lesions cause complete hemispatial neglect. Often, one-sided pulvinar lesions seem to cause subtler difficulties in selective attention to stimuli on one side, especially under conditions when the patient is tasked to focus on a “target” stimulus and ignore a “distractor.” This does suggest a role in attention; but the studies on pulvinar lesions are frustratingly inconsistent. Different studies find different deficits; some studies find no deficits at all; generally humans and monkeys with pulvinar lesions have almost normal sensory and motor function, which is not quite what you’d see if the pulvinar was “the” seat of conscious sensory perception.

Subjects with pulvinar lesions may have no obvious symptoms beyond limb weakness, clumsiness, and tactile sensory issues (numbness or pain) on the side of the body opposite to the lesion; they can even make a full recovery with no sensory or motor deficits.4

When mild pulvinar lesion symptoms exist, they’re often a sort of “lesser version of hemispatial neglect”. The neglect patient completely ignores the contralesional side (opposite the lesion); other pulvinar lesion patients merely exhibit an attentional bias to the ipsilesional side (same side as the lesion), or a subtle impairment in difficult sensory-attention tasks on the contralesional side.

For instance, one patient couldn’t visually follow lines from left to right (into his contralesional field). His eyes fixed for longer on a single point than normal controls, and he was worse than controls at visually searching for items on the contralesional side. This is a clearcut example of something like a deficit in visual “exploration” on the bad side.5

People with pulvinar lesions also have impairments related to voluntary control over their eye movements. In a task where participants are instructed to look at a particular colored circle when it appears, their eyes are often drawn unintentionally to a “distractor” circle of a different color. Pulvinar lesion patients (without hemispatial neglect) are worse at the task when the “distractor” is on the opposite side from the lesion (contralesional); healthy controls are better at the task overall and show no “side” preference.6 Similar results happen when it comes to reporting the color of a “target” vs “distractor” square; pulvinar lesions interfere with “response competition”, the ability to respond to the target rather than distractor stimulus.7

One theory of what’s going on is that shifting visual attention involves three operations: “disengage” from what you’re currently looking at, “move” to a new location, and “engage” with the new visual stimulus. The pattern of impairments in pulvinar lesions is consistent with a problem with the “engage” step, in the contralesional visual field. They can move their gaze there — this isn’t true neglect — but they don’t get the boost in speed and accuracy that normal people get when the “spotlight of attention” is focused on a region.8

Monkeys with pulvinar lesions, similarly, have their gaze more strongly drawn to visual stimuli than a blank screen; they get “visually captured” more, and scan less, than control monkeys.9 In tasks with distractors, monkeys do much worse on the contralateral side when their pulvinar is inactivated (with drugs). 10; they also have much less neural response to visual stimuli in V4, and see a large increase in alpha wave power across the whole cortex, a state more similar to sleep.

Lesions in the dorsal pulvinar can also cause deficits in reaching and grasping for things in a human subject.11

Drug-based inactivation of the pulvinar nucleus in monkeys had similar results related to reaching/grasping; monkeys would not use the hand on the non-lesioned side to reach for a treat, and if their “good hand” was inactivated, they were awkward in reaching and grasping with their “bad hand”, sometimes letting the treat fall to the floor altogether (which never happens with intact monkeys.) The monkeys were neither paralyzed nor blind on the contralesional side; they simply did not explore it, either with eyes or limbs, especially if there was something happening simultaneously on the ipsilesional side. They were still capable of directing their gaze towards contralesional images, but their gaze went faster to the ipsilesional side and stayed there.12

On the other hand, some other experimental lesions of the entire pulvinar nucleus in monkeys resulted in no effects on eye movements, so maybe not, after all.13

The “neglect-like” effect of pulvinar lesions isn’t restricted to vision but is relevant to other senses. A pulvinar lesion, in one case, caused an unusual auditory deficit — the patient could hear on both sides if the sound only came from one side at a time, but could not hear anything in his left ear if different sounds were coming from each side simultaneously, as though the problem was in attending to left-sided sounds in the presence of competing right-sided sounds.14

What happens if you have damage to both pulvinar nuclei? In one case, sudden-onset double vision and nystagmus (wobble) when instructed to move his eyes.15

The Pulvinar and Blindsight

Monkeys with blindsight have damage to the primary visual cortex V1, but can still be trained to move their eyes accurately to targets in their “blind field.”

If you also inactivate the pulvinar nucleus by injecting a compound that blocks neuron firing, the monkeys no longer show evidence of blindsight.

By contrast, the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) is not necessary for blindsight; it usually deteriorates in response to V1 damage, so it’s mostly gone already even in animals that still have blindsight.

Now, remember that blindsight is (usually) a form of unconscious visual processing — except in cases that are arguably a sort of “consciousness without visual qualia”, where the subject reports knowing about or sensing visual stimuli but not truly “seeing” them.

If the pulvinar is active in blindsight in monkeys, that could mean pulvinar activity is not sufficient for making a visual perception conscious; or the pulvinar could be involved in this sort of “technically conscious blindsight”. The monkey can’t tell us what it’s experiencing! So from animal experiments alone, We Just Don’t Know.16

The Pulvinar and Confidence

If you give a monkey a visual categorization task, with the option to “opt out” if uncertain, there’s less activity in the monkey’s pulvinar nucleus when they’re choosing to opt out than when they’re making a choice. In other words, activity in the pulvinar seems to track “subjective confidence” in their perceptions, or at least their willingness to “bet” on their perceptions. If you inactivate the thalamus, the monkey’s performance on the task is not impaired, but it is much less confident (i.e. more likely to choose the “safe” opt-out button.) By contrast, if you inactivate the LGN, the monkey’s performance is impaired.17

This is interestingly reminiscent of blindsight in humans. Not only do humans with blindsight report being unable to see, but if asked to bet on their confidence level on vision tasks, they usually bet as though they expect to perform at chance — even when in fact, they are getting enough subconscious visual data to perform well above chance.

Perhaps “knowing when you’re right” about visual data — a decent proxy for consciousness — requires pulvinar activity.

The Pulvinar and Attention

In a distractor task, where subjects were asked to pay attention either to the top two or bottom two of four images arranged in a square, only the images people pay attention to show spatially localized activity in the pulvinar nucleus (i.e. fMRI-measured activity is concentrated in different parts of the pulvinar depending on whether the image is on the left or right of the screen). The unattended images don’t spatially localize. 18

That is, the spatial pattern of activity in the pulvinar depends on whether you’re paying attention or not. Without attention, activity is more diffuse; with attention, the activity pattern carries spatial information about the image.

The Pulvinar and Arousal

Interestingly, the pulvinar nucleus is much less active than other parts of the thalamus during anaesthesia, which is suggestive of a role in consciousness.19

Also tantalizing: when a macaque’s pulvinar is inactivated, it gains a lot of power in the alpha EEG frequency throughout the cortex, and diffuse activation of visual-cortex neurons that are normally only active in the presence of particular visual stimuli. This is a pattern ordinarily seen in sleep.20

One patient developed severe hypersomnia — sleeping almost continuously, all day long — after a stroke that damaged the right thalamus, including the pulvinar nucleus on that side.21

The Pulvinar and Conscious Perception

You can train a monkey to report whether it sees a visual stimulus or not, including during optical illusions where the presence of distractors can make a target seem to suddenly “disappear.”

If you do this while recording neural responses, some visual processing areas (e.g. the LGN) show the same pattern of response whether the monkey reports seeing the target or not; but the pulvinar shows quite different responses, with some neurons being more responsive to “invisible” trials and some neurons being more responsive to “visible” ones. The effect in the pulvinar is bigger than that in visual cortex areas like V1, V2, and V4 using the same method.22

If you then don’t have the monkey press the button, the results are the same; pulvinar neural responses differ between trials where the monkey “should” be able to see the target and trials where it “shouldn’t.” This means it’s not simply tracking something like the hand movement or the decision to move.

Conclusions

The pulvinar is one of the regions (but not the only one) where lesions can lead to hemispatial neglect, or the total lack of conscious attention/perception on one side of the body. But damage or inhibition of the pulvinar usually doesn’t do anything so drastic, which suggests that there are multiple brain regions sufficient for perceptual attention.

The pulvinar definitely changes its activity pattern based on “consciousness-related” states like attention, arousal, and confidence in one’s correctness on perceptual tasks.

Mess with the pulvinar and you can (but don’t always) get phenomena like:

• impaired performance on visual tasks on the affected “side”

• lower confidence in visual tasks even when performance is not impaired

• impairments in other sensorimotor tasks (auditory processing, reaching/grasping), again on the affected side

• loss of blindsight when it was previously present

• excessive sleep, and sleep-like brainwave patterns

So, while this isn’t exactly the smoking gun I initially hoped it was, I do think the pulvinar is (weasel word alert) “involved in” conscious perception.

In this part of the sequence I’m trying to distinguish between information we’re consciously aware of, and information that we’re exposed to, and which may still affect our behavior “subconsciously” or “unconsciously”, but which we don’t consciously perceive.

How can you tell those apart?

One decent proxy is communication — can a human subject indicate to the experimenter that they have noticed something? Then they’re probably consciously aware of it.

Of course, this isn’t a perfect indicator. What people say, and what they subjectively experience, aren’t exactly the same. It seems unlikely that many people would lie in a low-stakes psychology experiment with neutral sensory stimuli, but they might consider a very subtle perception “not worth mentioning” to an experimenter, or they might guess at or confabulate a perception they don’t actually experience.

One thing we observed in the last post is that, if you ask people to bet on their degree of confidence in making judgments about subtle sensory perceptions, they’re pretty well calibrated, while if you ask them to rate their confidence, they’re systematically underconfident.

Think of two separate pieces of information:

1. the sensory stimulus one is exposed to

2. the correlation between one’s behavior and 1).

If your behavior correlates with 1.), your brain is processing the stimulus, and using it to shape behavior. But “you” might not be consciously aware of the stimulus. (see blindsight, subthreshold sensations, etc.)

If your behavior can correlate with 2.), as it does when someone bets correctly on their confidence, then your brain has access to meta-level or second-order information, and is using that to shape behavior. “Some part of you”, at least, “knows” when you see the stimulus and when you don’t.

Is this second-order information a necessary-and-sufficient condition for consciousness? Not sure; maybe the betting is itself an “automatic” process without subjective awareness.

But it’s suggestive that people with blindsight don’t have this kind of second-order information; they don’t bet on their ability to “see”.

From a revealed-preference perspective, where you can be said to “know” things if you coherently shape your behavior around them, people with blindsight “know” where visual stimuli are but don’t “know they know”.

As best I can, I want to keep these distinctions straight going forward. I’ll only use words like “consciousness” or “awareness” or “subjective perception” to refer to things people report experiencing or things they can indicate (e.g. via betting on confidence) knowledge of having experienced; I’ll use “detection” or “processing” to refer to stimuli that measurably affect the brain or behavior but may not be consciously perceived.

Inattentional Blindness

We all have the subjective experience of not noticing things when we’re distracted, a phenomenon known in the literature as “inattentional blindness.”

I think it’s fair to say we are not conscious of stimuli we don’t notice due to inattention. The ambiguity around communication doesn’t really enter here; you can just observe, introspectively, that when you don’t notice a thing it isn’t in your awareness.

So what’s the difference, neurologically, between stimuli we notice and stimuli we don’t?

First of all, there’s a literature demonstrating that stimuli we don’t notice can affect our behavior.

In a standard experimental paradigm, inattentional blindness can be induced by assigning people a “distractor task” that takes up a lot of attention — something like doing arithmetic problems or counting the number of baskets in a video of basketball — and then they’re exposed to a surprising stimulus, like a gorilla running across the basketball court. People focused on the task often don’t notice the gorilla. (Interestingly, they’re more likely to notice if they have ADHD).1 In this paradigm, the role of the gorilla — the surprising stimulus that distracted subjects don’t notice — is known as the “critical stimulus.”

People are significantly better than chance at answering questions about the critical stimulus, even though they don’t report noticing it.2 3 Their behavior is also affected in other ways, such as faster reaction times on recognizing the critical stimulus than the same item if it wasn’t previously presented.4

These findings have survived the replication crisis; more recent studies have replicated the classic findings.5

What does inattentional blindness look like neurologically?

fMRI activity can be compared between three conditions: no critical stimulus, unaware (the critical stimulus is there but not noticed; inattentional blindness), and aware (the critical stimulus is there and noticed.)

The only region that was found to be significantly more active in the aware vs. unaware condition was the left orbitofrontal cortex, a region in the prefrontal cortex just behind the eyes — and this was only after loosening the criteria for significance, so it’s ambiguous whether it’s a “real” effect.6

Lots of other brain areas, including the orbitofrontal cortex, other prefrontal cortex regions, and the cerebellum, are significantly more active in both the aware and unaware conditions than in the no-critical-stimulus condition; they may be involved in subconscious processing of the critical stimulus.

But fMRI isn’t the only tool we have. We can also tell apart aware (undistracted) recognition of images from inattentionally blind (unaware) exposure via EEG signals. Around 200 ms after exposure, there’s a spike in the posterior electrode signals (known as N170) when people recognize familiar shapes and faces, and not when they don’t.7 8

Notably, people who did not exhibit inattentional blindness — the subjects who noticed the critical stimulus — have the same N170 EEG spike pattern as people who initially did have inattentional blindness but were then verbally informed (made “aware”) of the critical stimulus. That is, the spike consistently seems to track the state of being aware of the critical stimulus, no matter how people got there (noticing on their own, or being told.)

The EEG response is faster than fMRI can pick up — fMRI only detects brain activity 4-6 seconds after it happens — so it’s unsurprising that an fMRI couldn’t pick up a difference in occipital lobe activity between aware and unaware states.

This suggests that the N170 pattern — likely caused by activity in the fusiform gyrus, responsible for visually recognizing familiar objects — is involved in conscious perception (as opposed to unconscious processing) of faces and shapes. What about other, less recognizable visual stimuli?

There’s still a difference between aware and unaware conditions in occipital EEG responses when the critical stimulus is a “contour shape” in a field of arrows, but it’s later than N170, more like 300 ms in.9 Moreover, the intensity of this EEG marker of “awareness” was greater the more confident subjects were that they saw the contour shape.

This signal is inferred to be coming from the extrastriate cortex, aka V2-V6, the regions of the visual cortex that do “higher” visual processing (color, shape, texture, object recognition, motion — not just light/dark and location.) This matches the finding in blindsight that you need to have “enough” signal in the extrastriatal cortex before you can consciously “see” anything.

We get the same result in the rare cases where a patient is undergoing brain surgery and it’s possible to do intracranial EEG, which lets us find out exactly where in the brain the signal is coming from. Visual distractions resulted in a reduction of activity in V2.10

As with blindsight, this obviously doesn’t mean that V2 is “where consciousness lives.” It’s a visual processing area; it’s not going to be the defining factor between conscious and unconscious processing of, say, auditory or tactile stimuli. But (enough) extrastriatal cortex activity might be a necessary condition for conscious visual perception, while other senses might have other areas where (sufficient) activity is necessary for consciousness.

There’s also inattentional deafness, in which people miss auditory alarms when they’re distracted by a working-memory-heavy task. (This is a particularly big problem for pilots and healthcare workers, where immediately noticing beeping noises is a life-and-death issue.)

In an auditory flight simulator task, pilots missed more alarms when they were under higher cognitive load, and they had a much higher signal in the N100 evoked potential as measured by EEG, peaking over the fronto-central region of the scalp at around 116 ms after the alarm. This is a well-known auditory processing signal, generated by the auditory cortex in the superior temporal gyrus.11

If you use magnetoencephalography, which can localize brain activity better in time than fMRI and better in space than EEG, again you get reduced auditory evoked potentials at around 100 ms after an auditory stimulus, and the reduced activity is concentrated in the superior temporal sulcus and the posterior middle temporal gyrus — close but not exactly the same location as the primary auditory cortex, but also involved in some auditory processing like speech recognition and audiovisual integration.12

Upshots

In inattentional blindness, just like in subthreshold perception, people’s behavior is affected by sensory information they claim not to notice.

To some extent, people seem to be underconfident in what they’re willing to say they saw (though I couldn’t find a gambling study for inattentional blindness to identify whether people asked to bet on their confidence level can accurately gauge “how much” they’re perceiving.)

But brain states are also measurably different between cases when people “don’t notice” visual and auditory stimuli vs. cases when they do.

And the neural differences are in more or less the regions you’d expect; we see less activity in visual and auditory processing areas respectively, shortly after a visual or auditory stimulus that goes unnoticed because of distraction.

This is still consistent with the hypothesis I formed in the last post that less activity in certain sensory processing regions reduces conscious awareness of the corresponding sensations, even if there’s still enough “signal” getting through to affect behavior somewhat, or to allow people to make better-than-chance guesses about the sensory stimulus.