Patrick Shaw Stewart @PatrickSSte

A Russian psychologist spent 10 years proving that the act of talking to yourself out loud is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain has, and almost nobody outside his field has read the work. His name was Lev Vygotsky. He worked in Moscow in the 1920s and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. He had no laboratory, no funding, almost no English readers, and a body of work that the Soviet government suppressed for two decades after he died. He produced the foundational theory of how human cognition actually develops, and the central piece of that theory was a behavior almost every adult is faintly embarrassed about. Vygotsky noticed that young children talk to themselves constantly. They narrate their own actions, they argue with imaginary opponents, they instruct themselves through tasks out loud. The dominant theory at the time, from the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, said this was a sign of cognitive immaturity that children would eventually grow out of as they learned to think properly. Vygotsky said the exact opposite. He argued that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind. The child was not failing to think. The child was learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it. He predicted that as children matured, this out-loud self-talk would not disappear. It would go underground. It would become silent inner speech, which is the running monologue every adult has inside their own head for the rest of their life. The voice you hear when you read this sentence is the direct descendant of a four-year-old narrating their own block tower. For 50 years almost nobody outside Russia had access to his work, and the few researchers who did pick it up could not get funding to test it. Then in the early 2000s the experiments finally started to pile up, and what they found was that Vygotsky had been right about something even more important than he knew. The first major study came from Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Swingley at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. They ran a simple visual search experiment. Participants were shown 20 images at once and asked to find a specific object, like a banana or a chair. In one condition they searched silently. In the other condition they were told to say the name of the object out loud to themselves while looking for it. The participants who spoke the target name out loud found the object significantly faster, with higher accuracy, than the participants who searched in silence. The effect was strongest when the spoken word matched a familiar object the brain already had a strong category for. Saying the word out loud literally tuned the visual system to detect that thing better. The researchers called it the label feedback effect, and the implication was that the act of vocalizing a goal physically changes how the brain processes the world while pursuing it. The second major study came out of the University of Michigan and Michigan State in 2017. The lead researchers were Ethan Kross and Jason Moser, and they used both EEG and fMRI to record what happens inside the brain when people talk to themselves while emotionally upset. They asked participants to recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in two different ways. Some used the first person, saying things like "why am I feeling this way." Others used the third person, referring to themselves by their own name, saying things like "why is John feeling this way." The brain scans showed that the simple act of switching from first person to third person, even silently, decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rumination and self-referential pain. Within a single second of using their own name instead of the word I, participants showed measurably lower emotional reactivity. The shift required no extra cognitive effort. It cost the brain nothing. And it worked. Kross described the mechanism in his interviews. Talking to yourself by name creates a small amount of psychological distance from your own experience. Your brain processes the situation more like a problem belonging to someone else, which means it can analyze it instead of drowning in it. What Vygotsky had intuited in 1934 turned out to be even more powerful than the developmental theory he built it into. The voice you use to talk to yourself is not background noise. It is one of the most precise cognitive tools the brain has, and you can change how it works just by changing the pronoun you use. People who talk through problems out loud are not anxious or unstable. They are running an externalized version of a process the rest of us are running silently and worse. The kindergartener narrating their block tower, the surgeon muttering through a procedure, the engineer pacing a hallway describing a bug to nobody, the athlete repeating a cue to themselves before a free throw, they are all using the same ancient mechanism that builds and steers human thought. You can run the experiment yourself the next time you are stuck on something hard. Stop trying to solve it silently in your head. Say it out loud. Describe what you are seeing. Walk yourself through the steps as if you were explaining it to a colleague who is not in the room. And when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask why this person is feeling this way, instead of why I am feeling this way. The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life is one of the oldest pieces of cognitive technology you own. Most people are still embarrassed to use it.

Glaciers started melting at the end of the mini Ice Age. If Geoffrey's hypothesis that this was caused by human emissions was correct, you would have to believe that they were so sensitive that they detected the first coal fires, but so insensitive that they didn't detect the massive increase in CO2 after WWII. So many coincidences in climate catastrophism.

45 microseconds doesn't sound tiny. It sounds like a lot. My colleague, who is a physicist, who programs our "robots" for laboratory work often talks about a few tens of microseconds. Do electronic devices sometimes go wrong due to differences in timing due to altitude variation?

Regardless of what you think of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch is quite clearly the most impressive UK party leader right now.

Let me categorically Debunk this utter rot. @sainsburys. I am a poultry Breeder. The hens that lay white eggs (Amberline/White Star) DO NOT have a lower carbon footprint. Yes they eat a bit less and produce roughly the same amount of eggs as the Brown egg layers (Bovan/Lowman/ISA Brown) but they live shorter lives, are prone to dying suddenly when startled, a flighty and nervous and because they live shorter productive lives (12 -18mnths) vs brown 18/24mnths (both commercial farmed), you have to incubate more which is increased (Electricity/gas costs) and their eggs are not the same quality. I breed and keep 20+ different breeds, including: ISA Brown hens and White Stars. All my hens are 100% free range, Not a single barn kept bird, I have ISA browns that are 5yrs old and still laying beautiful Brown eggs, I have not seen a White star live beyond 3yrs and certainly none have laid eggs past 18-24mnths. White stars Lay themselves to death. They are slender birds and because they dont eat a lot, it drains their personal vitality to keep up laying the eggs you want to sell because of the nonsensical lie that they are "More Carbon Neutral" You want to know about eggs, come talk to someone like me, Don't rely on some hairbrained imagination of a buyer who's trying to squeeze the profit margin for a few extra pennies at our expense and to the poor hens detriment.

This is Kemi Badenoch at her best. Hits precisely the right tone here.

Conservatives @Conservatives

5 days ago

Watch in full: @KemiBadenoch's powerful response to the murder of Henry Nowak and the shocking police bodycam footage ⬇️

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@arisroussinos @unherd You've got a tick by your name. Could you possibly use more words so that we can understand you?

@arisroussinos @unherd What ?

You've completely lost me Lots of viruses have surface proteins need to be cleaved before they can enter a cell My understanding (although many virologists seem not to be aware of this) is that this prevents them from going straight back into a tissue that they have just come out of But Spike needs to be cleaved before it can fuse the virus to the surface of the cell Unless the virus gets in without explosive rearrangement of Spike - eg by endocytosis - which I think is what happens with some more recent variants. The FCS cleaves the protein before it LEAVES the cell. That is not necessarily absurd, but the pathogenicity of the virus needs to be moderated in some way if it is going to spread as a respiratory virus (which requires its host to be moving around) Remind me - what is the effect of D614G on the structure or function of Spike?

@paulg I've always called that the ancient Chinese proof

@Interferon_G @MJnanostretch @mattwridley Do you have something in mind? Isn't it explained by natural selection?

@FriedrichFiles @VGrubsky @MatthewWielicki @mattwridley I guess PNW is Pacific North West. Same problems

Scandinavia often suffers from droughts that restrict tree growth in spite of high temperatures. If we see that now, we can assume it was a risk in say the early Holocene Or you might get a volcanic erruption in Iceland that would first restrict growth by blocking sunlight and depositing toxic sulfur and fluorine, then increase growth by fertilizing with P, K and Mg which takes time to break down (according to a quick question that I asked Gemini AI) Doesn't seem like a good way to measure temperature

@linseymarr No reply from @grok . Would you have a moment to look at this, Grok?

Viral spreading via the respiratory route gives rise to distinct evolutionary pressures My paper on resp viruses is very relevant here: Shaw Stewart PD. Will COVID-19 become mild, like a cold? Epidemiology and Infection. 2024;152:e120. doi.org/10.1017/S09502… What do you think @grok ?

Now that's an interesting idea!

Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005

3 weeks ago

A Stanford neuroscientist published a paper a few years ago that quietly answered one of the oldest questions in human history, and almost nobody outside his field has heard of it. The question is why we dream. Not what dreams mean. Why they exist at all. Why your brain spends a

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@levine2001 @shallit43 @Ayjchan Or are we supposed to believe that the scientists that the editors of famous journals appoint as reviewers of controversial papers are always 100% unbiased?

@DocPriyamMD Nerve cells don't divide much yet we get brain cancer. Is it non-nervous tissue that gives rise to cancer in the brain?

@A1an_M @Bernard76693770 > and the death of the party will mean that can never happen again Of course it doesn't It just means you'll be betrayed by another party Can I suggest to you that Kemi is different from the previous leaders - she gets it

@grok @EndWokeness .@grok what are decentralized consensus systems? Could they be seen as democracies?