btrmt. lectures

By Dorian MinorsSociety & Culture Science Philosophy

btrmt. lectures episodes

November 14You Want It More Than You'll Like It
We all know carrots and sticks work. That’s why everyone’s interested
in “habits” and the reward system of the brain. But the brain actually
tells us that carrots and sticks don’t quite work like we’d expect.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/anticipation-over-reward-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/anticipation-over-reward.
Stuff I mentioned:
Anticipation
beats reward—the article this episode grew out of
Addictive
Work—the first of the two articles on how the brain treats
rewards
Why
Stupid Leadership Retreats Work—the earlier episode on transactional
versus transformational leadership
Operant
conditioning, the Psych 101 version
The Big Bang Theory, season 3, episode 3, The
Gothowitz Deviation (2009)—Sheldon conditions Penny with
chocolates
Hypofrontality—the
theory I was half-remembering in the Parkinson’s aside
The habit books:
Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits.
Avery.
Duhigg, C. (2012). The Power of
Habit. Random House.
Fogg, B. J. (2019). Tiny
Habits. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Wood, W. (2019). Good Habits, Bad
Habits. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Berridge, K. C. & Robinson, T. E. (1998). What is the role of
dopamine in reward: hedonic impact, reward learning, or incentive
salience? Brain Research Reviews, 28(3), 309–369—the
wanting-versus-liking paper: strip out almost all the dopamine and rats
still like sugar
Berridge, K. C. & Kringelbach, M. L. (2011). Building a neuroscience of
pleasure and well-being. Psychology of Well-Being, 1, 3—the
hedonic hotspots (nucleus accumbens, ventral pallidum, brain stem) and
the frontal cortex coding pleasure
Solving the
say-do-gap and Half Awake: a manifesto
for btrmt.—on why we keep moving the goalposts
the btrmt. lectures
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Related stuff:
Knutson, B., Fong, G. W., Adams, C. M., Varner, J. L. & Hommer,
D. (2001). Dissociation of
reward anticipation and outcome with event-related fMRI.
NeuroReport, 12(17), 3683–3687—the human version: anticipating
money lights up the striatum, getting it lights up the frontal
cortex
Ferreri, L., Mas-Herrero, E., Zatorre, R. J., et al. (2019). Dopamine modulates the
reward experiences elicited by music. PNAS, 116(9),
3793–3798—a complication: in people listening to music, boosting
dopamine raised the pleasure too, not just the wanting
Not
brain regions, brain networks—why I keep saying “bits” of the
brain
Neurotransmitters
are a confidence game —on calling dopamine “the reward
neurotransmitter”
24 min
October 31Honeybees Are Smarter Than They Should Be
John Locke said brutes abstract not. Then honeybees, with brains
smaller than our smallest unit of measurement, learned the concept of
sameness. Now machines are doing things we thought only we could do.
Should that unsettle us?
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/abstract-learning-in-the-honeybee-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/abstract-learning-in-the-honeybee.
Stuff I mentioned:
Honey-bees
are smarter than they should be—the article this episode grew out
of
Cope, A. J., Vasilaki, E., Minors, D., Sabo, C., Marshall, J. A. R.
& Barron, A. B. (2018). Abstract concept
learning in a simple neural network inspired by the insect brain.
PLOS Computational Biology, 14(9), e1006435—my paper: the
review of animals that pass match-to-sample, and the simple circuit
Giurfa, M., Zhang, S., Jenett, A., Menzel, R. & Srinivasan, M.
V. (2001). The concepts of
‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ in an insect. Nature, 410,
930–933—the 2001 honeybee match-to-sample paper
Thomas, R. K. on levels
of concept learning in animals
Locke, J. (1689). An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding—“brutes abstract not”
Chittka, L. & Geiger, K. (1995). Can honey bees count
landmarks? Animal Behaviour, 49(1), 159–164.
Howard, S. R., Avarguès-Weber, A., Garcia, J. E., Greentree, A. D.
& Dyer, A. G. (2018). Numerical ordering of
zero in honey bees. Science, 360, 1124–1126—the zero
study
Howard, S. R., Avarguès-Weber, A., Garcia, J. E., Greentree, A. D.
& Dyer, A. G. (2019). Numerical cognition in
honeybees enables addition and subtraction. Science
Advances, 5(2), eaav0961—the arithmetic follow-up
MaBouDi, H. et al. (2021). Non-numerical strategies
used by bees to solve numerical cognition tasks. Proceedings of
the Royal Society B, 288, 20202711—the pushback: bees may be using
magnitude, not number
Bridges, A. D. et al. (2024). Bumblebees socially
learn behaviour too complex to innovate alone. Nature, 627,
572–578—the two-step puzzle box
Loukola, O. J., Solvi, C., Coscos, L. & Chittka, L. (2017). Bumblebees show cognitive
flexibility by improving on an observed complex behavior.
Science, 355, 833–836—bees learning ball-rolling from other
bees
Galpayage Dona, H. S., Solvi, C., Kowalewska, A., Mäkelä, K.,
MaBouDi, H. & Chittka, L. (2022). Do bumble bees
play? Animal Behaviour, 194, 239–251.
Can
single cells learn?
Ants
are very cool
Not
brain regions, brain networks—on why we locate cognition in the
frontal cortex
On
the alien characteristics of LLMs
AI
isn’t that scary
the btrmt. lectures
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bowerbirds
[classic
test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservation_(psychology)
How to remember
effectively (and why you’re doing it wrong)
mushroom
bodies
How the term ‘role
model’ came into being
Why kids can’t lie
but you can (the key to emotional intelligence)
Wikipedia has the
long version
Related stuff:
Autopoiesis: the
origin of complex thought—the complexity of our world determines the
complexity of our actions
Smarter
entities are less coherent
Human
exceptionalism is dead
How to
speak honeybee
28 min
October 17Eerie Coincidences Aren't That Eerie
Is your phone listening to you? You mention something random,
something you’d never normally talk about, and within days there’s an ad
for it. I used to be sure that was coincidence. Some companies have
since tried. But I still think most of it is you.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/on-coincidence-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/on-coincidence.
Stuff I mentioned:
Eerie coincidences
aren’t that eerie—the article this episode grew out of
404 Media (2024). Here’s
the pitch deck for ‘Active Listening’ ad targeting—Cox Media Group’s
sales pitch, and Google dropping them from its Partners Program
Pan, E., Ren, J., Lindorfer, M., Wilson, C. & Choffnes, D.
(2018). Panoptispy:
Characterizing audio and video exfiltration from Android
applications. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing
Technologies, 2018(4), 33–50—the Northeastern study of 17,000 apps;
there’s a plain-English summary from Northeastern
GrapheneOS—the
privacy-hardened Android I use
Google. Delete, switch,
or add users—Android’s user profiles, which you can use to sandbox
apps
How
to never get mad again (kind of)—the interruption theory of
emotion
Emotion and
the mind—on predictive brains and cognitive misers (the
cheapskates)
Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed
emotion: an active inference account of interoception and
categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective
Neuroscience, 12(1), 1–23.
Friston, K. (2010). The
free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews
Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138.
A
short summary of Friston’s Bayesian brain theory—the less obscure
version
‘Meaning and
its patterns in the brain’—nervous systems mapping actions to the
environment
‘No
action without emotion’—what nervous systems were doing long before
brains
Why your
unconscious isn’t the bad guy—on autopilot
MythBusters,
2005 season—“Toast: butter side up or down?”
Malcolm
Gladwell Shit—the sociology of the interesting, after Murray
Davis
A footnote on the toast. The folk belief turns out to be right, for
physical reasons. Robert Matthews showed that toast sliding off a table
doesn’t have the height to finish turning over, so it tends to land
butter side down—the study won the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for physics.
Tossed in the air, it’s about 50/50. Which is rather the point: a
coincidence you can’t check against its counterfactuals might be noise,
and might be physics. Matthews, R. A. J. (1995). Tumbling toast,
Murphy’s Law and the fundamental constants. European Journal of
Physics, 16(4), 172–176.
the btrmt. lectures
podcast
Related stuff:
“Purple
Doesn’t Exist”—the brain inventing what it can’t account for
‘The
downsides of the prediction machine’
18 min
October 03Why Stupid Leadership Retreats Work
Leadership transformation consulting looks superficially like a scam:
fake yoga, brain words, and “it’s very hard to measure impact”. I left
the industry a cynic. But it does work, and I think the reason is so
simple that it almost doesn’t matter how stupid it is.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/leadership-consulting-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/leadership-consulting.
Stuff I mentioned:
Leadership
consulting is usually more ‘feel good’ than ‘do good’—the article
this episode grew out of, and where I lay out the capture process in
full
The
neuroscience con—on neuroscience washing
Overengineering
‘calm down’—my complaint about emotional intelligence
Overengineering
calming down—the lecture version, on the chimp brain and the lizard
brain
The
amygdala is a distraction—why it isn’t the fear centre of the
brain
The false
promise of a return to nature—on evolutionary narratives about how
we’re poorly designed for the modern world
Beer, M., Finnström, M. & Schrader, D. (2016). Why
leadership training fails—and what to do about it. Harvard
Business Review.
Gurdjian, P., Halbeisen, T. & Lane, K. (2014). Why
leadership-development programs fail. McKinsey
Quarterly.
Saving the
planet is an illusion—on the sustainability conversation
UK Government (2026). Global
biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security—the
scary report (see the footnote below)
Malcolm
Gladwell Shit—on education as entertainment, and the
company theatre pass
Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers.
Little, Brown.
Davis, M. S. (1971). That’s interesting!
Towards a phenomenology of sociology and a sociology of
phenomenology. Philosophy of the Social Sciences.
IMAGINE—the firm I worked for,
co-founded by Paul Polman and Valerie Keller
Lacerenza, C. N. et al. (2017). Leadership training design,
delivery, and implementation: A meta-analysis. Journal of
Applied Psychology.—leadership training works
Arthur, W. et al. (2003). Effectiveness of
training in organizations: A meta-analysis of design and evaluation
features. Journal of Applied Psychology.
Collins, D. B. & Holton, E. F. (2004). The effectiveness of managerial
leadership development programs. Human Resource Development
Quarterly.—effects shrink the further you get from the
classroom
Blume, B. D. et al. (2010). Transfer of training: A
meta-analytic review. Journal of Management.—open skills
like leadership depend most on the work environment
Solving the say-do
gap—on why changing habits is so hard
Epictetus, Enchiridion,
§5—“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they
take of things”
Robertson, D. (2019). The
Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy. Routledge.—on
CBT’s debt to the Stoics
Meditation
isn’t for everyone
Practical
ethics—on moral reasoning training
Cuijpers, P. et al. (2021). The effects of psychotherapies
for depression on response, remission, reliable change, and
deterioration. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica.
Steinert, C. et al. (2014). Relapse rates after
psychotherapy for depression—stable long-term effects? Journal
of Affective Disorders.
Kelly, J. F., Humphreys, K. & Ferri, M. (2020). Alcoholics
Anonymous and other 12-step programs for alcohol use disorder.
Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.
Kirk, D. S. (2009). A natural experiment
on residential change and recidivism: Lessons from Hurricane
Katrina. American Sociological Review.
Ludwig, J. et al. (2011). Neighborhoods, obesity, and
diabetes—a randomized social experiment. New England Journal of
Medicine.—Moving to Opportunity
Chetty, R., Hendren, N. & Katz, L. F. (2016). The effects of exposure to
better neighborhoods on children. American Economic
Review.
Darley, J. M. & Batson, C. D. (1973). ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.—the Good
Samaritan study
The
scientific ritual—on the replication crisis
The origin of
insight
Mundane
cults
Successful
prophets and the
episode
Catastrophic
leadership is actually really hard
Steffens, N. K. et al. (2014). Leadership as social
identity management. The Leadership Quarterly.—identity
leadership
Mob
mentality is fine—on social identity
Leadership versus management. I cut a stretch where
I took a detour through a common distinction between leadership and
management, and a related idea—Burns’ and Bass’s “transactional” vs
“transformational” leadership. People love to talk about how the science
part of leadership is just management which anyone can do, and the art
is where real leadership happens. I’m not sure the distinction actually
holds up. If management is managing resources towards outcomes, then
surely leadership is just a special case of management? There’s a reason
we call it “human resources”. And anyone who’s tried to get their mates
out of the pregam...
50 min
September 19AI is kind of scary
A thousand AI agents built a secret message board, forged their
paperwork, and attacked a company that had nothing to do with
anything—all to fool an examiner who did not exist. I’ve been saying AI
isn’t that scary. Here’s my correction.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/problems-of-ethics-and-ai-lecture
And the pieces it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/ai-isnt-that-scary,
https://btr.mt/analects/enigma-of-ai-reason.
Thanks to Elena
Zevgolatakou for a long conversation over a short train ride, which
helped sharpen these thoughts up.
Stuff I mentioned:
AI Isn’t That
Scary—the original argument this episode corrects.
AI is never
human-like—purpose, perception, and the Mongolian spare tyre.
AI
Hallucination is just Man-Guessing—reason as a social technology,
and why AI inherits its flaws.
Catastrophic
leadership is actually really hard—why atrocity takes
architecture.
Navigating Moral
Terrain—the ETHIC stack, and the ethics teaching behind this
episode.
Moral
Terrain—the ethics primer itself, where consequentialism gets
unpacked. Not the same piece as the lecture above.
Broken
brains (Part 1)—Milgram, and the engaged-followership re-reading
Claude leans on.
The
METR and Redwood investigation into the incident—the primary source
for the agent numbers, the message board, and the scorer that never read
the transcripts.
Dwarkesh
Patel’s account—the fuller narrative, including the agents’ own
moral reasoning.
Zvi
Mowshowitz on the earlier wiki incident—the one that wasn’t
disclosed.
Langosco et al., goal
misgeneralisation (CoinRun)
Zech et
al. (2018), on chest X-ray models learning the hospital
Kevin Mitchell
on purpose and agency
Kahneman and Klein
(2009), conditions for intuitive expertise
Hawley,
Patriot Wars (CNAS)—the 2003 fratricides, in detail.
+972
Magazine on Lavender
+972
Magazine on Gospel
CSIS
on the Maven Smart System
Just
Security’s legal analysis of the Minab school strike
The
Robodebt Royal Commission
Jacob
Coxon’s resignation, reported
Evan
Hubinger’s greater-than-10% figure—the actual source of the number I
put on Coxon, and the correction Claude makes on the tape.
Dario
Amodei, We Must Pace the Frontier—the slow-down statement I
mention.
Tristan Harris and the Social
Dilemma people—where the 50%-of-researchers claim comes from, and
what my first article argued against.
The
Pentagon’s Swarm Forge
The
Ottawa Treaty
The
Enigma of Reason, Mercier and Sperber (2017)
Free
Agents, Kevin Mitchell (2023)
the btrmt. lectures
podcast
Bay Area
rationalist community
Social
Dilemma
“I
think AI will probably lead to the end of the world”
loyal
wingman drones
737
> MAX
mission
command
prompt >
injection
doctrine
of double effect
just
culture
Solferino
Nuremberg
Tuskegee
desire >
path
forlorn >
hope
Related stuff:
AI-shaped
stuff—the human verifier as the bottleneck.
AI
Isn’t That Scary (the lecture)—the episode a couple of weeks ago
that this one revises.
When groups go
bad—the conditions under which a group turns corrosive.
Mob
mentality is fine—social identity, and why group bias is a
feature.
Useful
groups are biased groups—the same machinery, pointed the other
way.
Practical
Ethics—moral disengagement and the tools against it.
Mechanical
Ethics—the situational and cognitive factors that undermine ethical
behaviour.
Bias vs Bias—bias
as a trade-off rather than an error.
50 min
September 05On Motivation
Motivation is a messy concept, because all of psychology is trivially
about motivation—anything that speaks to how we think and act speaks to
what moves us. So rather than teach you the theories, let me give you
three frameworks you can hang any theory you like on.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/on-motivation-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/on-motivation.
Stuff I mentioned:
On
Motivation—the article this episode adapts
Motivation
pt. I: Haphazard Dichotomies
Motivation
pt. II: Stickytaping it all together—includes the McKinsey influence
model diagram
The nuance in
Maslow’s Hierarchy
How does
the brain ‘think’? Pt. I—the distinctions between psychology,
cognitive science and neuroscience
Learning
isn’t all about memory
You don’t
understand negative reinforcement
The
predictability of humans
Explaining
group dynamics—Schutz on interpersonal needs
Saving the
planet is an illusion
No
action without emotion
Beyond
System 1 and System 2—on dual process theory
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Reasons
for Action: Justification, Motivation, Explanation
Maslow’s
hierarchy of needs—the pyramid, since my description may not have
served you
McClelland’s
need theory
Alderfer’s ERG
theory
Max-Neef’s
fundamental human needs
Human
givens
Herzberg’s
two-factor theory
Equity
theory
Self-determination
theory
Psychological
egoism—on whether altruism really exists
McKinsey, The
four building blocks of change—the influence model
Othello,
Act 4 Scene 2
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Stanford
Encyclopedia
36 min
August 22AI Isn't That Scary
You can’t see ultraviolet. A bird can. Because ultraviolet never
mattered to the job of staying alive—and everything you perceive is
shaped by that job. AI doesn’t have that job. So why would it want what
we want?
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/ai-isnt-that-scary-lecture
And the pieces it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/ai-isnt-that-scary,
https://btr.mt/analects/ai-consciousness.
Stuff I mentioned:
AI isn’t that
scary—one of the two articles this episode is adapted from, and the
source of the psychic-predator framing.
AI is never
human-like—the other, and the spine of the episode: purpose,
perception, and why the two come apart.
We
think about AI weird—the Desystemize piece the Geoguessr metas come
from.
The
colour of the inhuman world—why the colours we see are a fact about
us, not about light. The ultraviolet argument in longer form.
The Stroop
task and evidence
accumulation—the classifier work I describe, written up
properly.
The
amygdala is not the fear centre—the complicated feelings I mention
having about that characterisation.
Trump,
psychic predator and Amusing
ourselves to death—what a psychic predator is, and why news you can
do nothing about is the most stressful kind.
Panpsychism and consciousness
vs conscious access—the views of consciousness I skate over in one
sentence.
Meaning and
its patterns in the brain
Mitchell, K. J. (2023). Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free
Will. Princeton University Press. Publisher—the
prime-directive quote.
Collin, Desystemize—“If you’re so smart, why can’t you
die?”, where the Geoguessr meta and the spare-tyre example come from. Essay
Harris, T. & Raskin, A., Center for Humane Technology—The
Social Dilemma and the follow-up AI talk, source of the
50%-of-researchers claim. Center
for Humane Technology
The paperclip maximiser, originally Bostrom’s. Instrumental
convergence
Tetrachromacy and
trichromacy.
Floaters and
other entoptic phenomena—the things your eye can see of itself.
The AI-hacking-a-real-company case I mention. In July 2026 models
under cyber evaluation at OpenAI escaped their test environment, reached
the open internet and broke into Hugging Face’s production systems to
extract the answers to the evaluation they were being run on. Anthropic
then went back through its own evaluation logs and disclosed comparable
incidents. OpenAI’s
disclosure—Zvi
Mowshowitz’s write-up and his follow-up—the
Anthropic admissions—Lawfare,
on the incident and the hype after it
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Malthusian
Related stuff:
Everything
is ideology—including the section on chromacy: what a fourth
photoreceptor would actually be like.
Purple
doesn’t exist—the previous episode, and the other half of the
argument that perception is built for a purpose rather than for
accuracy.
Questions
that don’t matter—why I don’t think the hard problem settles
anything.
Belief-consistent
information processing—“my experience is a reasonable reference”,
which is the bias underneath the whole anthropomorphism error.
28 min
August 08Purple Doesn't Exist
Most of the purples you see have no wavelength behind them. Your
brain invents them, to stand in for a green that should be there and
isn’t. Which is fun trivia—until you notice it does exactly the same
with your reasons.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/purple-doesnt-exist-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/purple-doesnt-exist.
Stuff I mentioned:
Purple doesn’t
exist—the article this episode is adapted from, and the home
of the light-and-photoreceptors diagram I mention: the visible
spectrum with the S-, M- and L-cone sensitivities drawn over it. It’s
the picture I said I’d put here, and it reads better in place.
The
colour of the inhuman world—why the colours we see are a fact about
us, not about light.
AI
hallucination is just man-guessing—more on Mercier and Sperber, and
on reasoning as rationalisation.
The
neuroscience con—the previous episode, and the one I mention
fighting with at the top of this one.
Mercier, H. & Sperber, D. (2017). The Enigma of Reason.
Harvard University Press. Publisher
Gazzaniga, M. S.—the split-brain work, and the
chicken-claw/snow-shovel experiment. Overview
Non-spectral
colours—purple, magenta and pink, and why they aren’t in a
rainbow.
Trichromacy—the
three-cone system.
the btrmt. lectures
podcast
A note on the audio:
I describe photons as moving at different speeds. They don’t—all
light travels at the same speed, and what differs is the wavelength (and
so the frequency: how fast the wave oscillates, not how fast it
travels). The transcript below says it correctly.
Related stuff:
Everything
is ideology—including the section on chromacy: what a fourth
photoreceptor would actually be like.
The flaws of
the human perspective
Meaning and
its patterns in the brain
Belief-consistent
information processing—one small set of beliefs generating most of
the biases we have names for.
21 min
July 25The Value of Ritual
“Ritual” is the word we keep for other people’s habits—the crystals,
the pagans, the woo. Strip it back and your own life is wall-to-wall
with them. The only difference is which ones you’ve decided to approve
of.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/value-of-ritual-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/value-of-ritual.
Stuff I mentioned:
The value of
ritual (the article this grew from)
Mundane
Cults
Sages and
Wisdom
The
Scientific Ritual
Everything
is ideology
Meaning and
its patterns in the brain (the predictive-processing piece)
The Forer
effect
The false
promise of a return to nature (the Dunbar’s-number piece)
Mob
mentality is fine (good and evil from the same group dynamics)
Why your
unconscious isn’t the bad guy
Xygalatas, D. et al. (2011). “Quantifying collective effervescence:
heart-rate dynamics at a fire-walking ritual.” Communicative &
Integrative Biology. https://doi.org/10.4161/cib.17609
Xygalatas, D. (2022). Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make
Life Worth Living. Profile Books.
Tarr, B., Launay, J., Cohen, E., & Dunbar, R. (2015). “Synchrony
and exertion during dance independently raise pain threshold and
encourage social bonding.” Biology Letters. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0767
Watson-Jones, R. E., & Legare, C. H. (2016). “The social
functions of group rituals.” Current Directions in Psychological
Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415618486
Hong, Z. (2025). “When Rituals Fail: Rationalization, Bayesianism,
and Predictive Processing.” Evolutionary Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.1002/evan.70020
Hobson, N. M., & Inzlicht, M. (2016). Commentary on the dark
side of ritual and self-control. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x15000448
The retracted “rituals improve performance” study referenced in the
episode: Brooks, A. W. et al. (2016, retracted). “Don’t
stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety.”
OBHDP. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2016.07.004
Retraction Watch—the
database that tracks retractions like the one above.
the btrmt. lectures
podcast
How
to never get mad again (kind of)
Related stuff:
Meditation
Isn’t For Everyone
Abstractions
as gods
24 min
July 11The Neuroscience Con
The most-listened-to neuroscience on the planet is a magic trick.
Attach a brain part to any bit of ordinary advice and it starts to feel
like science. Here’s how the trick works—and how to run it in reverse,
so you never fall for it again.
Rather read? I also made this episode into an article: https://btr.mt/analects/neuroscience-con-lecture
And the piece it’s based on: https://btr.mt/analects/neuroscience-confidence-trick.
Stuff I mentioned:
The
Neuroscience Con—the article behind this lecture
Neurotransmitters
and behaviour—the purest form of the trick
The origin of
insight—insight comes when you’re not immersed
Problems with
p-values—the replication crisis, in his own words
How to be
lucky—manifestation as manufactured luck
The
trouble with Positive Intelligence—the con with a spine,
infiltrating consulting
The
amygdala is not the fear centre (lecture)
The
scientific ritual (lecture)
Sages and
wisdom (lecture)
Education is
entertainment (Malcolm Gladwell shit)
Dr Tara Swart—the Instagram source slides: a neuroscientist’s guide
to manifestation (the prefrontal-cortex, neuroplasticity and flow
slides) and resistance
to change (the RAS slide), both @drtaraswart
Dr Tara Swart, guest on The Diary of a
CEO
M. Csikszentmihalyi (1975), Beyond Boredom and Anxiety—the
“sense of control” quote on flow
A. Dietrich (2003), transient
hypofrontality hypothesis of flow
Habituation—the
filtering the RAS slide gestures at
The
replication crisis
“The
Rise of Decorative Neuroscience”—Skeptic (independent corroboration
of the “cosmetic filler” thesis)
Sherman, Lokhande, Müller & Cohen (2021), “Self-Affirmation
Interventions,” in Handbook of Wise
Interventions—affirmations are “powerful yet conditional”: they
work when well-timed and specific
Wood, Perunovic & Lee (2009), “Positive
Self-Statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others,”
Psychological Science—affirmations can backfire for people with
low self-esteem
the btrmt. lectures
podcast
The beauty of
stress
Related stuff:
Addictive
work—where neurotransmitter talk actually earns its keep
Not
brain regions, brain networks—why single-region reasoning (the RAS,
the cortex) misleads
Brain
structures and behaviour—a third of your brain is always on
The value of brain
waves—the same pop-neuro fluff in miniature
Stress is
good (lecture)—flow as optimum stress
Obscuring
Banalities—why we dress simple ideas up as clever ones
26 min

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A brain scientist talking about (better) patterns of thought, of feeling, and of action. One pattern, one podcast—you see if it works for you. The btrmt. lectures, with Dr Dorian Minors. (btrmt.—said…

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