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What if some inner-city leftist activists are neurologically broken, deluded like an AI trained on AI material?

Image by gugacurado from Pixabay

By Jo Nova

We now know that when AI is trained on AI generated content, its output degrades. The more artificial the training material is, the more it hallucinates and becomes delusional. But humans are a sort of large-language-model and we are running that same experiment on us. We are gradually raising children on more and more artificial content and less real experience. There are adult children who have never grown and harvested a single piece of food, who live online, watch anime, and know that electricity comes from wall sockets, and food comes from Coles. We thought they were just detached from reality, but what it it’s something much deeper? What if AI shows us a universal truth of a neurological network?

This is the thesis of The Copernican: Urban Bugmen and AI Model Collapse: A Unified Theory

Model collapse is a serious limit to AI systems; a failure mode that occurs when AI is trained on AI-generated data…

In reviewing model collapse, the symptoms bear a striking resemblance to certain non-digital cultural failings. Neural networks collapse, hallucinate, and become delusional when trained only on data produced by […]

November 27th, 2025 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming, Health, Social Media | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Is lithium the missing essential nutrient for brains that could prevent Alzheimers?

Top row: In a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease, lithium deficiency (right) dramatically increased amyloid beta deposits in the brain compared with mice that had normal physiological levels of lithium (left). Bottom row: The same was true for the Alzheimer’s neurofibrillary tangle protein tau. Images: Yankner Lab

By Jo Nova

Lithia Springs 1888 poster

A bit of a blockbuster… Wow. A major new study this month suggests for the first time, finally, what might be a causal link between a deficiency in lithium and Alzheimer’s. The team at Harvard asks: Could Lithium Explain — and Treat — Alzheimer’s Disease?

A few weeks ago, they released a big paper in Nature. They had analyzed brain tissue from people who had died, and found that lithium levels declined dramatically in people with mild cognitive decline, in other words, in the earliest stages, before Alzheimer’s was diagnosed. When they deprived mice of lithium, the mice showed accelerated brain pathology and their memory declined. But when they fed deprived mice lithium, they were able to restore their memory. It’s quite remarkable. There is hope.

We’ve known for years lithium might be essential

For a century or more there have […]

August 28th, 2025 | Tags: , , , , , | Category: Diet, Health, Vitamins | Print This Post Print This Post | |

First invertebrate astronomers found? Australian Bogong moths use stars to navigate 1,000 kilometer trip

Bogong moths resting in caves in the Snowy Mountains. Photo by Eric Warrant. The Conversation.

By Jo Nova

First insects to use the stars to navigate?

Flight paths of Bobong moths. | The Conversation.

Each year thousands of Bogong moths hatch all over Eastern Australia. Somehow they fly 1,000 kilometers to caves in the Snowy Mountains that they have never seen. Once inside, they hang around and do an insect form of hibernation in the cool Alpine caves through the heat of summer. When autumn comes, they fly 1,000 kilometers back to where they came from so they can breed, and keel over. Next year their children make the exact same trip.

Researchers managed to catch some moths and put them in flight simulators (for real) where Earths magnetic field was neutralized, so they could figure out if the moths could navigate without it. Somehow they “tethered” the moths, and showed them night sky and lo’, behold, the moths still tried to fly in the right direction. When the sky was flipped, the moths reversed course, and when the stars were randomized, the moths were confused.

Ponder that the stars revolve through the night, […]

June 20th, 2025 | Tags: , , , | Category: Astronomy, Biology, Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

One in six dementia cases might be avoided with Vitamin D

Click to enlarge | Paper

Just imagine that 17% of dementia cases could be prevented with a new drug that cost five cents, had a huge safety margin, and virtually no risk?

The study from the University of South Australia looked at data from 294,000 people in their 60s in the UK, and followed them for a median of 11 years or so. Researchers even controlled for time spent outdoors, types of physical activity, and the amount of oily fish they ate to try to cover for other benefits from these activities.

Seems to me, that if Ministers of Health were interested in actual health, they might be offering free Vitamin D tests, free supplement bottles, lessons in school and public awareness programs. They might even offer testing clinics in shopping centre car parks or free bottles at the RSL and Bowls clubs. Crazy idea right? In the world you thought you were living in, the treasurer might be chasing them down to forecast savings on public health spending ten years from now by keeping 1 in 6 out of nursing homes. Instead our Departments of Health are apparently keen to approve patented drugs with few clinical benefits […]

June 15th, 2022 | Tags: , , , | Category: Health, Vitamins | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Covid Brain Fog: the survivors who forget whole holidays, can’t recognise their own car

Normal CT Scan

We really need to know “how many”.

The NY Times tells the story of some Covid survivors who are forgetting entire holidays that were taken weeks before they got ill. They stare at photos and recall nothing… One 31 year old woman suffers from “white static” moments where she is so disoriented she washed the TV Remote, couldn’t remember who she was, or where she was.

This happens in other viral diseases too, as sufferers with chronic fatigue, ME, and ongoing inflammation will tell you. But the scale of it appears to be something unique. Months later some of these people are have given up their jobs.

‘I Feel Like I Have Dementia’: Brain Fog Plagues Covid Survivors

Pam Belluck, New York Times

After contracting the coronavirus in March, Michael Reagan lost all memory of his 12-day vacation in Paris, even though the trip was just a few weeks earlier.

Several weeks after Erica Taylor recovered from her Covid-19 symptoms of nausea and cough, she became confused and forgetful, failing to even recognize her own car, the only Toyota Prius in her apartment complex’s parking lot.

https://www.scientificanimations.com

October 14th, 2020 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming, Health | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Older adults can still improve memory with high intensity exercise

Image profvideos

Just 4 sets of four-minute-long bursts of intense exercise was all it took for sedentary people aged 60 -88 to get an improvement in memory scores of up to 30%.

They worked out three times a week for 3 months, and the short sharp sets were better than 50 minutes of moderate exercise. Five hundred million years of evolution will do that — hone organisms to adapt to common stressors. And even if don’t need to outrun lions very often now, we still carry the genes that did.

This won’t surprise people who’ve been reading medical research papers. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) appears to be good for fat loss, anxiety, depression, improves blood vessel function, may slow Parkinsons, and colon cancer, is quicker, can restore glucose uptake in diabetic muscles in just two weeks.

Obviously the 30% memory boost mostly happens to people who start out sedentary. There may not be such spectacular gains for people who are already semi fit. But it only took 12 weeks.

Researchers at McMaster University who examine the impact of exercise on the brain have found that high-intensity workouts improve memory in older adults.

Researchers […]

November 4th, 2019 | Tags: , , | Category: Exercise, Global Warming, Health | Print This Post Print This Post | |

The Stem Cell revolution: growing brain cells to repair damage

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This week in stem cell news one research group announced they’d accidentally figured out a way to easily convert human bone-marrow stem cells into brain cells which could in future repair spinal or brain damage. Another group showed that if you happen to be a particular type of old mouse with memory problems, researchers can give you a transplant of stem cells that restore your learning and memoryand help you swim through water mazes faster. But seriously, these discoveries could help a lot of very needy people.

Meanwhile Australia, celebrated it’s one millionth roofing panel that provide expensive, irregular electricity.

Ladies and Gentlemen — there is a revolution going on, and it’s not the Green one. How much could $2 billion wasted dollars have achieved if it were spent wisely?

These two studies fit together quite well — the first shows it’s possible to use stem cells to restore brain function, the second suggests it might be easier to get the right stem cells than anyone thought.

Repairing damaged mouse brains

How’s this for odd, […]

April 27th, 2013 | Tags: , | Category: Health, Medicine, Stem Cells | Print This Post Print This Post | |