#preverbal-thought

#preverbal-thought

"I can look at an object in the world around me, but I can also close my eyes and imagine the object," says Varun Wadia, highlighting the dual capability of visual perception and imagination.

Computational linguistics is a two-way street: You're either using a computer to do things with human language or communicate or translate or teach a foreign language, or you're using computational techniques to learn something about human languages. Her work documenting and preserving endangered languages uses a little bit of both.

You know that sinking feeling when you realize you've been using a phrase that makes you sound less intelligent than you actually are? I had one of those moments a few years back during a pitch meeting for my startup. I was presenting to potential investors, and I kept saying "I think" before every point I made. "I think our user acquisition strategy will work."

The term "conspiracy theory" calls to mind a variety of dubious claims and controversies, like rumors about Area 51, claims that the Earth is flat, and the movement known as QAnon. At first blush, these phenomena would seem to have little in common with bogus word origins. But there are a variety of false etymologies that spread virally and refuse to go away, in much the same way that stories about chemtrails, black helicopters, and UFOs refuse to die.

Parents often hear the warning: "If your child doesn't learn a second language early, they'll never be fluent." Adults, meanwhile, are told: "It's just too late for you to learn now." These claims are familiar and tidy, but misleading. Are they actually true? Is it better to learn a second language as a child or as an adult? The short answer is that it depends on what we mean by "better."

Attention is the brain's filtering mechanism; what passes through that filter is what gets encoded. What gets encoded becomes memory. And memory is the raw material of identity. So in the architecture of your identity, attention is the doorway.

Studies show that people with high fluid intelligence can process multiple "what if" scenarios concurrently, helping them see ahead, identify concealed dangers, and plan their actions. This mode of thinking requires a lot of working memory because the brain isn't looping idly; it's stress-testing every single possibility that comes to mind. This might be why these people seem to be frequently lost in their thoughts, even when they're alone.

For the first time, speech has been decoupled from consequence. We now live alongside AI systems that converse knowledgeably and persuasively-deploying claims about the world, explanations, advice, encouragement, apologies, and promises-while bearing no vulnerability for what they say. Millions of people already rely on chatbots powered by large language models, and have integrated these synthetic interlocutors into their personal and professional lives. An LLM's words shape our beliefs, decisions, and actions, yet no speaker stands behind them.

For Plato, psyche meant something like what we'd now call mind -understood as a complex system requiring governance. The psyche had distinct parts: a reasoning part that deliberates, a spirited part that feels emotion and courage, and an appetitive part that desires. Each part has its own function and its own form of excellence. And crucially, these parts need to be governed-integrated under what Plato called constitutional self-rule.

Neuroscientists have a name for the brain network that fires up when you're not focused on an external task: the default mode network, or DMN. It's the constellation of regions - the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus among them - that hums to life when you daydream, reflect on yourself, or think about other people's mental states.

By comparing how AI models and humans map these words to numerical percentages, we uncovered significant gaps between humans and large language models. While the models do tend to agree with humans on extremes like 'impossible,' they diverge sharply on hedge words like 'maybe.' For example, a model might use the word 'likely' to represent an 80% probability, while a human reader assumes it means closer to 65%.

I am a worrier, and have been for most of my life. At some point, someone dear and smart teased me that I worry about the wrong things. The things that hit me, she noted, were never the things I worried about. For a while that left me feeling like an incompetent worrier-until my research caught up. I realized that the things I worry about often don't end up hurting me precisely because worrying helps me diffuse them ahead of time.