Ephaptic coupling inhibition implements Drosophila sweetness taste neuron dominance
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Insect brains do beta feature attention too pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Those single-neuron control studies involve a controlled sensory feedback loop (vision, touch, etc). I don't think single-neuron ghrelin feedback control is very feasible.

Possibly www.frontiersin.org/journals/mol...

If I can't parse it, then it's not parsimonious

The right paracingulate sulcus would be a prime suspect pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

I mangled the conclusion: millisecond predator vulnerability is a small price to pay for bilateral blinking.

Blink once if you are the VTA, three times if you are p32pr.

So why do both eyes blink at once? Probably because with single-eye blinking, the eyeblink signal can no longer be interpreted as an episode boundary. A small price to pay for millisecond predator vulnerability. @markolas.bsky.social

Another conjecture I will add: there exists a cingulate eye field (CEF) inside the area of midcingulate cortex associated with cognitive dissonance (p32pr in HCP). We all recognize eye flutter as confusion.

Another function of blinking seems to be to reset the retina to adjust to visual conditions, such as luminosity or blur. We have all unconsciously performed blinking to correct blurry vision. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Eyeblinks also momentarily disengage the dorsal attention network and activate the default mode network. This might be like 'autosave' for episodic memory. www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

A recent finding is that blinking correlates with VTA activation, the brain's central dopamine center. This may serve a kind of timestamping function in episodic memory. If the eyes are the window into the soul, blinking may be a window into the VTA. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

As early as 1945, it was observed that blinking during reading seemed to correspond to gaps in words on the page. We also blink on unfamiliar words. www.newscientist.com/article/2461...

Love the sparkplug metaphor for the weak language used for roles and telos

Platt seems downright suspicious of theory here

I think it is important to distinguish
1. theory - 'the dopamine theory of schizophrenia'
2. iteratively testing hypothesis spaces - 'antagonizing D2 should alleviate sch symptoms'
3. insight into hyp spaces - 'what if that's all downstream of NMDAR loss?'

Platt called for 2-3; 1-2 not so much.

The Big Five is just a lexical aggregation of *English personality adjectives* used in test questions. That is why it is circular, and language-dependent.

Four dimensions are just continuous versions of MBTI dims; Jung mapped neuroticism to "Shadow". McCrae & Acosta discussed this ~1990 IIRC.

I don't think hypothesis-driven neuroscience, nor the psych repl crisis, can be rescued by choosing btw "all swans are white", "swanness causes whiteness", or "if no swanness, then there would be no whiteness"

That aspirin reduces headache is a reliable large effect observation.
The causal theory of why aspirin does so is provisional, and subject to ceteris paribus caveats about unknown mediators awaiting discovery.
cornellsun.com/2015/10/20/b...