r/cogsci

A new study from Wharton researchers highlights a troubling psychological phenomenon called "cognitive surrender." When 1,372 subjects were given a cognitive reflection test alongside an AI chatbot, they accepted the AI's incorrect answers 80% of the time. Even worse, subjects who used the AI rated their confidence 11.7% higher than those who didn't, even when their answers were completely wrong.

It is extremely important that this video is shared. We still have time! Look at the published dates on youtube.

Hey everyone. Going through the hardest time in my life right now. Chronic stress and hormonal issues, lack of sleep and cognitive overload pushed me into burnout in December. I have not had many physical symptoms, but mostly severe brain fog for 4 months, only noticing slight improvement in the last month. Did several tests, been to doctors, tried supplements, diet (less sugar and carbs, no alcohol, no smoking, caffeine 2x a week), exercise (light)...

Before: perfectionist, overachiever, always gave 150%, open-minded, quick to learn and understand complex topics, top of class all my life, creative, funny, able to adapt to any situation... Spoke 3-4 languages fluently, read books, did free courses, drove, worked and studied.

Right now: battling sever fog most days (hard to recall things or need a lot of time, hard to have conversations since my mind feels blank, forgetting words, memory issues, focus issues, processing speed is slow, hardly remember things I just did or wanted to do, pressure in my forehead, wake up at night, fatigue and fog most day and a bit clearer head in the evening when my mind races and wont let me sleep...).

I feel negative thoughts and emotions deeply, but can't physically find joy or interest in things I used to love. For example, I received a notice of being selected for a grand award for my academic performance and diploma last year and felt over the moon, but not really "felt" happy. Like my body just would not react to positive things.

It's a rollercoaster right now. Some days feel 60%, then one or two feel 80-90% and then crash for 3 days and feel like I am back to square one.

I was taking dexamethasone for 2 days to test my cortisol and ACTHand those 2 days felt the best in the last 4 months. Like I was fully awake again, clear and driven. But then after stopping them, I crashed again.

This gives me a lot of anxiety since I was always in control, dependable, and observant. Now I can barely register the world around me; everything seems overwhelming, everybody seems smarter and better, I can't drive or work since it's hard to communicate or react fast. School is really hard. I can memorise things for an exam if I do active recall by writing it down, but if I have to repeat things out loud its a huge struggle. My mind just cant organize thoughts. I see in my head what I want to say, but it turns to gibberish, and I just can't word it properly. I am wired but tired, can't seem to calm down or relax, listen to music or watch a movie.

Labs: bad cortisol suppression, elevated testosterone and androgens, PCOS (PMS problems, hirsuitism, mood swings, acne, weight), insulin resistance, ACTH and DHEA (grey zone and no dynamic). I have never experienced these symptoms before. Doing more testing for cortisol. Vitamin D and iron were on the lower end of the range, so I started supplementing.

Currently taking: metformin (extended release), B12, Vitamin D+K, Omega 3, Magnesium, iron, multivitamins, occasional creatine and electrolytes

Anyone who had the same thing going on and was able to come out of it? Get back to normal?

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, alongside other phenomenologists, invokes the idea of intentionality as a core aspect of consciousness. His distinctive contribution is the idea of motor intentionality, and the distinction between the "habit body" (what we do as a function of pre-reflective, skilled and automatized engagement with the world) and the "present body" (adaptive and present to new situations). A unique way to view these ideas is through the lens of jazz, and jazz improvisation.

In this 2.5 hour meetup, we will watch together Chasing Trane, a retrospective on the life and work of legendary jazz saxophonist, John Coltrane.

In the remaining time, we will discuss the film alongside the following paper (please read this in advance): The Spur of the Moment: What Jazz Improvisation Tells Cognitive Science

https://preview.redd.it/otdgan5xrytg1.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2c281691c9d64ff3dd1a60ab62aa3acc2692b5c9

This is an online discussion hosted by Cece to discuss the theme of "Jazz, Embodiment, and Temporality" through phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty.

To join this meetup taking place on Sunday April 12 (EDT), please sign up in advance on the main event page here (link); the Zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Look for other sessions in this series on our calendar (link).

All are welcome!

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About the Series:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is a key figure in phenomenology, and is considered one of the most influential philosophers of perception, embodiment, and lived experience.

In The World of Perception, Merleau-Ponty expounds upon at least two core premises. First, while not denying the utility of the scientific method, he posits that there is more to understand and appreciate about life that is not easily pinned down by science. Second, he draws contrasts between what he refers to as "the classical world", which for him communicates a perfect and final view of things, and "the modern world", which is messy, unfinished, and disquieting, yet ultimately more consistent with the ambiguity of life as it is. One of his vehicles for illustrating these two core premises is the arts. In fact, he admonishes us that we might "rehabilitate our perception" through considering the differences between classical art and contemporary art.

In this meetup series, we will take up Merleau-Ponty's invitation to understand perception - and life as it is lived - through contemporary arts. Each session has an assigned reading, and then we will watch a film related to the arts and then discuss the film - and the art medium - with respect to the article and Merleau-Ponty's ideas (and related phenomenologists).

If you are new to Merleau-Ponty, you can find The World of Perception here. It is a very accessible series of public lectures transcribed into a book. You may find this useful background reading for this series.

I am an independent researcher, and after exploration and self-experimentation, I arrived at a simple observation: many methods used in affective research may prevent the states they try to measure.

This is the measurement paradox.

High-intensity positive states often emerge when evaluation and monitoring drop. But standard tools, self-reports, questionnaires, prompts, reintroduce evaluation.

So the act of measuring injects the very process that blocks the state.

This creates a structural mismatch:

• the method requires evaluation
• the state requires its absence

As a result, these states appear rare, weak, or unreliable, not necessarily because they are, but because they are measured under conditions that suppress them.

The implication is direct:

To observe some affective states, you must not try to observe them.

What are your thoughts about it?

The standard neuroscientific account of cognitive deterioration in solitary confinement attributes the damage to sensory deprivation: reduced neural stimulation leads to cortical thinning, executive function decline, and identity fragmentation. But: this framing treats the brain as a stimulus-processing machine that degrades without input. There's an alternative structural hypothesis: what degrades in isolation is consciousness-as-relational-process. The infant's conscious experience is organized through the mother's embodied activity before the infant has independent experiential resources: consciousness is structurally relational before it is individual. If the relational substrate is foundational, solitary confinement severs the ontological ground of cognition. This predicts specific patterns: the deterioration should be qualitatively different from sensory deprivation in non-social contexts, relational contact (even minimal) should disproportionately mitigate the damage compared to equivalent non-social sensory input, and the sequence of collapse should move from higher relational functions downward rather than uniformly across cognitive domains. The question is empirically testable and the answer has implications beyond prison policy.

Every phenomenological description of conscious experience includes asymmetry: this face rather than that one, this sound rather than the background, this taste rather than another. The word "rather than" introduces a structural feature (selectivity) that operates before discursive or conceptual act. You don't first perceive a neutral field then choose what to attend to. The field arrives organized: foregrounded and backgrounded, oriented and peripheral, salient and recessive. A positivism committed to explicating the given can't stop before reaching the question of what organizes givenness into this-rather-than-that. If it stops, it has identified a brute feature that resists its method: a choice to stop explicating, not a discovery that there is nothing further to explicate. This has implications for cognitive science: if selectivity is a structural feature of consciousness and not a post-hoc cognitive operation, then attention models that treat selection as a computational process applied to neutral input have the architecture backwards. Selection doesn't process experience: selection is what makes experience experiential, not just informational.

Surprisingly, sharing raw data when producing publications and books was not a standard when seminal studies on human reasoning were being released from the 1980s-2000's.

Wason - Foundational reasoning study - aggregated error rates and selected reasoning excerpts, but not complete datasets.

Kahneman & Tversky - Prospect theory, heuristics and biases- only summary statistics, not raw response data.

Hutchins - Cognition in the wild - recorded full reasoning chains for navigation teams across people, tools, and charts in real-time, full process- raw observational data was never released.

Modern day research like: Alpsbench '26, Twin 2k-500 '25, Personagym '24, H-ARC '24, try to bridge this, but each is insufficient in it's own way. Specifically when requiring explicit visibility on human reasoning especially in regards to deep thinking over time.

So I had to look towards fields where a reasoning chain must be provided, publically and transparently. The legal field in particular is ripe with this information; publicly available, structured format, over time, with mechanical attributes like precedent citation, known authorship, and most importantly, multiple judges reasoning through the same case differently.

very excited.

A thought worth considering: from the first-person perspective, apophenic pattern detection and valid pattern recognition produce identical phenomenological signatures.

 

The "aha" moment, the sense of obviousness in retrospect, the feeling of discovery rather than construction — these are present in both cases. There is no introspective access to whether the detected pattern is real or confabulated.

 

This has significant implications for any domain that relies on expert intuition — trading, diagnosis, strategic decision-making. The subjective certainty of the expert who has found a real pattern and the expert who has constructed a spurious one is functionally identical.

 

Research on random price data consistently shows human observers detecting chartist patterns (head and shoulders, double tops) at rates indistinguishable from their detection in real market data. Yet practitioners continue to trade on these formations with high conviction.

 

The evolutionary framing is fairly standard — asymmetric costs of type I vs type II errors in ancestral environments selected for a massively over-sensitive pattern detector. The modern cost is a system calibrated for a world of genuine threats now operating in an environment saturated with noise.

 

What I haven't seen adequately addressed in the literature: is there any training intervention that meaningfully improves the ability to distinguish signal from self-generated noise without degrading sensitivity to genuine patterns?