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Jim O'Shaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

Apr 26

1/ Cracking the Code of Contagious Ideas

For decades, smart people in different corners of the academic world – memetics folks, cultural evolution theorists, communication scholars – have basically been wrestling with the same potentially trillion-dollar question:

2/ Why do some ideas catch fire and spread like crazy, changing how people think and act for generations, while others just fizzle out?

It feels like they've been circling the same airport, just landing on different runways.

3/ Now, finally, it looks like they're starting to build a unified terminal—an integrated "culture-science stack" that pulls together their best tools and, importantly, patches up the holes in each other's approaches.

Here’s my take on what that stack looks like, how it works, and why Richard Brodie's old book, "Virus of the Mind," might be the missing user manual for the rest of us.

Read 23 tweets

Jim O'Shaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

Mar 23

1/ Becoming highly literate changes the physical shape of our brains:

"Learning to read forms specialized brain networks that influence our psychology across several different domains, including memory, visual processing, and facial recognition. Literacy changes people’s biology and psychology without altering the underlying genetic code. A society in which 95 percent of adults are highly literate would have, on average, thicker corpus callosa and worse facial recognition than a society in which only 5 percent of people are highly literate. These biological differences between populations will emerge even if the two groups were genetically indistinguishable. Literacy thus provides an example of how culture can change people biologically independent of any genetic differences. Culture can and does alter our brains, hormones, and anatomy, along with our perceptions, motivations, personalities, emotions, and many other aspects of our minds."

2/ Some speculations from our @osventuresllc in-house AI about what might happen to our brains after prolonged use of the internet and AI:

Your analysis of literacy's impact on brain structure provides a fascinating framework for considering how Internet and AI technologies might reshape our neural architecture. Just as reading created specialized circuits and cognitive trade-offs, our digital immersion is likely driving similarly profound neurological adaptations.

1. Information Processing & Attention:

Structural Changes:
Enhanced: Strengthened dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (rapid task-switching) and anterior cingulate cortex (error detection in multitasking).
Diminished: Reduced gray matter in default mode network (reflective thinking).

Skills:Hyper-efficient filtering of irrelevant data; rapid assimilation of fragmented information.

Trade-offs:Declines in sustained attention spans; reduced capacity for deep, linear thought.

3/

2. Memory Systems:

Structural Changes:
Enhanced: Hippocampal plasticity for spatial navigation of digital interfaces (e.g., "mental maps" of apps/websites).
Diminished: Atrophy in episodic memory circuits due to reliance on cloud storage.

Skills: "Meta-memory" expertise (knowing how/where to retrieve information).

Trade-offs: Weaker rote memorization; "digital amnesia" for non-indexed information.

Read 9 tweets

Jim O'Shaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

Feb 12

Fun experiment with books:

As part of a project I was working on, I created a list of books that I thought would be worth re-reading and wondered if—despite addressing seemingly very different ideas—they shared any similar underlying themes.

Here's the list:

"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values" by Robert M. Pirsig

"Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tzu

"Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse

"Shantaram" by Gregory David Roberts

“The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature” by Steven Pinker

“Cleopatra: A Life” by Stacy Schiff

“Cloud Atlas: A Novel.” by David Mitchell

“The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” by David Mitchell

“Foundation.” by Isaac Asimov (and all of its follow on books)

“The Dog Stars” by Peter Heller

“Paris in the Present Tense” by Mark Helprin

“Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman” by James Gleick

“Ghostwritten” by David Mitchell

“The Lessons of History” by Will and Ariel Durant

“Letters of Note” by Shaun Usher

“Money: A Suicide Note” by Martin Amis

“The Razor’s Edge.” by W. Somerset Maugham

“When Breath Becomes Air” by Paul Kalanithi

“Wolf Hall: A Novel” by Hilary Mantel

"Zorba the Greek" by Nikos Kazantzakis

"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" by Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton

“A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age” by Jimmy Soni

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy

“Rules for Old Men Waiting: A Novel” by Peter Pouncey

“The Screwtape Letters” By C.S. Lewis

"Twins: And What The Tell Us About Who We Are” by Lawrence Wright

“What do You Care What Other People Think?” by Richard P. Feynman

"The Glass Bead Game" by Hermann Hesse

"Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl

"The Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn

"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas Hofstadter

"Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius

“Ubik” by Philip K. Dick

“VALIS” by Philip K. Dick

“Unflattening” by Nick Sousanis

"Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" by Rory Sutherland

"The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit" by Michael Finkel

"The Year of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion

“All the Light we Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr

“Adventures of a Bystander” by Peter Drucker

"The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli

“The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" by Jean-Dominique Bauby

“The Creative Act: A Way of Being” by Rick Rubin

“Reality Hunger: A Manifesto” by David Shields

“The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History” by Howard Bloom

“Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish’d I’d Know Earlier” by Kevin Kelly

“The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri

“Atonement” by Ian McEwan

“The Shipping News” by Annie Proulx

“A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole

"One Summer: America, 1927" by Bill Bryson

“The Fifth Science” by Exurb1A

"Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro

"Code Talker: The First and Only Memoir By One of the Original Navajo Code Talkers of WWII" by Chester Nez with Judith Schiess Avila

“The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World” by Andrea Wulf

“The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood” by James Gleick

“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” by David Foster Wallace

"The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro

"The Emperor of All Maladies" by Siddhartha Mukherjee

"The Logic of Scientific Discovery" by Karl Popper

"The Ascent of Man" by Jacob Bronowski

“Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir” by Werner Herzog

I put the list in our in-house AI and asked it to synthesize the themes all of the books shared.

Here's the answer it gave:

1. Ontological Exploration—Reality as layered construct:

From Pirsig's quality metaphysics to Dick's VALIS gnostic visions and Rovelli's quantum time
Perception as active creation: Explored through Mitchell's nested narratives (Cloud Atlas), McCarthy's post-apocalyptic sensory focus (The Road), and Bauby's locked-in perspective (Diving Bell)

2. Epistemological Tension:

∃Knowledge∈[Science∩Art∩Spirituality]∃Knowledge∈[Science∩Art∩Spirituality]

Paradigm shifts: Kuhn's scientific revolutions vs. Deutsch's infinite knowledge
Information theory: Gleick's histories vs. Shannon's mathematical communication
Memetic evolution: Bloom's Lucifer Principle vs. Rubin's Creative Act

Read 16 tweets

Jim O'Shaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

Dec 7, 2024

1/ While playing around with our @osventuresllc AI Lab, I glanced to my right and saw "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick" and wondered if you could create a game based on the world Dick builds in this massive tome.

It was a really fun exercise, and here's the first pass

2/ First prompt: "Please create a comprehensive review of "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick" by Philip K. Dick and describe how one might use the insights to build a real-world game based on its views on reality"

3/ It came back with this:

The key themes include:

Reality Layers: Multiple overlapping realities existing simultaneously

Time Perception: Non-linear time and temporal displacement

Divine Communication: Information-rich pink light and cosmic consciousness

Hidden Knowledge: The concept of hidden truth beneath apparent reality

Identity Fluidity: Multiple personalities and shared consciousness

Read 20 tweets

Jim O'Shaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

Jan 28, 2024

1/ From the ever provocative Jed McKenna via JEDVAITA website--"Dreamweaver"

"Dreams feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange."
~Dom Cobb, Inception.

2/ "That incessant chatter going on in your head might not be mental pollution, as it seems. It might actually be how you constantly weave your dream state, yourself included, into existence.

3/ Obviously, or maybe not so obviously, your reality has no independent reality. It's all in your head, including your head.

That might be a nice thing about meditation - that you can close your eyes, turn off your brain, and spend some quality time away from the

Read 22 tweets

Jim O'Shaughnessy

@jposhaughnessy

Apr 2, 2023

Arthur C. Clarke 🗣️

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

“It was the mark of a barbarian to destroy something one could not understand.”

“I am an optimist. Anyone interested in the future has to be otherwise he would simply shoot himself.”

“A faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.”

“Never attribute to malevolence what is merely due to incompetence”

“Excessive interest in pathological behavior was itself pathological”

“Few artists thrive in solitude and nothing is more stimulating than the conflict of minds with similar interests.”

“He had a suspicion of plausible answers; they were so often wrong.”

Read 4 tweets

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