CTE brain May 3, 2025
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, is a brain disease achieved by getting hit on the head a lot, and it's usually found in football players and boxers.  Some of the symptoms include impulsive behavior and aggression. 

It's a real thing, and I don't mean to make light of it.  But there's a pattern of behavior I've noticed in certain public figures in recent years that suggests something similar is happening to otherwise healthy people.  There was the football player Antonio Brown who walked off the field (i.e. quit) mid-game in a pretty dramatic fashion (though that might've actually been CTE).  There was the Dilbert creator Scott Adams who used to post benign little things on his blog and Twitter, but who has since devolved into a racist and an extreme fear-mongerer.  There's also Jordan Peterson, who achieved notoriety with a fairly benign self-help book, but who has since become an aggressively annoying Twitter personality.  Add to this list JK Rowling, who earned a billion dollars as a young adult author, but whose entire public life now consists of degrading transgender people for some reason.  And then there's Elon Musk, who used to be an awkward nerd but has since become a Nazi.  Also, Donald Trump. 

You could claim these people are just doing things for attention.  Or maybe that's how these people have always been, and social media has simply allowed them to be more visible about it.  But I think it's something else.  It might be that, similar to CTE, social media has altered peoples' brain to make them act more impulsive and aggressive.  Or it might be drugs (Elon) or supplements (Adams -- men that old shouldn't have abs).  I don't know what it is, but I don't like it, and I think social media should be abolished and people should have to obtain a license to use the internet. #psychology
Autism spectrum May 3, 2025
This is probably wrong, but if autism truly is a spectrum, it would sort of make sense that everyone is on this spectrum, similar to the spectrum of gender or sexuality.  You can't be on or off the spectrum; you're on it.  If this is the case, most people are on the low end of the spectrum, i.e. not very autistic.  The people we think of as "having autism" are on the high end.  That leaves a whole bunch of people in the middle, which would maybe help explain people with difficulty making eye contact, sensory sensitivities, and things like that.  In other words, I think we're all a little autistic. #psychology
Mirror bacteria May 3, 2025
This People I (Mostly) Admire podcast episode introduced me to the concept of mirror bacteria (or mirror life) which is the idea that biology uses molecules of a specific chirality, i.e. molecular formations that are either right-handed or left-handed.  The same chemical can exist in either form, but all biology tends to use molecules of a specific handedness, e.g. proteins are exclusively composed of left-handed amino acids.  There's a scary idea out there that if left-handed bacteria suddenly evolved or were created in a lab, the human immune system would be unable to defend itself because it evolved to recognize right-handed bacteria only. #science
More than five senses May 3, 2025
The traditional "five senses" we learned in grade school (via Aristotle) -- sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing -- are associated with specific sensor organs on the human body:  eyes, ears, skin, nose, and tongue.  But it's widely established now that there are more than five senses.  Temperature can be sensed by the skin or tongue, but it's different than simply sense of touch.  Balance and body orientation are sensed by the inner ear.  You can sense when you're moving versus stationary.  I would add a couple weird ones to the list:  You can often sense when someone is standing close to you, or if they're looking at you. #science