Mind and brain

3 papers · 2022–2026 · oldest first

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What minds are and what changes them. These papers ask whether consciousness can be given a number, whether naming an illness can itself be a treatment, and how badly people misjudge the way opinions have moved over their own lifetimes.

Ours, not the authors' — written for a reader who does not work in this field. The papers' own words are the quotes on each paper's page.

The shape of the field

2022

Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change (with 1 co-authors)

Adam Mastroianni · in the archive · 4 korrents

People badly misjudge how Americans' opinions on big social issues have shifted over decades, usually thinking there's been far more change toward liberal views than the polls actually show.
2025

The Rumpelstiltskin effect: therapeutic repercussions of clinical diagnosis (with 1 co-authors)

Awais Aftab · in the archive · 3 korrents

Just putting a medical name on someone's suffering can ease it all by itself, no pills or therapy needed—like in the fairy tale where guessing the name frees you.
2026

Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood (with 6 co-authors)

Anil Seth · in the archive · 3 korrents

Integrated information theory tries to measure consciousness by taking basic features of experience as its starting point and turning them into a number any physical system can be scored on.

3 of these 3 papers are in this archive, with quotes you can check — those are the linked ones. The rest are here so the timeline is the field's shape rather than ours: they carry no quote, no link and no claim beyond their title, authors and year, and the one-line notes are ours, about what each paper did rather than what anyone believes.

What you can read here

1 Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change (with 1 co-authors)

Adam Mastroianni · 7 Mar 2022 · 4 korrents

People badly misjudge how Americans' opinions on big social issues have shifted over decades, usually thinking there's been far more change toward liberal views than the polls actually show. These mistakes can lend support to policies people might reject if they knew the real history of opinions, and can even turn imaginary trends into real ones. It reports survey results matching people's guesses about long-term attitude shifts against actual polling data, and finds the errors stem from a shared stereotype that today is much more liberal than the past.

attitude change
2 The Rumpelstiltskin effect: therapeutic repercussions of clinical diagnosis (with 1 co-authors)

Awais Aftab · 22 Aug 2025 · 3 korrents

Just putting a medical name on someone's suffering can ease it all by itself, no pills or therapy needed—like in the fairy tale where guessing the name frees you. This means diagnosis itself can act as a treatment, so doctors should watch for its help and harm and researchers should study it directly. It is an argument describing a neglected phenomenon, drawing on folk tales, patient reports and studies of labels and placebos, and calling for proper investigation.

Psychotherapy
3 Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood (with 6 co-authors)

Anil Seth · 13 Apr 2026 · 3 korrents

Integrated information theory tries to measure consciousness by taking basic features of experience as its starting point and turning them into a number any physical system can be scored on. Much of the criticism aimed at it attacks things it does not actually claim, though it has real problems of its own: the number has never actually been computed for a real system, only stood in for, and it does not yet fit the physics we have. It is a position paper separating the fair objections from the unfair ones, and arguing the theory would need rewriting in terms of continuous fields to sit alongside fundamental physics.

physics consciousness

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