The staggering fragility of American democracy: The Nebraska horror story

A terrifying NYT opinion (not paywalled) discusses the possibility that one person, Nebraska State Senator Mike McDonnell, who defected from the Democratic Party a few months ago, is standing in the Republican Party’s way of giving DJT the election if the closest electoral college scenario comes to pass:

A Leading Law Scholar Fears We’re Lurching Toward Secession

Here’s how rickety our constitutional system has become: The fate of the 2024 election could hang on the integrity of a single Republican state senator in Nebraska.

Almost all states use a winner-take-all system to apportion their presidential electors, but Nebraska and Maine award some electors by congressional district. In 2020, Joe Biden won one of Nebraska’s five electoral votes, and Donald Trump won one elector from rural Maine. This year Kamala Harris’s clearest path to victory is to take the so-called blue wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, plus one electoral vote in Nebraska.

This year, Republicans waited until it was too late for Maine to change its rules before starting a push to change them in Nebraska. If they succeeded and Harris held the blue wall but lost the other swing states, there would be a tie in the Electoral College. For the first time in 200 years, the election would go to the House, where each state delegation would get one vote and Trump would almost certainly be installed as president.

So far, one man, State Senator Mike McDonnell, who defected from the Democratic Party this spring, is standing in the Republican Party’s way. We should all be grateful for his courage. But the pressure on him from his new party will be intense, and he can still change his mind in the coming weeks.

Whether or not McDonnell remains steadfast, this is a preposterous way to run a purportedly democratic superpower. The Electoral College — created in part, as the scholar Akhil Reed Amar has shown, to protect slavery — has already given us two presidents in the 21st century who lost the popular vote, and it continues to warp our politics. It is one reason Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the U.C. Berkeley School of Law and an eminent legal scholar, has come to despair of the Constitution he’s devoted much of his life to. “I believe that if the problems with the Constitution are not fixed — and if the country stays on its current path — we are heading to serious efforts at secession,” he writes in his bracing new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States.”

To me, the main point is this: this is a preposterous way to run a purportedly democratic superpower. 

Chemerinsky's concern about secession is too far out in time to be a serious worry for me at least. The possibility of a constitutional convention doing anything significant or at all is very low because 38 states (75%: 37.5 gets rounded up to 38) would need to ratify it. That is politically just about impossible, if not actually impossible. 

So, join with me and let's fret about the crappy way we run our democracy, which is on the verge of falling to some form of kleptocratic authoritarianism. Just one yahoo in Nebraska could drag us into the brutality and cruelty of DJT and MAGA in control. Let's hope that probably low-probability Nebraska scenario does not come to pass.

What, me worry? Nah!

America's fine-tuned electoral

system works just fine  /s

A sampling of authoritarian radical right reality & thinking

Dissident Politics is exposed to too little MAGA reality and thinking. To broaden our horizons a bit, here is some heavy duty MAGA-ology:

Progressives Thrive on Deceit

To remake America, progressives have centered on a strategy of rewriting history, distorting current events, changing language, and using false allegations of disinformation, malinformation (facts progressives believe are presented out of context), and racism to censor and suppress centrists and conservatives.

By undermining confidence in American values, progressives have considerably advanced their efforts. They have controlled the White House and at least one House of Congress for 12 of the last 16 years, and the Supreme Court for nearly all of the last 70 years. Almost all major media outlets and reporters are in lockstep with progressive goals, lies, and omissions. Most report only about events and views that benefit the progressive agenda, and mischaracterize or suppress news, information, and opinions that may impede it. Progressives also control most federal agencies, many state agencies, leading universities, school boards, professional organizations such as the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, most leading think tanks, and many corporate boards.

As the COVID pandemic raged, progressives spoke hopefully of a new world order in which experts would tell us how to live. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, along with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, often refer to this chaos as the “rules-based international order.” They and other progressives, including Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, see the U.S. as just one among many countries. That is why they oppose immigration controls, support global compacts, subordinate the United States to the United Nations, and believe the U.S. can use economic or military power only when supported by an international coalition.

In a recent article for RealClearPolicy[1] about progressives’ crude ad hominem attacks on conservatives, it is explained that progressive dogma is a fierce,
culturally Marxist philosophy that:
(1) demands all policies, resources, and opportunities be allocated in accordance with a benighted view of oppressors and victims centered on race, sex, and sexual orientation;
(2) believes children are wards of the state to be indoctrinated by educators, while physically cared for by parents;
(3) represses religion for being what Karl Marx described as “the opium of the people;” and
(4) places a green agenda, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and the rights of criminals above free speech and assembly, the judicial process, and rights of petition. Progressives deny that ISIS and Hamas are terrorists, oppose Israel’s right of defense because Jews are “oppressors,” and believe children may select irreversible gender reassignment surgery without parental consent.

Eliminating or distorting teaching about Western civilization, American exceptionalism, and liberty leaves students uninformed about America’s unique story. An Echelon Insights poll highlights the cumulative impact of this indoctrination. Sixty-six percent of high schoolers viewed the U.S. as exceptional and unique, compared to 47% of college students; 63% of high-schoolers were proud of the U.S., compared to 40% of college students; and 58% of high-schoolers were patriotic, compared to just 35% of college students.

Concurrently, progressives are remaking the acceptable lexicon. They corrupt language and norms to deprive us of the ability to express nuance and understand distinctions.

Leading institutions, including government agencies, professional organizations, and universities, proclaim that our language is replete with hidden racism and genderism that must be cleansed with a new vocabulary featuring ideologically-laden phrases. Among the words that trouble the American Medical Association are “disadvantaged,” “equality,” and “disparities.” The politically acceptable terms are “historically and intentionally excluded,” “equity,” and “inequities.” Similarly, “ex-con” or “felon” are to be replaced with “returning citizen” or “persons with a history of incarceration,” and “fairness” with “social justice.”

“Illegal alien,” the term used in federal law for those who enter the U.S. without proper visas or overstay their visas, first became “undocumented alien” and then “non-citizens,” who somehow deserve all benefits to which citizens are entitled.

As progressives erase and change language, history, and values to create a foundation to change America’s way of life, they also corruptly fabricate, suppress, and misrepresent recent and current events to confuse voters, shield accountability for their failures, and disparage their opponents. The following is a list of recent political hoaxes promoted by progressive elected officials, bureaucrats, and major national media (my thanks to Breitbart News for identifying many of these):

Russia Collusion Hoax
Hunter Biden’s Laptop Is Russian Disinformation Hoax
Biden Is Not Cognitively Impaired Hoax
The Biden-Harris Administration Is Not Censoring Social Media Hoax
Biden Is Not a Crook Hoax
Project 2025 Hoax
Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Hoax
Jussie Smollett Hoax
Covington KKK Kids Hoax
Very Fine People Hoax
Drinking Bleach Hoax
Seven-Hour Gap Hoax
Russian Bounties to Taliban Hoax
Trump Trashes Troops Hoax
Policemen Killed on January 6 Protest Hoax
Rittenhouse Hoax
Eating While Black Hoax
Border Agents Whipping Illegals Hoax
NASCAR Noose Hoax
The Georgia Jim Crow 2.0 Hoax
COVID Lab Leak Theory Is Racist Hoax
Biden Will Never Ban Gas Stoves Hoax
COVID Deaths are Overcounted Is a Conspiracy Theory Hoax
Mass Graves of Native Children in Canada Hoax
Hamas Hospital Hoax
The Alfa Bank Hoax

Hiding Biden’s cognitive impairment took dozens, if not hundreds, of staff, family, elected officials, and reporters. That hoax was revealed only when replacing Biden became imperative to defeat Trump. In lockstep, the progressive media complex abandoned its cover-up of Biden’s impairment and called for his replacement.

Harris’s and Tim Walz’s campaign became the second act of this hoax. With few exceptions, they refuse to discuss their records or beliefs, and falsely claim to have changed both. They willfully misstate Trump’s positions and falsely attribute to him sponsorship of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (yet another hoax, as even USA Today and CNN have acknowledged).

From what I can tell, that is very likely very close how most of MAGA sees the situation. In all of that, one can see some nuggets of truth, along with some other things. For example, one could consider Dem elites hiding Biden's cognitive situation a hoax. I do, but that does not lead me to support DJT or his corrupt authoritarianism. Despite labeling the bad guys here progressives, this is probably how most of the MAGA rank and file sees most everyone other than themselves. Centrists, the center-right, independents, pragmatic rationalists and other non-MAGA, but anti-MAGA folk seem to be either implicitly lumped in, or ignored. The undeniable authoritarianism and staggering corruption of DJT and his MAGA are flat out denied or ignored.

With that kind of "reality" and "reasoning", it is easy to see why so many minds stay trapped in MAGA's version of reality and reason. There is no good will in it. No accounting for disagreement. Can you feel the pull of persuasion in it if you just let go and ride the emotional appeal, the facts be damned? I can definitely feel it.

Qs: Is it good or at least useful to be occasionally exposed to how MAGA presents its version of reality and reason, e.g., so that the power and appeal of its dark free speech can be felt in one's guts? Or, are Germaine's guts full of crappage and there is little or nothing one can feel in, or learn from, how the radical right authoritarian propaganda Leviathan presents its arguments, reasoning and alleged facts?

Footnote:

1.  The RCP article referred to above includes these comments:

Both parties are guilty of incivility, hyperbole, hubris, and engendering turmoil. But, there is a binary choice in what this election means for freedom, prosperity, and security.

To deflect from their autocratic dogma and failures, including massive illegal immigration, compounding inflation, lawless prosecutors, spiraling crime, a two-tiered justice system, rampant racism, and international wars, progressives falsely attack Trump as an existential threat to democracy.

The faux Russian collusion conspiracy, defunding police, delegitimizing conservative justices, and claims that Republicans are threats to democracy is the sophistry of leftists who despise traditional values, family, faith, equal opportunity, individual rights, Western culture, industriousness, and performance. As the ultimate centralization of authority, the far left intelligentsia seeks a liberal, rules-based international order that overrides national sovereignty.

The RCP article equates the far left intelligentsia with the mostly center to center-right politics and policy of dominant mainstream Democratic politics. In the real world, the far left is socialist, not centrist to center-right capitalist. Support for abortion and reasonable gun safety laws is centrist, and maybe also socialist, but that does not negate the possibility that centrism or even center rightism and socialism sometimes overlap. What decades of radical right dark free speech has successfully done is drag the Overton Window so far to the right that most of the MAGA rank and file now think of the center right and center as far left progressives, i.e., socialists or communists. That's the power of dark free speech.

Overton Window

InfoWars: A critical weapon in the global authoritarian attack on democracy and truth

American and other democracies are in a bitter, existential InfoWar against forces of foreign and domestic authoritarianism. In essence InfoWar constitutes a combination of dark free speech (divisive lies, slanders, bigotry, crackpot reasoning, irrational emotional manipulation, etc.) and dirty tricks. The big gun is dark free speech.  A WaPo opinion (not paywalled) focuses on the foreign InfoWar that China wages against the US:

The PRC is increasingly controlling global narratives and silencing critics

The United States is not yet losing the global information war, but we soon will be — unless we act quickly and make the most of our strengths.

Russia recently amped up its disinformation and misinformation around the U.S. election. The United States recently accused RT, Russia’s state media, of out-and-out intelligence activities. Still, of all the globe’s information warriors, the most formidable is still China, which spends billions each year to dominate the world’s information space. More than missiles, ships, drones or guns, this is the real threat to our national — and global — security. Listen to China’s president, Xi Jinping, as quoted by then-Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) during a congressional hearing last November: “Once the front lines of human thought have been broken through, other defensive lines also become hard to defend.”

How is China controlling global narratives and silencing critics? By buying television and radio frequencies around the world, partnering with news organizations, seeding pro-China content into local media, courting journalists and content creators with trips, training and new equipment and winning over their bosses with free content.

The PRC targets both Chinese and non-Chinese audiences worldwide, far beyond its own borders. China’s largest media conglomerate, Xinhua, has 37 bureaus in Africa, far more than any other news agency, African or non-African — a dramatic increase from just two decades ago. The PRC is running information operations into Latin America, from Cuba to Nicaragua to Venezuela and beyond.

Even in countries boasting a free press, China’s free-for-the-taking content lures the cash-strapped media industry: Consider Xi’s visit to South Africa in 2023, when he put his name to an article hailing China and South Africa as “comrades and friends.” Three leading South African newspapers reprinted the talking points verbatim on their front pages. 

In China, the PRC has made tremendous progress fortifying the so-called Great Firewall, deterring citizens from accessing outside information while funding party-approved, entertainment-focused content to lull them into cocooning themselves within.

Once again, critically important but shockingly under-reported issues related to defense of democracy bubble up from all the usual MSM fluff and noise. This is the heart of MSM's weakness:

American capitalism is not compatible with the level of MSM professionalism and blunt honesty needed to (i) properly alert the public to authoritarian dangers, or (ii) to adequately defend democracy and truth against foreign and domestic authoritarian dark free speech. Regarding defense of democracy and truth, I continue to give the MSM an F. American professional MSM is far too damaged by its fealty to the profit motive. America's authoritarian propaganda Leviathan, e.g., Faux News, faces no sanction for its role in fomenting domestic kleptocratic authoritarianism, i.e., DJT and MAGA. Weakness and subversion of America's professional MSM is a key weakness in our defenses against internal and external authoritarianism. Maybe a decisive, lethal weakness.

A NYT opinion comments (not paywalled) about Russia's worldwide authoritarian  tactics of hiring thugs to beat dissidents up or assassins to murder them:

Putin Is Doing Something Almost Nobody Is Noticing

In November 2022, my editors asked me to be careful about what I ate and stop ordering takeout. Initially, I didn’t think much of it. But I soon realized the importance of their advice when, just one month later, my colleague Elena Kostyuchenko discovered she had been poisoned in Germany, in a probable assassination attempt by the Russian state.

Such stories have become routine. Last year, an investigative journalist, Alesya Marokhovskaya, was harassed in the Czech Republic; in February, the bullet-riddled body of a Russian defector, Maxim Kuzminov, was found in Spain. In both cases, the Kremlin was assumed to be involved. Russian opposition figures know well that even in exile they remain targets of Russia’s intelligence services.

But it’s not just them who are in danger. There are also the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left home because they did not want to have anything to do with Vladimir Putin’s war — or were forced out, accused of not embracing it enough. These low-profile dissenters are subjected to surveillance and kidnappings, too. Yet their repression happens in silence — away from the spotlight and often with the tacit consent, or inadequate prevention, of the countries to which they have fled.

It’s a terrifying thing: The Kremlin is hunting down ordinary people across the world, and nobody seems to care.

So there we have it, democracy and truth fans. American kleptocratic authoritarians like DJT and their wealth and power MAGA movement are not much different from the goons that rule China with an iron fist. But so far, the US dictator squads still rarely resort to breaking knee caps and murder, like the fun-fill Putin and his hired thugs and murdering monsters.

1488

 Anyone know what that number symbolizes?

Here it is:

1488 is a combination of two popular white supremacist numeric symbols. The first symbol is 14, which is shorthand for the "14 Words" slogan: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." The second is 88, which stands for "Heil Hitler" (H being the 8th letter of the alphabet). Together, the numbers form a general endorsement of white supremacy and its beliefs. As such, they are ubiquitous within the white supremacist movement - as graffiti, in graphics and tattoos, even in screen names and e-mail addresses, such as aryanprincess1488@hate.net.  Some white supremacists will even price racist merchandise, such as t-shirts or compact discs, for $14.88.

https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/1488

So, the following image might just be a coincidence then?

An analysis of MAGA; A Taliban update; Abortion war update - gone from nuts to the Spanish Inquisition

An interesting NYT opinion (not paywalled) by David French posits the following analysis related to MAGA "moral values", or more accurately, immoral values:

After enduring weeks of lies about the Haitian immigrants who live in Springfield, Ohio, and an entire news cycle devoted to covering Trump’s connection with Laura Loomer, one of the most overtly racist figures in MAGA America (she once spoke at a conference of white nationalists and declared, “I consider myself to be a white advocate, and I openly campaigned for the United States Congress as a white advocate”) — I’m hardening my view. Trump loses now or the Republicans are lost for a generation. Maybe more.

The reason is plain: The yearslong elevation of figures like Mark Robinson and the many other outrageous MAGA personalities, along with the devolution of people in MAGA’s inner orbit — JD Vance, Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham and so very many others — has established beyond doubt that Trump has changed the Republican Party and Republican Christians far more than they have changed him.

In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.  

Trump has set the course of the Republican Party’s cultural river for more than nine years. Fewer and fewer resisters remain, and they’re growing increasingly exhausted and besieged. You can see it online in response to the Mark Robinson [the self-professed black Nazi] news. The mere suggestion that Republican primary voters can and should do better is greeted by scorn and contempt.

So, French's interesting assertion is that the GOP rank and file have (morally) degenerated from generally disliking transgressions to demanding Republican politicians who transgress. That opinion feels a lot more right to me than wrong. Of course my bias and probably minority opinion that all rank and file DJT supporters are MAGA may be clouding my perception here. 

Defining transgression: As usual, the concept at issue ought to be defined. Exactly what is transgression in this context? French does not explicitly define it. Presumably it means immoral things like accepting dark free speech as legitimate. For example, denying inconvenient but obviously true facts. It also includes (i) employing bigoted rhetoric and engaging in bigoted behaviors, and (ii) joyfully, intentionally provoking target people and groups to inflict as much unjustifiable, unwarranted pain and unhappiness as dark free speech can inflict.

Assuming I am wrong and most rank and file DJT supporters do not demand transgressions in their politicians. The what do they demand? Truth telling? Hell no. Acting toward the non-MAGA world in good will and good faith? Hell no. Protecting civil liberties? Absolutely, positively not, e.g., abortion and voting rights.

Q: Do most of the MAGA rank and file demand that Republican politicians sufficiently transgress enough before they support them, assuming transgression is more or less as defined above?

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The WaPo reports:

As Taliban starts restricting men, too, some 

regret not speaking up sooner

Women have faced an onslaught of increasingly severe limits on their personal freedom and rules about their dress since the Taliban seized power three years ago. But men in urban areas could, for the most part, carry on freely.

The past four weeks, however, have brought significant changes for them, too. New laws promulgated in late August mandate that men wear a fist-long beard, bar them from imitating non-Muslims in appearance or behavior, widely interpreted as a prohibition against jeans, and ban haircuts that are against Islamic law, which essentially means short or Western styles. Men are now also prohibited from looking at women other than their wives or relatives.

Apparently, the 20 year US war in Afghanistan did not turn out quite like some American nation builders had hoped. How much did that kerfuffle cost? Oh yeah, according to one estimate it cost about 2,400 American service members, an estimated 46,000 Afghan civilians, about $2.3 trillion (that includes interest on debt, veterans' care, and other indirect costs) plus an unknown current monthly cost for veterans benefits.

 

  

Sex alert: Don't look! Too sexy for looking 

Dork on the street: Woof! Look at those hot toes! (catcall whistle)

Righteous Taliban thugs beating on the dork 

with their clubs: You're under arrest, 10 years hard labor for you, pervert!

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From The Rock and Hard Place Files: Several sources report that the number of women dying from withheld abortion related health care is increasing. The situation is caused by radical Republican authoritarian zealots writing intentionally ambiguous forced birth laws. The ambiguity and threat of criminal prosecution makes health care providers reluctant to have anything to do with abortion-related care, even sometimes when it kills women seeking care. Radical right authoritarian theocrats who support draconian forced birth laws are blaming the dead and harmed women for breaking the laws. And in addition, now they are threatening health care providers for not providing care.

Rolling Stone reports:

Republicans Threaten Doctors Who Fail to Provide 

Emergency Pregnancy Care Amid Abortion Bans

As doctors refuse to provide necessary care due to abortion bans, providers feel threatened by Ron DeSantis’ admin and Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill

MAGA thug DeSantis and 

MAGA thug Murrill

Florida health officials issued new guidance about abortion on Thursday, threatening to take “regulatory action” against doctors who delay in providing emergency medical care to pregnant patients, as providers say the state’s abortion ban has doctors afraid to do their jobs and is putting patients at risk.

“They know their law is what puts women in danger and they’re just trying to threaten physicians so that we feel scared, rather than taking accountability for what their law is doing to people,” an OB-GYN in Florida tells Rolling Stone. She asked that her name not be used because the state controls her license and she fears retaliation for speaking out against them.

“You are simultaneously being told you are going to prison if you make a mistake and provide abortion in a context they don’t consider valid, while also being threatened with regulatory action and malpractice if you do not provide that care,” Lauren Brenzel, campaign director for Yes on 4, the ballot measure that would relegalize abortion in FL, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s an impossible choice — physicians are being threatened on all sides by the government intervening in their medical decisions.”

In Louisiana, Attorney General Liz Murrill released a six-page statement with similar language to Florida’s health department. She claimed the media and politicians are spreading “disinformation” about Louisiana’s abortion ban.

“To be clear: nothing in Louisiana laws stands in the way of a doctor providing care that stabilizes and treats emergency conditions,” said Murrill. “Any statements to the contrary are flatly incorrect. Any hospital or doctor at any hospital or emergency room who refuses to treat and stabilize a woman having a miscarriage or suffering with an ectopic pregnancy could be committing both medical malpractice and violating federal law.”  

Murrill’s statement comes after increased pressure on Louisiana for passing an unprecedented law reclassifying common pregnancy care pills, including misoprostol, as controlled dangerous substances. Hundreds of doctors have spoken out about concerns the law will cause delays in care for women, particularly since misoprostol is used to treat postpartum hemorrhage and will be removed from obstetric carts.

Given the shameless mendacity that all or essentially all MAGA elites routinely rely on, it is reasonable to believe that DeSantis and Murrill are cynical liars. 

Q: Is it reasonable to believe that DeSantis and Murrill are cynical liars?

Major neuroscience update: Zeroing in on ways to measure and characterize cognition

A new research paper discusses an absolutely amazing aspect of cognition in the brain. In essence, when engaged in significant cognitive effort, like listening to a story, the brain compresses a huge amount of information into a small set of electrical signals. 

One author described the stunning degree of data compression like this: “If human language was similarly efficient, I’d be able to tell you the details of every Wikipedia article just by speaking a dozen or so words.” That has to be either a gross exaggeration, or the high degree of compression is incomprehensible to me. I do not see how this can be remotely possible.

If this research holds up on replication, it is mind-blowing.  PsyPost reports:

A new neuroimaging study reveals that when we engage in more complex cognitive tasks, our brain activity becomes not only richer in detail but also more streamlined. The findings suggest that the brain adjusts its patterns of activity to match the demands of the task, allowing for more efficient processing during mentally challenging activities.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was driven by a desire to understand how the brain manages different cognitive demands. Previous research by the same team had revealed the brain’s remarkable ability to reconstruct missing data from minimal measurements, raising questions about why the brain can generate such detailed and efficient activity patterns with limited input.

“Several years ago, my co-author and graduate student at the time, Lucy Owen, and I came out with a precursor to this study, where we found something very surprising,” explained study author Jeremy Manning, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College and director of the Contextual Dynamics Lab.

“At the time, we were working with neurosurgical patients who had electrodes implanted in their brains to monitor for seizure activity. A challenge with working with those recordings is that our brains contain roughly a hundred billion neurons, but we can only safely implant around a few hundred wires into someone’s brain. So there is a massive undersampling problem: for every measurement we take, we miss roughly a billion others! We wanted to understand how much of that ‘missing’ data we could reliably and accurately reconstruct using statistical ‘hacks.'”

“We were very surprised to find that just a few hundred measurements from an essentially random sampling of locations throughout someone’s brain could give us enough information to fill in an accurate guess about activity patterns throughout their entire brain, at millimeter-scale resolutions (roughly on par with the best fMRI available today), but at millisecond-scale sampling rates (roughly 1000 times faster than fMRI),” Manning said. “If human language was similarly efficient, I’d be able to tell you the details of every Wikipedia article just by speaking a dozen or so words.”

To assess the informativeness and compressibility of brain activity, the researchers used advanced computational techniques. They measured informativeness by analyzing how much specific information about the task was reflected in participants’ brain activity. Compressibility, on the other hand, was evaluated by examining how efficiently the brain’s activity patterns could be represented using fewer components or data points. A highly compressible brain pattern is one in which fewer pieces of information are needed to reconstruct the full activity.

“In the world of machine learning, the ability to reconstitute a detailed pattern from its parts is called ‘compression,'” Manning told PsyPost. “Highly compressible patterns can be accurately rebuilt from just a tiny sliver, like reconstructing the complete text of a novel from just a single word. Another related property is called ‘informativeness.’ This refers to how ‘expressive’ a sequence of patterns is– akin to the length of a novel.”

The researchers uncovered two key findings. First, brain activity was more informative and compressible when participants engaged in the more demanding task of listening to a coherent story compared to the scrambled story or resting conditions. This suggests that during higher-level cognitive tasks, the brain produces detailed, information-rich activity that is also organized efficiently. In simpler tasks, or during rest, the brain’s activity is less organized and contains less specific information.

Second, the study found that these brain patterns became more informative and compressible over time as participants continued to listen to the coherent story. As the narrative unfolded, the brain seemed to adapt by refining and optimizing its activity patterns. This pattern was less pronounced in the scrambled conditions, where the lack of a coherent structure in the story likely led to less mental engagement and, consequently, less organization in the brain’s activity.

“Going into this study, we would have guessed that ‘compression’ and ‘informativeness’ would have changed in opposite directions,” Manning said. “That would be analogous to either being able to reconstruct short novels from just a few words (perhaps under certain cognitive circumstances — representing high compressibility but low informativeness), or being able to reconstruct longer novels from more words (perhaps under different circumstances — representing low compressibility and high informativeness). Finding that compression and informativeness change in the same direction helped us to understand that these two aspects of how our brains respond can vary independently from each other.” 

“We looked at data from a little over 100 participants, using one set of experimental conditions, and using one method for measuring brain activity,” Manning noted. “Although it is tempting to generalize to ‘all humans and circumstances,’ the true test of these findings, as with any study, will be in how well they replicate and generalize.”  

“We are deeply curious about understanding fundamental questions about how our brains work, and what makes us ‘us.’ This line of work is a tiny part of a much broader literature aimed at uncovering the neural basis of thought,” Manning said. “My website is www.context-lab.com. It has links to all of my lab’s publications, data, and software, along with some open courses that could be of interest to people who want to learn more about this stuff.”

In their research paper (behind a paywall), the authors describe the significance of their research like this:

How our brains respond to ongoing experiences depends on what we are doing and thinking about, among other factors. We examined two fundamental aspects of brain activity under different cognitive circumstances: informativeness and compressibility. Informativeness refers to how specific the brain activity we measure at a given moment is to whatever was being done in that particular moment. Compressibility is a measure of how redundant the activity patterns are. We found that when people were engaged in higher-level cognitive tasks, their brain activity was both more informative and more compressible than when they were engaged in lower-level tasks. Our findings suggest that our brains flexibly reconfigure themselves to optimize different aspects of how they function according to ongoing cognitive demands. 

So, this paper is saying that during high-level cognition (high cognitive load), the brain dynamically, i.e., cognitive load-sensing, produces detailed, information-rich activity that is organized and compressed with astounding efficiently. The effect was more pronounced in higher-order brain networks associated with complex functions like decision-making and memory. 

As participants continued engaging in a complex task like listening to a coherent story, brain patterns became more informative and compressible over time. That suggests the brain adapts and optimizes data process while engaging in a significantly cognitive loaded task. In essence, the brain's data compression ability seems to become more efficient and effective during complex, engaging cognitive tasks, allowing for rich information processing while maintaining compressible, organized activity patterns.

This research challenges the researchers' initial hypothesis that informativeness and compressibility would trade off against each other. Instead, they both change in the same direction during complex cognitive tasks. That is counterintuitive, at least to me. That alone ought to prompt real quick testing in other labs this to see if these results replicate and get either verified or debunked.

Germaine mental status: Mind blown