What is mind-blanking, really?

I'm re-reading Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (the Moncrieff translation), so mind wandering and hypnogogia have been front and centre in my musings lately (well, since mid-January, when I started it again). The Kindle tells me I am 28% of the way through. That's somewhere in Within a Budding Grove. I've noticed I often have little to no recollection of the cooldown walk from my morning workouts.

A just released study in Trends in Cognitive Sciences maps out mind-blanking, or when we report "thinking about nothing" in terms of its reportable expressions, neurophysiology, and relationship to adjacent phenomenology, including meditative practices and sleep. They propose a mechanistic account linking MB to changes at the physiological, neural, and cognitive levels.

There are some great tables in the arguments about what people report and how the phenomenon has been studied. I'd love to go through Proust's tome to identify how many of these measures and tests developed from so many different fields appear in his magisterial novel/memoir. One day, I'll get around to writing up my case that the seven volumes are a long experiment in soporifics as much as a meditation on memory and identity.

Until then, I'll have to be content with baking madeleines. If I get really ambitious, I might get out the oil paints and admire Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's works on cardboard. I only just learned the two would have been at the very least acquainted since they both were regulars at the Natansons' parties on rue Saint-Florentine.


Image Credit: ChatGPT 4 from the prompt: "Generate an image of a plate of madeleines and a cup of tea on a fin de siècle table next to a leatherbound copy of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec" on 29 April 2025.

New Dinosaur Remains Found in the Canadian Rockies!

The Origin of Feathers

I had my first robin sighting of this spring on our morning walk today. The birdsong is back in the forest, and so are the bumblebees so busy pollinating the daffodils.

Two researchers at the University of Geneva's Laboratory of Artificial and Natural Evolution (LANE) have just published a study of embryonic development of the chicken that uncovered a key role of a molecular signalling pathway (the Shh pathway) in the formation of feathers from the proto-feathers of dinosaurs in PLOS Biology.

Photo by Ashlee Marie on Unsplash

Fosterage has long been an interest of mine -- in medieval Europe, it was a common practice that gave a child a larger network of support should something happen to their biological parents. This is a lovely project by Dr. Rhodes that examines how foster mothers cared for their wards -- and how the authorities treated them very differently from birth mothers who often needed the same kind of charity.

Fostering power A rare collection of 17th-century petitions gives voice to England's early foster carers as they fought for their rights

This is probably the coolest business/leadership study I have seen all year -- and its telling that its about animal behaviour and not AI.

The abstract: Collective behaviour, social interactions and leadership in animal groups are often driven by individual differences. However, most studies focus on same-species groups, in which individual variation is relatively low. Multispecies groups, however, entail interactions among highly divergent phenotypes, ranging from simple exploitative actions to complex coordinated networks. Here we studied hunting groups of otherwise-solitary Octopus cyanea and multiple fish species, to unravel hidden mechanisms of leadership and associated dynamics in functional nature and complexity, when divergence is maximized. Using three-dimensional field-based tracking and field experiments, we found that these groups exhibit complex functional dynamics and composition-dependent properties. Social influence is hierarchically distributed over multiscale dimensions representing role specializations: fish (particularly goatfish) drive environmental exploration, deciding where, while the octopus decides if, and when, the group moves. Thus, 'classical leadership' can be insufficient to describe complex heterogeneous systems, in which leadership instead can be driven by both stimulating and inhibiting movement. Furthermore, group composition altered individual investment and collective action, triggering partner control mechanisms (that is, punching) and benefits for the de facto leader, the octopus. This seemingly non-social invertebrate flexibly adapts to heterospecific actions, showing hallmarks of social competence and cognition. These findings expand our current understanding of what leadership is and what sociality is.

Click to expand...

There must be octopodes (I just cannot bring myself to type out the other) in our bay, but we have never caught a glimpse of them or any remains -- unlike a lot of other life from the seafloor that ends up on our dock after the seals and otters are done with their feast.
Here is a YouTube video of the footage.

The article is open-access and includes other supplementary videos too: Sampaio, E., Sridhar, V.H., Francisco, F.A. et al. Multidimensional social influence drives leadership and composition-dependent success in octopus–fish hunting groups. Nat Ecol Evol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02525-2

Freddie deBoer's recent piece about what he refers to as the "Temporal Copernican Principles," but which historians are more likely to refer to as the sin of "teleological thinking" has been on my mind a lot lately because, well, it was a milestone birthday earlier this week. I keep thinking back to all the times that I can remember (and there are so many I am sure that I have forgotten) when I reflected on this milestone and how impossible it seems. And yet, it's surreal how the meandering narrative of one's life always seems to be headed downstream to the present moment no matter how hard we try to remember all the coin flips and games of rock-paper-scissors that got us here.
The merganser ducks are active on the waterfront these days, and the males have lost their ostentatious mating plumage. They are still noisy.


Photo by cecile mousist on Unsplash

To Waterfowl
by William Cullen Bryant

Whither, 'midst falling dew,
While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,
Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue
Thy solitary way?

Vainly the fowler's eye
Might mark thy distant flight, to do thee wrong,
As, darkly seen against the crimson sky,
Thy figure floats along.

Seek'st thou the plashy brink
Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide,
Or where the rocking billows rise and sink
On the chaféd ocean side?

There is a Power, whose care
Teaches thy way along that pathless coast,—
The desert and illimitable air
Lone wandering, but not lost.

All day thy wings have fanned,
At that far height, the cold thin atmosphere;
Yet stoop not, weary, to the welcome land,
Though the dark night is near.

And soon that toil shall end,
Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend,
Soon, o'er thy sheltered nest.

Thou'rt gone, the abyss of heaven
Hath swallowed up thy form, yet, on my heart
Deeply hath sunk the lesson thou hast given,
And shall not soon depart.

He, who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must trace alone,
Will lead my steps aright.