Mary Helen Immordino-Yang — On AI
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Contents
Cover Foreword About Chapter 1: The Brain at Rest Is the Brain at Work Chapter 2: We Feel, Therefore We Learn Chapter 3: The Feeling of Knowing Chapter 4: What the Default Mode Actually Does Chapter 5: Transcendent Emotions and the Depth of Caring Chapter 6: The Adolescent Brain at the Crossroads Chapter 7: Creativity Requires the Inward Turn Chapter 8: The Signal Worth Amplifying Chapter 9: Building the Neural Dam Chapter 10: The Meaning-Making Species Epilogue Back Cover

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang Cover
On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Mary Helen Immordino-Yang's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.

Foreword

By Edo Segal ^ Opus

By Edo Segal

The number that changed how I think about everything I built is six to eight seconds.

That is how long it takes the human brain to feel awe. Not to register surprise — surprise is milliseconds, a spike and a fade. Not fear — fear is ancient, instant, already dissolving before you know what scared you. Awe takes six to eight seconds to reach peak activation in the brain. admiration, compassion, moral elevation — the emotions that connect you to meaning, that make you feel your life is part of something larger — all of them operate on this timescale.

Default Mode Network
Default Mode Network

I can get a working code implementation from Claude in less time than it takes my brain to fully experience admiring

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11 chapters
WIKI COMPANION

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang — On AI

A reading-companion catalog of the 25 Orange Pill Wiki entries linked from this book — the people, ideas, works, and events that Mary Helen Immordino-Yang — On AI uses as stepping stones for thinking through the AI revolution.

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Antonio Damasio
Further Reading From The You On AI Encyclopedia · Related Thinkers for Mary Helen Immordino-Yang — On AI
12 voices alongside this section — click to meet them
Thinkers whose frameworks illuminate this section.
Antonio Damasio
Antonio Damasio
Immordino-Yang's mentor and the originator of the somatic marker hypothesis that grounds her entire research program. Central to chs 1-3.
William James
William James
The originator of stream-of-consciousness psychology and the first to argue that emotions are embodied processes — the philosophical antecedent of Immordino-Yang's neural findings.
Dacher Keltner
Dacher Keltner
The leading researcher on awe as a social emotion, whose timescale data (six to eight seconds) is the book's animating discovery.
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget
The developmental psychologist whose stages of cognitive development provide the scaffolding for Immordino-Yang's adolescent brain research.
Lev Vygotsky
Lev Vygotsky
Vygotsky's zone of proximal development and social constructivism support the book's argument that genuine learning requires emotional engagement with a caring other.
John Dewey
John Dewey
Dewey's pragmatist education philosophy — that learning must be experiential and emotionally engaged — is the intellectual ancestor of Immordino-Yang's neurological argument.
Jerome Bruner
Jerome Bruner
Bruner's narrative theory of mind and meaning-making framework are the cognitive science antecedents to Immordino-Yang's default mode research.
Cal Newport
Cal Newport
Newport's deep work thesis — that continuous shallow engagement degrades cognitive capacity — maps directly onto Immordino-Yang's neuroscience of default mode suppression.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Pang's research on deliberate rest as a cognitive practice provides the behavioral complement to Immordino-Yang's neural findings.
Daniel Kahneman
Daniel Kahneman
Kahneman's System 1/System 2 framework parallels Immordino-Yang's task-positive vs. default-mode distinction — fast versus slow cognition serving different functions.
Robert Bjork
Robert Bjork
Bjork's desirable difficulties research — the counterintuitive finding that learning is deeper when conditions are harder — is the learning-science complement to Immordino-Yang's emotional engagement argument.
Sherry Turkle
Sherry Turkle
Turkle's research on technology and alone-togetherness captures the social-emotional cost of device-mediated interactions that Immordino-Yang identifies at the neural level.

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