Lately, I’ve been reading Why We Remember, and there’s a particular idea in the book that I really like: instead of asking why we forget, we should ask why we remember. It reminded me of something I read in The Basis of Brain—for the amygdala, mammals (not just humans) never actually forget fear toward a certain thing. If they stop fearing it, it’s because they’ve learned not to be afraid of it. I find that fascinating because it indirectly highlights neural plasticity and different ways to build resilience.
There are also some more cliché points in the book, like how memory mechanisms are coordinated by the prefrontal cortex, which supports top-down attention. Recognition and recollection don’t rely on a specific neuron or brain region but instead emerge as a pattern across the brain. That part immediately reminded me of the Mixture of Experts model mentioned in DeepSeek’s paper, and I got super excited while reading it. Anyway, I really love this book.
These past few days, I’ve also been reading Klara and the Sun and The List of Suspicious Things. I originally went to the bookstore planning to buy Klara and the Sun, but they were out of stock that day. The staff told me they could get it for me the next day, so I ended up picking up another book by Richard Powers (I love Richard Powers so much, who else gets it?), along with The Jazz of Physics (haven’t read it in depth yet, but the title alone got me—jazz lovers rejoice).
Oh, right! This summer, I’m planning to teach kids at H-Lab. Initially, when drafting a sample syllabus, I wanted to cover Markov Decision Processes and Reinforcement Learning—because I love them so much and actually planned to do this last year. But a friend reminded me that the course is meant to be simpler and suited for high schoolers, so I had to change my syllabus and switch to Nexus instead. That night, I kept working on the syllabus and realized something—if I could teach an entire course just on Yuval Noah Harari, I’d have so much to say. I mean, I really love his work.
A few weeks ago, I had been doing intense wall climbing sessions, and then… I caught COVID. Absolute devastation—for my gut microbiome and immune system (not really, but you get the idea). I couldn’t sleep for two nights, kept chugging hot water, and still had a fever. At one point, I found myself lying there thinking, Who was the COVID-positive person that just had to go climbing?—I was ready to grab a knife and hunt them down (just kidding… or am I?). It hit me hard, so I’ve been stuffing myself with protein every day. Still feeling a little off today.
Anyway, that’s why I’ve mostly been reading and not running or reading papers. Instead, I played some elderly person’s game (The Witcher 3), watched Killing Eve, and oh—One Hundred Years of Solitude is getting a Netflix adaptation! I’m using it to practice Spanish, though so far, I can only catch words like por favor, también, los primos, etc. Cracking myself up at how little I actually understand.
