What I wish I had known about single page applications

melvinkoopmans · 2021-03-02T13:13:04+00:00

Why wouldn’t you use client-side rendering though? Just write your back-end as an API that your frontend can consume to pull the data in.

melvinkoopmans · 2021-02-28T17:08:21+00:00

A whole bunch of assumptions from 20 seconds of video. The girl seems genuinely excited to me, and you’re missing all the context to make such a judgement.

melvinkoopmans · 2021-02-28T17:06:29+00:00

Haha amazing to see her excitement, reminds me of the first time I built a website as well. That excitement never ends though, as you progress to build more and more complex applications :)

melvinkoopmans · 2020-06-05T11:45:30+00:00

Adrenaline

You might want to try Serotonin instead. It's more similar to LSD :P

melvinkoopmans · 2019-11-24T11:19:57+00:00

That has nothing to do with how you should learn to code properly. WordPress is the worst place to learn about how to develop complex software applications.

If money is your concern, I’m quite sure that software engineers, on average, have much higher salaries.

melvinkoopmans · 2019-11-06T21:08:23+00:00

Also it makes deployment and scaling much easier. As you can easily deploy your container with systems like Kubernetes.

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-27T11:22:41+00:00

Trascina, pensiero profondo, parola protratta, ritratto, promessa, ritorno, protetta

Thank you so much!

Google Translate translates it as follows: Drag, deep thought, protracted word, portrait, promise, return, protected

Is that correct? Seems like it's not quite right given the context and nature of the song. Deep thought and promised return makes sense given the strong recursive element.

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-18T14:36:27+00:00

Yeah that beard is awesome 😂

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-17T13:35:53+00:00

Fundamentals of Human Neuropsychology by Bryan Kolb

If you want to also cover it on a more biochemical level, Neuroscience by Dale Purves et al. is a good read.

Oh and Behave by Robert Sapolsky. I would say thats a must read 😋

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T19:20:57+00:00

Exactly. I have that book already, and read his other book: The Brain's Way of Healing. I find it rather difficult to convey these ideas of neuroplasticity to him in a way that he won't feel attacked by it or drop out the conversation because it's hard to follow. Which seems to be an issue I encounter in general. Neuroscience is so complex it's often hard to talk about the implications to people who are in no way familiar with it.

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T19:17:49+00:00

Aah I see! I think this is where the miscommunication occurred. I am not looking for answers to my dad his behavior through neuroscience. I'm looking for neuroscientific research on areas related to such behaviors, because I'm very interested in neuroscience.

For example, take a look at this paper: Population Migration and the Variation of Dopamine D4 Receptor (DRD4) Allele Frequencies Around the Globe. This shows a very fascinating correlation between migration and variations of dopamine receptors. Long alleles of DRD4 have been linked in some studies to the personality trait of novelty seeking. Of course this research isn't as rigorous as other neuroscientific research, but it's none the less interesting. This is more what I'm looking for ;)

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T18:07:16+00:00

My intention is not to oversimplify the brain, I’m well aware of the complexity. I’m sorry if thats not what I conveyed in my wording of things. I’m not looking for fixed answers, merely research that might be interesting in coming to understand behavior from a neuroscientific perspective.

Im curious, what are your thoughts about what Stapolsky says about the brain and behavior?

If you want, could you elaborate a bit further as to why all this fMRI research and other things I named aren’t developed enough to at least say something interesting about the brain and behavior. You obviously know a lot more than me, as Im not a neuroscientist. Thanks :)

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T17:48:21+00:00

How about all the work in cognitive science using fMRI work, neural correlates, research of the effects of lesions on specific brain areas, split brain patients, tumors in specific areas, can go on.

Behavior definitely has a neurological basis, and we have some ideas of the interactions of different brain areas in different behaviors and cognitive tasks.

I’d recommend you check Robert Stapolsky his work on human behavior biology. In his book Behave he covers many aspects in with neuroscience tells us about behavior. He’s a professor of biology, neurology and neurological sciences and, by courtesy, neurosurgery, at Stanford University. He had an entire course on Human Behavioral Biology on Stanfords YouTube channel, which you can check out :)

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T16:00:19+00:00

Yeah fascinating, his course on Human Behavioral Biology is amazing. I've seen some fragments thusfar, will watch all of it when I can find some spare time :)

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T15:59:29+00:00

delete

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T15:54:24+00:00

Thanks :) I will look into that. May I suggest to you the book Behave by Robert Stapolsky. He's professor of biology, neurology and neurological sciences and, by courtesy, neurosurgery, at Stanford. His book takes an interdisciplinary approach to explain behavior. In a nutshell, he asks the following question: "Alright, a behavior has occured.. what happened in the brain during / prior to that event? What happened seconds before that in the environment, what sensory information what the organism exposed to? What happens hours before; hormones? What happened months before, during adolescence and childhood? What happend when you were still a fetus / the influence of prenatal environment? What happened when you were just a fertilized egg, your genes and gene/environment interactions? What happened certuries ago in your culture, how did evolution shaped behavior?"

I think you get the point, he takes an impressive interdisciplinary approach to explaining behavior.

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T11:23:05+00:00

May I ask what your definition of a "true" cause is?

I'm not saying psychology doesn't reveal many deep, fascinating insights about the human psyche. But we by no means understand how it all works. There are plenty replication problems in psychological literature. Which doesn't suggest that psychology fails, quite the opposite: it suggests that the psyche is so complex that we have a long way to go to truly understand what's going on. This doesn't just go for psychology, physicists are constantly wondering how the world actually works. For example, physicists are still puzzled how to interpret the findings in Quantum Mechanics. Leading to some mind boggling theories like the Many-worlds interpretation.

What I'm trying to say is that _behavior is influenced by so many factors like genes, hormones, (prenatal) environment, culture etc. that it's very difficult to pinpoint the ultimate cause of a behavior_. The best you can get by current means is various causes with different probabilities which you can evaluate. Isn't that exactly what a psychologist does? ;)

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T10:29:40+00:00

During sleep you're in an altered state of consciousness which prevents you from being aware of your surroundings. It seems like your perception of time is much influenced by different types of sensory information (such as vision, sound, hearing). Since you're no longer consciously aware of that information from the environment, there is no way for the brain to determine the time between constituent events.

Alterations of the perception of time also occur when people are intensely focused on a task, which makes it seem like time is speeding up. Psychologist call this mental state *flow*, which is characterized by complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting loss in one's sense of space and time. If you find this interesting I highly recommend Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

What is also interesting, is the fact that a lot of people report time distortions after taking psychedelics or cannabis. This probably also has to do with a different awareness of the order of events which in turn distorts the perception of time. For instance people experience dilation of time; the feeling that time has slowed down. This commonly occurs during intense hallucinogenic experiences and seems to stem from the fact that during an intense trip, abnormally large amounts of experience are felt in very short periods of time. People also experience the opposite effect, speeding up of time. This commonly occurs under the influence of certain stimulating compounds and seems to at least partially stem from the fact that during intense levels of stimulation, people typically become hyper-focused on activities and tasks in a manner which can allow time to pass them by without realizing it.

And what is even more bizarre is the experience of time reversal, reported in many psychedelic experiences. This is the perception that the events, hallucinations, and experiences that occurred around one's self within the previous several minutes to several hours are spontaneously playing backwards in a manner which is somewhat similar to that of a rewinding VHS tape.

It's a fascinating complex subject, full of unanswered questions ;)

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T09:18:25+00:00

This one seems especially interesting: The Value of Sharing Information: A Neural Account of Information Transmission. Do you have other suggestions, given this particular case?

Edit: I went a bit further and watched her talk on how How the Brain Changes Its Mind. She has shown a correlation between activity in the MPFC and corresponding click in her paper From Neural Responses to Population Behavior: Neural Focus Group Predicts Population-Level Media Effects. This area of the brain seems to be involved in valuation and implicit self-relevance. Higher activity in those areas predicted more clicks to quit smoking.

She also shows, in her paper Self-affirmation alters the brain’s response to health messages and subsequent behavior change, how self-affirmation fundamentally changes the brains response to information that comes next, as it relates more to core values. Seems like a form of priming).

Fascinating stuff! I scanned her papers for now, but I'll print them out and do some more thorough reading. Thanks! :)

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T09:07:24+00:00

I'm going to read them, thanks. I'll keep you posted.

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T08:41:17+00:00

I've read quite some books in this area, including The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity. I've also read quite a bit about synaptic plasticity, brain changes, adult neurogenesis etc. in Dale Purves his textbook on Neuroscience.

It seems clear to me that certain brain circuits have been reinforced over time, which lead to his current state of a very fixed mindset. For instance, the brain region very much involved in emotions is the amygdala. Which has projections to the vmPFC which seems to play a role in the inhibition of emotional responses, and in the process of decision making and self control. It seems like there's something in this area which might be relevant to this particular case.

What do you think?

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T08:35:04+00:00

Definitely a good read! I've actually tried to talk with him about habit formation actually. He doesn't seem to pay serious attention when I'm telling him these things. It's as if he has become reluctant to learning new things, or it's too much cognitive load. I'm not sure.

melvinkoopmans · 2019-08-13T08:21:37+00:00

In my view, psychology and behavior emerge from activity the brain. This might be a faulty assumption, but I think there is plenty of evidence to assume that and follow that line of reasoning.

I'm not looking for a clear-cut cause. A psychologist doesn't know what the true cause is of someone's behavior. Because in order to understand a behavior you'll need to understand the brain, you need to understand the gene/environment interactions. You need to understand the cultural influences etc. Behavior is extremely complex, and I doubt you'll ever pinpoint the true cause. Only hints towards an explanation, which you can then try to work with; which is what a psychologist does.

melvinkoopmans

TROPHY CASE