Menstruation can often come with a degree of discomfort as the uterus prepares to shed. For some, the effects can be horrendous.

It’s estimated that some 5 to 8 percent of women experience moderate to severe symptoms that have a noticeably negative impact on their lives, mental health, and ability to function normally. These premenstrual disorders, or PMDs, affect millions of women globally, yet we know shockingly little about their long-term consequences.

Now, a new nationwide observational study in Sweden has shown that women with PMDs have an increased risk of suicide. In fact, they’re more than twice as likely to die by suicide as women without PMDs. It’s a sobering figure, one that strongly suggests more work needs to be done to understand PMDs, and help the people who suffer from them.

First written: Dec 14, 2018, Last update: Jan 2, 2019.

How can we think about the relationship between the conscious and the physical? In this essay, I wish to propose a way of thinking about it that might be fruitful and surprisingly intuitive, namely to think of consciousness as waves.

The idea is quite simple: one kind of conscious experience corresponds to, or rather conforms to description in terms of, one kind of wave. And by combining different kinds of waves, we can obtain an experience with many different properties in one.

NOTE on Aut-generated English caption: in 1:08–1:12, auto-generated English caption says “Inner Dilemma” but actually it is “Yoneda lemma”(Thanks Junko and M…

According to the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett, a conscious state is a brain state that is spread out in both space and time. It is spread out in the brain across multiple instances of what Dennett calls “content fixations.” These content fixations are the “multiple drafts” in the theory’s name. Each of these drafts compete for domination in the cognitive system. This domination is what Dennett calls “fame in the brain.” Read more about it here: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/M…

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