confused Ape

Exercise improves brain health, but can it also delay brain aging? In a randomized controlled trial, we show that moderate- and heavy-resistance training significantly reduced accelerated aging in brain clocks (estimated with fMRI). The effect is global and distributed, not confined to single brain hubs. Simple, scalable interventions can meaningfully shape brain clock trajectories in healthy aging. Move the body to slow the brain’s tick-tock. Congrats @rglezgz and the full team: Naiara Demnitz, Carlos Coronel, @TheilGates Michael Kjaer, @HSiebner & Carl-Johan Boraxbekk. #LISA team @GBHI_Fellows Paper: doi.org/10.1007/s11357-026-0…

89% of organ transplant recipients report personality changes following their procedure. Perhaps cognition is not just localized to the brain.

There is no free will, I'll just say it. The idea makes people feel like they’re the authors of their own script. But, in any rule based reality, absolute free will is impossible. Every universe, every simulation, every dream, every biological body operates inside parameters, laws, constants, and constraints. You don’t get to bend gravity. You don’t get to rewrite your genetics. You don’t get to unlive your conditioning. And if you can’t do that, then you’re not free. You’re playing inside a sandbox built before you ever took your first breath. You didn’t design the rules at all. You didn’t choose the character. You just woke up and started playing the role thinking you were doing something. And even if you try to escape that box mentally, you still slam into the walls of causality. Every “decision” you make is the end point of a chain of causes that started before you existed. Your preferences, your desires, your fears, your impulses, your beliefs; none of them were chosen by you. They were built from genetics, trauma, culture, history, memory, chemical states, survival patterns. Neuroscience already proved the point that the brain fires the decision before you’re even aware of having made it. Consciousness shows up late to the party, slaps its signature on the action, and says “I did that.” Ego. It’s the equivalent of a mascot taking credit for winning the game. Most try to dodge this by pointing at dreams or consciousness like they’re secret cheat codes. But dreams don’t rescue you at all; they expose the trap. In dreams you can fly, change forms, talk to dead relatives, breathe underwater. The physics are fluid. The landscape makes no sense. Yet even there, you’re not choosing anything. You don’t decide what appears. You don’t design the environment. Your subconscious throws up symbols and you react to them. And even in lucid dreams; where you get a taste of “control”, that “controller” is just another construct inside the dream. The moment you wake up, the whole thing collapses. The only thing that remains is awareness. The character dies; the projector remains. Advaita Vedanta (which I follow) nails this, and cuts like a blade. The person doesn’t have free will because the person doesn’t exist as a separate, independent doer. Life is a movie playing on the screen of consciousness. The body mind is a character following its programming. Karma, conditioning, cause and effect; that’s the film reel. Awareness is the projector. And the projector doesn’t do anything. It just illuminates whatever frame shows up. The character screams, suffers, loves, fights, chooses, but none of that touches the light. That’s why you can’t find a “first decision.” There never was one. The doer is imaginary, the doing is conditioned, the witnessing is untouched. You cannot have free will inside the story, because the story is already written at the level of cause and effect. And you cannot have free will outside the story, because outside the story there is no character left to choose. Consciousness isn’t bound by rules, but it also doesn’t act. It doesn’t decide. It doesn’t pursue preferences. It just is. So in both directions; within the rules and beyond them, there is no free will. There is only the appearance of choice in the dream and the freedom of being beyond choice in the real. Once you understand that, the whole argument collapses, and what’s left is the one thing nobody likes to face; you were never the author, only the awareness watching the script unfold.