Health & Training · Week of August 20, 2026
Cognitive costs of outsourcing thought, and where evidence-based care draws its lines
- The Cognitive Offloading Front: When Delegating to AI Erodes the Reasoning It AssistsSouth Africa's Draft National AI Policy was withdrawn earlier this year after reviewers discovered something embarrassing: some of its citations pointed to journal articles and authors that did not exist. The references …
- Defining Treatment-Resistant Depression: Should Failed Psychotherapy Count Alongside Failed Drugs?Thirty-two percent. In the LQD trial—the pragmatic Lithium versus Quetiapine study—that's the fraction of patients who met criteria for treatment-resistant depression while never having received psychological therapy dur…
- Extreme Heat Is Degrading Cognition and Learning—and Schools Are UnderpreparedHere is a contradiction worth sitting with.
- Comparison, Cynicism, and Blind Spots: The Functional Side of How We Read OthersSeveral times a day, you compare yourself to your romantic partner. Not to your coworker, not to the stranger crushing it on Instagram—to the person across the kitchen table. Per the research, that is reportedly who you …
- The Fasting Window Illusion: Matched-Calorie Trials Show Timing Isn't the MechanismArticle — "The Fasting Window Illusion: Matched-Calorie Trials Show Timing Isn't the Mechanism": Thirty-one women ate nearly identical meals—same calories, same nutrients—for two weeks at a time. The only difference was …
Threads we are following
- Whether challenger-configured AI tools actually restore reasoning workload in real workplace deployments, or just get switched off
- Whether the FDA or EMA will amend TRD staging rules to require documented psychotherapy adequacy before device escalation
- Will any district publicly adopt a 'cognitive snow day' testing policy for extreme-heat days this coming school year?
- Whether symmetric-feedback interventions can durably recalibrate trust instincts outside the lab
- Whether early time-restricted eating (morning-aligned windows) improves insulin sensitivity independent of calories, once a non-restricted control is tested
One issue a week. Free.
sift. reads hundreds of sources so you don't have to, and sends one issue you can actually finish. No daily noise. Unsubscribe anytime.