THE MELTONIAN WEEKLY

THIS WEEK'S DISPATCH

Issue · Week of May 22–29, 2026

A heavy week on the publication side — seven new pieces out across Substack, Medium, and KDP — and more additions to the Boat Yoga line over on Etsy. The connective thread, if there is one, is the brain again: what an LLM does to the EEG when a student leans on it, what a stroke teaches us about the architecture of mental imagery, why sleep gets harder past sixty, and the new ADHD work suggesting that forty years of the wrong diagnostic name may have just been quietly retired. Then a swerve into theoretical physics, the climate ledger for the month, and a piece on the gap between American AI investment and American AI use. The full slate below.

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ON SUBSTACK

Cognitive Debt: What MIT Saw on the EEG When Students Used ChatGPT

THE STUPIDITY THRESHOLD SERIES · LONG-FORM ESSAY

Kosmyna et al. (MIT Media Lab, 2025) ran 32-region EEGs on participants writing SAT essays with ChatGPT, search engines, or no tools. The ChatGPT users showed the lowest brain engagement, struggled to quote their own essays back, and reported the lowest sense of ownership. By session four, many had defaulted to copy-paste. The piece situates the finding alongside Barcaui and the Fan et al. "metacognitive laziness" replication, then makes the argument that distinguishes LLM offload from calculator offload — the offload is at the level of synthesis, not retrieval. Ends with a use protocol rather than a refusal. The most efficient possible mechanism for crossing the Threshold without noticing.

Read it: meltonian.substack.com​

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ON MEDIUM

Aphantasia as Functional Disconnection

A NEW MODEL OF HOW THE MIND BUILDS (OR FAILS TO BUILD) AN IMAGE

Anchored on the Liu & Bartolomeo 2025 Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper that names the model. Traces the discovery from Galton through Zeman's 2015 naming, through the Paris 7T fMRI work, the Spagna FIN meta-analysis, the Monzel/McCormick eLife hippocampal–occipital study, to the new Kutsche lesion data showing 100% connectivity to a single small region in the left fusiform. The takeaway: aphantasia isn't a missing image generator — it's a connectivity failure between concept and percept.

ADHD Isn't an Attention Problem. It's an Energy Problem.

FORTY YEARS OF THE WRONG NAME, AND THE PAPER THAT MAY HAVE FINISHED THE JOB

The argument moves through five evidentiary layers — Sergeant's cognitive-energetic model, Volkow's PET work, the Kay et al. Cell paper from December showing stimulants act on arousal and reward networks rather than attention networks, the default-mode literature, and supporting recent work on hypercuriosity, rejection sensitivity, and clinical context. A reframe of forty years of diagnostic shorthand that anyone who's lived with the condition will recognize on sight.

Sleep, Glorious Sleep

OVERCOMING INSOMNIA AND RESTORING RESTFUL NIGHTS AS YOU AGE

The myth that older adults need less sleep, what's actually changing in sleep architecture, the dementia/glymphatic mechanism, falls, depression, the Beers Criteria on why pills fail older adults, and CBT-I as the evidence-based first line with its four components broken out. Closes with a practical tonight-and-this-week sleep-hygiene checklist. Heavy on primary authorities — NIA, AASM, ACP, Nature Communications, AJPM.

Adoption Faster Than the Internet: Reading the Stanford 2026 AI Index

U.S. CONSUMER VALUE $172B ANNUALLY — AND RANKED 24TH IN ADOPTION

Generative AI hit 53% population adoption in three years — outpacing both the PC and the internet. U.S. consumer surplus reached $172 billion annually. And yet the U.S. ranks 24th in adoption rate (28.3%) while Singapore sits at 61%. The piece works through what the gap between American AI capital and American AI usage actually tells us, with the Kentucky admin assistant doing it on Tuesday afternoons grounding the abstraction.

Strings from Almost Nothing

NEW RESEARCH SUGGESTS STRING THEORY MAY BE DERIVABLE FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES

Clifford Cheung and colleagues at Caltech have shown — in work accepted to Physical Review Letters — that the string-theoretic Veneziano amplitude can be derived from a minimal set of consistency requirements: unitarity, causality, locality, Lorentz invariance. The piece traces the bootstrap program from Caron-Huot, Komargodski, Sever and Zhiboedov through Häring-Zhiboedov and Arkani-Hamed's hidden-zeros work, and lays out what the result does and doesn't claim. Honest about the skeptical voices — Woit, Eichhorn, Hossenfelder — and what would actually constitute experimental progress.

Meltonian Climate Brief — May 2026

THE LAST 4–6 WEEKS IN TEMPERATURE, ICE, OCEAN, POLICY, AND LAW

Seven sections covering April 2026 as joint third-warmest April; the ninth consecutive record year for ocean heat content; new AMOC observations from Miami and a Portmann et al. Science Advances projection of 51% slowdown by 2100; Arctic winter ice tying its record low on 15 March; the Met Office CO₂ forecast at 432.2 ppm; World Weather Attribution on the South Asia pre-monsoon heatwave; the National Academies' 14 May tipping-points consensus review; and the UN General Assembly's 141–8 vote endorsing the ICJ climate ruling on 20 May. Twenty-nine endnotes.

All six are at medium.com/@meltonian.

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NEW FROM MELTONIAN TECHNICAL

Understanding Inflammation: The Hidden Biology of Aging

PLAIN-LANGUAGE GUIDE · KDP

Inflammaging — the chronic, low-grade inflammatory state that underlies cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration, metabolic syndrome, and depression — is one of the most important concepts in modern longevity science, and one of the worst-served. The market is wall-to-wall "anti-inflammatory" diet books and supplement pitches; almost nothing exists at the science-literacy end. Fourteen focused chapters: what it is, the six biological drivers (senescence, immunosenescence, gut microbiome, mitochondrial dysfunction, visceral fat, chronic stress), the CANTOS trial and what it proved about cause vs. correlation, what an hsCRP test actually tells you, what the randomized evidence shows about diet/exercise/sleep/stress, and where senolytics and metformin actually stand. Rigorous about what the evidence supports, honest about what it doesn't.

Available now on Amazon: Meltonian Technical author page.

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FROM THE SHOP

NEW THIS WEEK​
​More Boat Yoga​
​Additional poses in the line that gives the contortions of sailboat maintenance the dignity of Sanskrit-adjacent names.

The Boat Yoga line continues to expand in the shop this week — more shirts, mugs, totes, and prints have landed, working through the catalog of impossible positions sailors fold themselves into while repairing things. The opening lineup runs through Bilgasana, The Lazarette Lunge, Engine Box Cobra, V-Berth Fold, Mast Boot Mountain, Stuffing Box Spinal Twist, Head Repair Child's Pose, The Chainplate Pretzel, Icebox Inversion, and the two-person classic — The Two-Person Through-Hull — with one sailor in the bilge and one on deck, neither able to see the other, both mid-shout. If you know someone who's ever surfaced from a cockpit locker with sealant on their cheek, this is the gift.

Browse the new Boat Yoga line: etsy.com/shop/meltonian.

The Rest of the Shop

The nautical humor line continues — B.O.A.T. (Break Out Another Thousand), Sorry For What I Said While Docking, the Cat Captain series — all staged for the Memorial Day → Father's Day → summer-on-the-water run that's now fully underway. And the neurodivergent line continues to land regularly — identity-affirming pieces for adults who got their diagnosis later in life, with "Diagnosed at 50. Everything finally makes sense." still the breakout.

Full shop: etsy.com/shop/meltonian​

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ELSEWHERE

All my links in one place: lnk.bio/mcclarke​

Bluesky: @meltonian.bsky.social​

YouTube & Twitch: @meltonianm​

Subscribe to the newsletter: optimistic-mover-9468.kit.com​

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Thanks for reading.

— Mel

THE MELTONIAN

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