This is good 🧠🧪🐡

APA Monitor article on what happens in the brain when we view art www.apa.org/monitor/2025... #neuroaesthetics

A new study uses AI-generated stimuli to uncover attention to complex scene features. Read more in a post by @ankosov.bsky.social on a new #psynomAPP paper by @songaeun.bsky.social, @drmack.bsky.social, and @dirkbwalther.bsky.social buff.ly/2So7ndD

📣 Call for unpublished studies on discrimination of bisexual people! ⬇️ Please see the full call below We are very grateful for all contributions! #SocialPsych #PsychSciSky

I've been selected as a 2026 Osher Fellow at the California Academy of Sciences (@calacademy.bsky.social), for a project with Indre Viskontas (@indrevis.bsky.social) and Cal Academy. Thanks so much to Rhonda Rubenstein and for facilitating this opportunity! www.calacademy.org/osher-fellows

Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇

No brush, no pencil. Just a typewriter. Artist James, using a 1930s Smith Premier typewriter, typed out this painting. #art #printer #unique #typewriter #illustration

This paper shows that some human "gestalt" style visual processing can emerge in purely feedforward deep nets with the right inductive biases and fine-tuning: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... 🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

Huge thanks to the #VSAC2025 organizers for such an incredible conference! Special thanks to everyone who stopped by my poster "From preliminary findings to a large-scale diary study: Investigating aesthetic experience in everyday life" - loved the insightful discussions and exchanges! 🤓💡

Had a blast chatting with @neildegrassetyson.com on @startalkradio.bsky.social ’s podcast about how AI and neuroscience come together startalkmedia.com/show/mindrea...

(link fixed) New theory: Categorization is Baked Into the Brain It is not at the end of sensory processing but a core computation that begins at the earliest stages, occurring throughout the cortex as predictive feedback shapes feedforward processing. #neuroscience doi.org/10.31234/osf...

Eye movements, vision and memory through the lens of Sherlock - awesome collaborative project led by @matthiasnau.bsky.social

✨ Does our body resonate differently when an everyday object is reframed by an artist as ready-made art? Full story & #OpenScience #Rcode are available in our latest publication Ruta, Schino, Wolfe & Iosifyan (2025) Scientific Reports ➡️ www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Eek. This is not good, and will definitely impact CCNY, which is an HSI. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/u...

How much does the environment we’re raised in change how we see the world? Wonderful piece in @sciam.bsky.social by @norabradford.bsky.social, ft. an interview with @dorsaamir.bsky.social about our work on the 'cultural byproduct hypothesis'. www.scientificamerican.com/article/does...

Preschoolers Selectively Attend to Speech That They Can Learn More From by ‪@ruthefoushee.bsky.social‬ and colleagues onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This is such an insane statistic that it's hard to understand. 40% of what is shipped is fossil fuels -- not 40% of things are shipped *by* fossil fuels. 40% of *what is being carried* is the fossil fuels themselves.

At #CCN2025? Check out these VisNALab posters Tues Aug 12: A158: Testing a Learning Theory of Aesthetic Appeal Using Category Learning and Deep Neural Networks (Vessel et al.) A144: Characterizing the temporal profile of meaning-making with visual art (Welke & Vessel) @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

Out today! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Interested in Arts & Health? Read my response to a recent critique of the field in Physics of Life Reviews. To Punch Down or to Build Up: Comment on "Can Arts-Based Interventions Improve Health? A Conceptual and Methodological Critique" by Skov & Nadal. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

It looks like all NSF/NIH grants to UCLA (including mine and all fundamental neuroscience grants) have been suspended. www.science.org/content/arti...

I'm quoted in this article about a recent paper on "The Beholder's Share" in abstract art. www.medscape.com/viewarticle/....

Gaah. These NYT interviews by Douthat with big figures on the right are extremely illuminating, and also exasperating. In this one, I don’t understand what ever accelerating progress is supposed to get us? Peter Thiel and the Antichrist www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/o...

"Eureka! The brain science behind lightbulb moments" - Excellent coverage in Nature of research on the neuroscience of Aha moments, including our research on this phenomenon. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

We show that memantine selectively improves neural decoding of attended illusory Kanizsa triangles, revealing NMDA receptor-dependent enhancement of feedback processing. elifesciences.org/articles/100... Thanks to Samuel Noorman @fahrenfort.bsky.social @timostein.bsky.social Jasper Zantvoord

Massive congrats to @neocosmliang.bsky.social for receiving the #OHBM Merit Award for his work on “the domain general neural signature of perceived object beauty”🌹 #ECR @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social @cognizelab.bsky.social

Article in NYTimes on changes in diagnostic standards. “Autism Rates Have Increased 60-Fold. I Played a Role in That.” www.nytimes.com/2025/06/23/o...

every year my lab does a re-read + edit of our Handbook, a documentation resource for how we do science this year we also updated our Public Handbook, an open-access version for folks wanting to improve their own docs it's at handbook-public.themusiclab.org and available for noncommercial re-use

⚡ New preprint ⚡ Long ago, I heard a talk about our remarkable ability to remember 1000s of images, after seeing each only once. How do brains manage it? 🤔 After years, this reflects the answer I was looking for. Congrats to Simon Bohn et al. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... More: /1

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders? We're not sure if a hummingbird is more closely related to a pigeon or to a penguin. 🪶🧪

Evidence in support of the "Brain from the inside out": Response to movies is dominated by intrinsic brain dynamics. The dynamic itself is barely alternatered by the task of watching movies. Human intracranial recordings from 5000 electrodes, now out in eLife. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Our paper “Chimpanzees yawn when observing an android yawn” is published in ScientificReports¦Nature Led by Ramiro Joly-Mascheroni, collaborating with @fundaciomona @ramiyoyo.bsky.social @tinaforster.bsky.social @springernature.com #SocialCognition #yawning #android #chimpanzees PDF: rdcu.be/epCQU

Characterising the Creative Process in Humans and Large Language Models arxiv.org/abs/2405.00899

No joke .. I participated in the CCNY commencement faculty procession for the first time on Friday, and they played “Imperial March,” the Darth Vader theme song, as we processed in.

I love this! A "Dance your PhD" winner about collective movement. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhYJ... by Manisha Biswas, Marcel Brass www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Today we're launching the first-of-its-kind Neuroarts Resource Center (NRC), a groundbreaking global digital platform created by the NeuroArts Blueprint Initiative, where people passionate about the arts and aesthetics come together to connect, collaborate and learn. www.neuroartsresourcecenter.com

Our recent research published in PNAS is featured today in the Research and Innovation at City College (RICC) Newsletter. Thanks so much to the CCNY Office of Research @ccnyresearch.bsky.social for your support and interest! thericc.com/exploring-em...

I was interviewed as part of this article on Neuroaesthetics. Also featuring @anjanchatterjee.bsky.social www.theoverview.art/neuroaesthet...

Exit to *exit* the subway 30 minutes before #handsoff starts. Good job, NYC!

Check out our new logo!

Where Creativity Meets Aesthetics: The Mirror Model of Art revisited with fMRI www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

If you have eye movements data, we would love to analyze it through the lens of patch foraging. Our next step is to reanalyze saccadic eye movements . Meanwhile , also directly fitting bayesian foraging models to these data. Paper here again for your reference: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Also very much in the Jody Culham @culhamari-lab.bsky.social fan club. A huge congratulations to Jody!

Former Cult Leader Reveals How He Escaped Needy Followers

🧠 Sadly missed the a.m. sessions, but managed to catch @edwardvessel.bsky.social’s lightning talk about his @cuny.edu lab’s great work “Using Personalized Deep Neural Networks to Model the Effect of Category Learning on Internal Representations of Art” #neuroaesthetics #artsky #psychsky #neurosky

Nice press release from CCNY on our latest paper. www.ccny.cuny.edu/news/new-pap...