With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Anthropomorphizing language conceals the limitations of AI, promoting misplaced trust. @emilymbender.bsky.social & @nannainie.bsky.social suggest focusing on a system’s functionalities: instead of saying a model is “good at” something, say what it is “good for." www.techpolicy.press/we-need-to-t...

Feel like this fresh year needs some serious culture change? We got you covered! With @clarekelly.bsky.social @eikofried.bsky.social Anna van 't Veer 📝 rdcu.be/eXja4

Gavin Monks, 48, is vaguely aware that before this morning he had hobbies, interests, and possessions, but has no idea what those could be, and even less idea where such possessions could ever be found.

Here, have a #painting. "Savage Rowan" came out of a challenge from an artist friend of mine where we both painted the same scene. This was mine and it eventually went to a good home in Galway. #art #SpeirGhorm #ArtYear

Where are the engineers, materials scientists, physicists who care about artificial lighting and noise reduction or dampening in different environments? Is anything being explored in terms of friendlier solutions that are sustainable and inexpensive? (1/2)

New podcast. An investigation of the emotion of shame as it applies over the festive period open.spotify.com/episode/0rW5...

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Passionate about women's mental health? Interested in brain stimulation? Excited by cutting edge neurotech? Come do a PhD with me! www.findaphd.com/phds/project... (thread)

Postdoc position available on our team, to work on the OptiCaT project - evaluating the use and impact of a community care intervention on psychiatric hospital admission and other health outcomes in people with learning disability and autistic people (1/2) www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/132727-...

Postdoc position available on our team, to work on the OptiCaT project - evaluating the use and impact of a community care intervention on psychiatric hospital admission and other health outcomes in people with learning disability and autistic people (1/2) www.kcl.ac.uk/jobs/132727-...

A #painting from a series I did of a bay in the west of Ireland. "Bertraghboy Bay 5" came out of a day cycling in Connemara where I was on a high from the incessant beauty of it all as every bay and mountain came into view. #art #SpeirGhorm #ArtAdventCalendar

Teach like a Luddite! In which I join @philnichols.bsky.social and @anterobot.bsky.social to argue for a Luddite praxis in education grounded in three elements: embracing strategic playfulness; developing localized tactics; and building networks of resistance. Read the article at Kappan:

An excellent letter from @cjcrompton.bsky.social on the profound challenge that the double empathy problem poses to how autism is described and researched.

Do you have an open working memory dataset and want it to be findable and reused? You can now add it to the Open WM Data Hub: williamngiam.github.io/OpenWMData! The collection of datasets tagged with useful metadata is steadily growing thanks to a small team of volunteers!

This is also a #neuro-affirming & integrative approach that suits autistic and other neurodivergent YP. @thewoodbug.bsky.social is fab on this topic! www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1... #monotropism

New editorial with @sarah595.bsky.social and @heasutherland.com We use our experiences working in UK special education and social care settings to explore some of the challenges of including autistic people with complex support needs in research. With recommendations!

On the Factor Fexcectorn and autism bicycle AI slop study: I got an answer from Springer Nature this morning that this scientific paper will be retracted! 🧪 Full story: nobreakthroughs.substack.com/p/riding-the...

New today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.

🚨Friends, we’re happy to share that our book is available for pre-order! 🎉 We aimed to cover all the foundations of the topic in an accessible manner for a large audience. It could help set up a bachelor-level curriculum on the topic. Pre-orders are very key for the fate of books: shorturl.at/Dxbif

There is no reason why systematic reviews can't be open. The data used for synthesis is *already* open and there are many excellent open source tools that can facilitate the easy sharing of analysis scripts. Here's a nice guide for performing open systematic reviews doi.org/10.1525/coll...

A complete and utter cockwomble has reportedly appointed themselves as an expert in your personal circumstances, deciding in their infinite wisdom that your autism is “only mild”.

Donders Institute seeks to appoint a new Scientific Director to lead our internationally oriented and interdisciplinary organisation 🌍🧠 Are you ready to help shape the future of brain, cognition, and behaviour research?👇 www.ru.nl/en/working-a...

New paper with @statsepi.bsky.social and @deevybee.bsky.social in which we show there's really no evidence for a link between the gut microbiome and autism www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

First up, this paper led by Bronagh McCoy: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... When noise and volatility are independently manipulated people behave differently depending on their anxious traits.

Thrilled to share our new paper, out now in @natneuro.nature.com, uncovering how estradiol, the most potent estrogen, modulates reinforcement learning and reward prediction errors across biological levels. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #blueprint 1/7

Now out in #ScienceAdvances: @baiweiliu.bsky.social and I ask how internal (goal) and external (sensory) selection are coordinated during visual search. The key insight: internal and external selection are not inherently serial, but may develop in parallel in the human brain: doi.org/10.1126/scia...

This work is now out in Nature Communications! 🎉 Computational signatures of uncertainty are reflected in motor cortex excitatory neurochemistry: www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-64702-6 Huge thanks to our amazing team! @beckyneuro.bsky.social @campsydept.bsky.social @camneuro.bsky.social

I'm looking to create an advisory group for a project on Monotropism, an attention-based theory of autism and potentially ADHD. If you or anybody you know is interested, please fill out the form below. Thank you! forms.office.com/Pages/Respon...

Parents of neurodivergent children in West Yorkshire seek support “They gave us a couple of sessions after the diagnosis, then some leaflets, then we were dropped from that service. It makes you feel unwanted." www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/...

"It’s essential that autistic people, regardless of age, have a way to communicate. Spoken words should not be valued above other methods, & AAC should never be taken away by parents, teachers, or caregivers. For many autistic people, using alternatives to speech is not a choice – it’s a lifeline."

@garymarcus.bsky.social argues for developing different, specialized AI tools for different domains, rather than hoping that one general artificial intelligence will be able to do everything. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/16/o... #AI

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Ammar I. Marvi, Nancy G. Kanwisher, et al: An efficient multifunction fMRI localizer for high-level visual, auditory, and cognitive regions in humans doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

happy to share this new article on reporting standards in autism intervention science: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41070555/ Autistic people deserve the highest standards of evidence based practice and reporting practices in this field fall woefully short. We offer recommendations to improve that.

“Uncritical adoption of AI, will inevitably create people without critical thinking, and this may be a feature - not a bug, as it represents an attack on human agency itself.” collectivefutures.blog/the-infrastr...

A #painting from Ireland's south coast. "Ardmore" is an exalted place for me, not because of the Round Tower, but because when I was small I stayed in a caravan and every day you'd jump over the dunes to the beach after first eating a bowl of Puffa Puffa Rice. #ArtYear #SpeirGhorm #TidesOutTuesday

“It could be because autistic people tend to have big, beautiful eyes, an air of mystique and a fathomless, unknowable heart… Oh. Oh, God. Er, excuse me for a minute.”

NEWS! Nation capable of spotting spurious link between paracetamol and autism still baffled by obvious link between guns and mass shootings

"CamCAN 15 years on" - a new preprint reviewing all findings about the cognitive neuroscience of ageing from sharing CamCAN data, led by @rhens.bsky.social : osf.io/preprints/ps...

A #painting from the southwest of Ireland "Bandon II" came out of times I spent cycling in West Cork, the town being one I've always enjoyed visiting. And I'm very much overdue another visit. Maybe this is what happens when you get older. I wonder if it's still orange? #ArtYear #SpeirGhorm #scape

The myth of optimality in human movement science www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

. @olivia.science and I had the honour to speak with Kent Anderson and Joy Moore on @disruptedscience.bsky.social 🧪 💫 🎬 🍿 Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9w0... 🎶👂 Podcast: open.spotify.com/episode/082h... 1/🧵

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

We are about a month away from releasing a complete refresh of the OSF user interface. The team has been working on this for a very long time, and we are very excited to be able to share it soon. A preview picture:

Just one of two big @nature.com papers from @intlbrainlab.bsky.social out today. This companion article illustrates the value of large-scale brain-wide recordings from mice performing a standardized task, giving new insights at cellular resolution into neural representations of prior information. 🧠🧪

Extraordinary resource! "Comprehensive recordings from 621,733 neurons in 297 brain areas of 139 mice (12 labs) performing a decision-making task with sensory, motor & cognitive components: a public dataset to understand how computations distributed across & within brain areas drive behaviour."👇🧪

I just finished reading this excellent paper, highly recommended.

The Fascinating Neuroscience of Lucid Dreaming www.brainfacts.org/thinking-sen...

NEW #AUTISM RESEARCH (@gavrobstew.bsky.social + @proffrancescahappe.bsky.social): Nearly 90% of middle-aged and older #autistic adults are undiagnosed in the UK; autistic adults are facing higher rates of mental and physical health conditions as they age www.kcl.ac.uk/news/up-to-9...