🚨Please repost widely! Are you into VR and cognitive rehab? Looking for a research technician to work with me in Pamplona @unav.edu on developing a multimodal XR system for stroke rehab (VYSIUM HEALTH). This project is financed by the Government of Navarra and FEDER. Apply here or DM me!

Nature suggests you use their "Manuscript Adviser" bot to get advice before submitting I uploaded the classic Watson & Crick paper about DNA structure, and the Adviser had this to say about one of the greatest paper endings of the century:

I feel bad for Panpsychism. Too many of its contemporary proponents give it a bad name as a lazy rhetoric humping polemic proposal. I sometimes wonder what would happen if a good philosopher picked it up and brought this idea into the 21st century.

You can really hear the silence.

Absolutely brilliant! #consci

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

Monty Python understood p-hacking

Is someone running a study to see how consciousness researchers react to crazy emails about AI, metaphysics, and or consciousness? I have run out of explanations for why I am getting so many random emails with manuscripts on this topic asking for feedback.

It is an enormous pleasure—and a dream, really—to share that the University of Bamberg has approved an initiative dedicated to mathematical approaches in #ConSci. The initiative is called Bamberg Mathematical Consciousness Science Initiative, or BAMΞ for short. bamxi.org #BAMΞ @uni-bamberg.de

New preprint! "Non-commitment in mental imagery is distinct from perceptual inattention, and supports hierarchical scene construction" (by Li, Hammond, & me) link: doi.org/10.31234/osf... -- the title's a bit of a mouthful, but the nice thing is that it's a pretty decent summary

New paper! This one is going to raise some eyebrows, so I want to explain the details before people get all worked-up about the title. 1/N www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014... A short thread [1/5]👇

There is no need to simulate multiple alternatives according to an internal model and then select one in order to navigate the environment. F&M articulate their view of perceptual consciousness in terms of this kind of implicit model-based planning, which we think does not exist. (4/7)

🐭 Mouse faces reveal hidden thoughts Researchers found that subtle facial expressions in mice reflect not only their current decisions but also unexpressed cognitive states, offering a new window into brain activity. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #SciComm #Neuroscience 🧪

What does postdiction show about the speed of consciousness? In this forth. piece in BBS, I respond to @smfleming.bsky.social + @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's claim that postdiction shows consciousness is slow -- too slow for its purpose to be online action guidance. 1/3 philpapers.org/rec/PHIPAT-14

This one looks intriguing. Arousal "embedding" whole-brain dynamics. 🤯 #neuroskyence #compneurosky doi.org/10.1038/s415...

I am recruiting graduate students for Fall 2026 through both the cognitive and developmental areas at Ohio State. If you are interested in spatial cognition, visual perception, and/or mental representation -- please reach out! I'd love to hear from you. www.cogdevlab.org

Wta? Mind you I got an AI summary that insisted people who had been awarded PhDs were more likely to get Alzheimer’s. Perplexed, I looked up the original. It defined PHD as primary headache disorder. The AI took the statistically more likely abbreviation and came up with its idiotic response. Sigh!

Proofs are in for my paper. The copy editor asks me to provide the given name for the reference to Aristotle. Amazing.

🧠⚽ Spot the ball! New benchmark for visual scene understanding! We ask: Can people and models locate a hidden ball in sports images using only visual context and reasoning? 🕹️ Try the task: v0-new-project-9b5vt6k9ugb.vercel.app #CogSci2025

My PhD student Trevor Hewitt is conducting an online experiment into closed-eye visuals during psychedelic experiences. If you've had such an experience, please consider taking part at closed-eyes.com (it's only a short survey) - and/or help us spread the word. 🙏🏽🧠

When billion-dollar AIs break down over puzzles a child can do, it's time to rethink the hype | Gary Marcus

Alison Gopnik describes AI as "Stone Soup" and anytime you can reference a vaguely socialist folktale from Eastern Europe and apply it to Silicon Valley technology I am here for it. buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/ai-is-ston...

applying for jobs again

We're hiring 2 Postdoctoral Fellows at IIT Gandhinagar's INT Lab! Join us to advance research in NeuroAI or Precision Imaging. Apply by May 30, 2025. Details: tiny.cc/NeuroAI | tiny.cc/PrecisionIma... Apply: tiny.cc/pdf-2

With nervous excitement, my most ambitious project yet: Dynamics of mental imagery. We got over 800 people to recreate the contents of their mental imagery with a focus on distinct phenomenological properties. Temporal grain, smoothness, stability. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... a 🧵1/n

Deciphering temporal scales of visual awareness: insights from flicker frequency modulation in continuous flash suppression- Ishan Singhal and Narayanan Srinivasan academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, says its bandwidth costs have gone up 50% since Jan 2024 — a rise they attribute to AI crawlers. AI companies are killing the open web by stealing visitors from the sources of information and making them pay for the privilege

Why aren’t ghosts blind? open.substack.com/pub/petemand...

Abstract submission for #TRF4 is now open!! @timingresforum.bsky.social Symposium Proposals : March 15 - April 20 Oral and poster presentations : March 15 - May 31
 sites.google.com/view/trf4tok...

Interested in neural timescales? Join @shiyanliang.bsky.social and I at the first poster session @cosynemeeting.bsky.social to learn about a new organizational principle of neural timescales beyond the hierarchy, across the whole mouse brain! #cosyne2025

An emotional day - I can announce I'll be the first director of The Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience at the LSE, supported by a £4m grant from the Jeremy Coller Foundation. Our mission: to develop better policies, laws and ways of caring for animals. (1/2) www.lse.ac.uk/News/Latest-...

Can't wait! Catch me discussing the last five years of my work on time-consciousness tomorrow.

Out now! Different aspects of visual awareness evolve over distinct timescales. Evidence from manipulations of the flicker rate in a continuos flash suppression (CFS) paradigms. A 🧵 1/n academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

Let's talk about this Nature piece in more detail. I've rarely read something so anti-scientific anywhere short of the National Review. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Watch this video. Do you remember seeing a ball in the second half of the video? Up to 37% of our participants reported seeing a ball, even though it wasn’t there. Why? In a new paper in press @ Cognition, Brent Strickland and I ask what causes event completion. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Hello, Could you recommend funding sources or grant opportunities for PhD students specializing in consciousness studies, embodied cognition, or embodiment? If you know of any relevant foundations or other resources, I would greatly appreciate your insights. Thank you! #Consci #AcademicSky #PhDSky

Hello! I'm looking to hire a post-doc, to start this Summer or Fall. It'd be great if you could share this widely with people you think might be interested. More details on the position & how to apply: bit.ly/cocodev_post... Official posting here: academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/14723

osf.io/preprints/ps... nice article, on why we may be totally wrong about aphantasia = imagery blindsight but i'm not sure i agree that for imagery representations to be perception-like, they need to be cross-decodable w/ normal perception. the brain can multiplex two sets of iconic signals 🧠📈

To wrap up the year, I thought I'll do a post about all failed academic achievements this year. Journal Paper Rejections: 5 Grant Rejections: 3 Failed Postdoc Applications: 3 Conference Rejections: 3 Rejected Book Proposals: 1 Hoping to do better next year on all these fronts!

Why has no one cross posted this paper to #PhilSky ? On Bullshit is a 2005 book (originally a 1986 essay) by the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt which presents a theory of bullshit that defines the concept and analyzes the applications of bullshit in the context of communication.

Why is reality so slow? Why can we only have one thought at a time? Why do we need so many neurons? Will Elon Musk's Neuralink really speed up his cognition? For answers and more questions check out our new review: "The Unbearable Slowness of Being". arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

Call for Papers! NeuroExp 2025 - Explanation in Cognitive Neuroscience: From empirical case studies to philosophical analysis 19.-21. Februrary 2025 Further info: neuroexp2025.sciencesconf.org #philsci #neurosky #cogsci #neuroscience #compneuro #compneurosky #philsky #philCognition #philMemory 🧪

Are theories of consciousness (ToC) about the same thing? Yes ✅ To show this, we unify 6 ToC, arguing that they each capture unique aspects of temporal phenomenology. Putting experience first, helps collective theorizing. Out now 🧵: psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-...

We are officially open to the world! Bye bye invites 👋 techcrunch.com/2024/02/06/b...

Aaron Swartz should/must never be forgotten... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_S...

We're on the lookout for passionate minds to join us as reviewers for #CogSci2024. This is your chance to be among the first to check out groundbreaking research while playing a crucial role in shaping the future of #CogSci Visit cognitivesciencesociety.org/submissions/ and fill out the form today!