In continuing with this tradition of cataloguing failures to balance social media feeds, here goes for 2025. New manuscript submissions: 0 Failed attempts at dissertation awards: 2 Conference/workshop rejections: 2 Rejected book proposals: 1 Failed journal editor applications: 1 A new year awaits!

Computational Neurophenomenology in a cabin in the alps! March 22-29, supported by my @erc.europa.eu grant #CONSCIOUS & organised by @singhal.bsky.social @robertchisciure.bsky.social & team. Application deadline extended until *December 28*. Pls spread word: www.uni-bamberg.de/en/bamxi/res...

In the spirit of winter holidays, the deadline has been extended to 28th December! Last chance to apply to join the Consciousness Cabin workshop .. #consci #neuroskyence #visionresearch #philsky

"About 40% of voxels with significant BOLD signal changes during various tasks showed reversed oxygen metabolism, particularly in the default mode network... Our findings challenge the canonical interpretation of the BOLD signal" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41402521/ A BOLD challenge #fmri

Just decline the peer review invitation. What are you people even doing?

I've got a fully-funded PhD studentship open at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social, investigating social learning about metacognition & awareness, w/ behavioural studies & neuroimaging (fMRI) - thanks to @leverhulme.ac.uk More details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPV831/p... #cogsci #neuroskyence

A reminder for sending in your applications: Deadline approaching! (20th December)

The Groningen Spring school on Cognitive Modeling is back! Join us from March 30th-April 2nd, 2026! www.ai.rug.nl/springschool/

The first school to market itself as AI free is going to corner the market on people interested in actually learning. And I would not be surprised if rich families and the children of people creating this tech were the first movers.

We're very happy to announce another consciousness workshop in the famed snowy mountain cabin of the Austrian Alps! ❄️🦇 This year's theme is computational neurophenomenology (broadly defined) Applications are now open! www.uni-bamberg.de/en/bamxi/res...

Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences: "Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

1/n We have discovered that bees can keep track of time duration! Bees can discriminate long 🟡🟡 vs short🟡 flashes, a bit like the "dash" and "dot" of the Morse code. Check our new paper royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... and videoclip youtu.be/hsGxU65OMQk?... @preparedmindslab.bsky.social

Philosophical debates often resemble trench warfare: both sides are so busy defending their positions that they not only fail to notice the battle ended a long time ago, but also that the points they were defending are now so riddled with holes that they are no longer worth fighting for

🚨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