This Saturday at Hay Festival - I'll be chatting to @claudiahammond.bsky.social about reading and the brain for #AllInTheMind. Come along at 5.30pm! www.hayfestival.com/p-25581-bbc-...

I think you get this when marking essays too. There's a distinct AI style...

This is spot on. You can 'hear' AI writing because it sounds like AI.

So pleased that our paper on empowerment and causal models is out and freely available as part of this impressive special issue on world models and AI, with Melanie Mitchell, Josh Tenenbaum, Tom Griffiths and many other stars. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article...

This Saturday at Hay Festival - I'll be chatting to @claudiahammond.bsky.social about reading and the brain for #AllInTheMind. Come along at 5.30pm! www.hayfestival.com/p-25581-bbc-...

Thanks to @jfeyaerts.bsky.social & @wtrax.bsky.social for having me present at the Too Mad to be True conference at Museum Dr. Guislain. It was an enormous privilege to speak to an attentive audience about two of my greatest passions: madness & cinema. #TMTBT #toomadtobetrue

🚨Abstract submission for the @theichr.bsky.social & @echrhallucinations.bsky.social satellite meeting is open! We’re excited to welcome keynote speakers Dr @kathaschmack.bsky.social , Dr @veithweilnhammer.bsky.social, Prof @mruscalafell.bsky.social & Prof Paul Fletcher! See you in Munich 🥨🧠!

Reminder

Today is official publication day for the paperback of A TRICK OF THE MIND. Surreal as ever to see on the shelves (this time thanks to Waterstones Gower St for indulging me). More here: www.penguin.co.uk/books/451515...

The Makerfield by-election is perfectly set up for a campaign-ready Reform candidate with possible roots in the North West

An incredible panel of speakers at the Too Mad to be True conference: (clockwise from top left) Tanya Luhrmann, Cherie’s Rosen @ccrosenphd.bsky.social , Tatiana Baxter @tatianabaxter.bsky.social , Pablo López-Silva, & in-person Rosa Ritunnano @rritunnano.bsky.social. #toomadtobetrue #toomadtobetrue4

A great presentation on "Reimagining spiritual and religious states in madness", chaired by @rritunnano.bsky.social w/ @ccrosenphd.bsky.social @tatianabaxter.bsky.social and a multicoloured Tanya Luhrmann. We are at Too Mad To Be True 4 in Ghent 1/n

Andrea Alford’s dissertation (Lamar University, Texas): “Access Over Modality: Early Language Acquisition in Deaf Infants - Early Intervention Teachers' Perspectives” confirms our experience that access to consistent language (signed or spoken) is more important than very delayed spoken language.

Neglected theory 2: Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin (1956) suggested perceptual and conceptual categorization aren't separate processes, but that concepts differ in "attribute immediacy" - or the availability of cues supporting category membership

Thrilled this is out! www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... 🧵 Do we have 2 kinds of beliefs? Some beliefs seem insensitive to evidence and rarely guide behavior, etc. To explain this, several theories divide belief into 2 types. I argue the explanation isn't in the *mind* but in the *world*

BABCP has submitted evidence to the Independent Review into mental health conditions, ADHD and autism, highlighting the need for equitable, timely, and evidence-based support. Read more here: https://babcp.com/babcp-submission-to-the-independent-review-into-mental-health-conditions-adhd-and-autism/

This letter is really something, my god.

New paper showing insufficient evidence for neuroimaging features to define reproducible, biologically valid, & clinically meaningful schizophrenia subtypes. The subtypes identified to date likely reflect continuous variation within the disorder rather than discrete, biologically distinct entities.

I am beyond excited to share our new preprint ‘Building world models by learning to distinguish imagination from reality: why childhood imagination feels so real’ with Nora Petrova, @tessamdekker.bsky.social and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social. osf.io/preprints/ps...

F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Aaaaaaah aaaaaaaaaaaah ah ah ah ah aaaaaaaaaaah ah aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.”

Two of our researchers @georgiapunton.bsky.social & @aldersonday.bsky.social explore the concept of imagination in articles published April's edition of @psychmag.bsky.social, part of a six-part series on the imagination 💭 Read the articles 👇

i dont think anyone has achieved mastery of the bullshit graphic more than brass eye

From peripersonal space to cognitive maps: An evolutionary perspective www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

That's the west coast mainline for you

Imagine being in fucking mumford & sons and that's only, like, the third most objectionable thing about you

The Danish FKU is a ‘psychometric test’ to assess parental competence and has resulted in 6% of Greenlandic children in Denmark being removed from their families. It contains among others knowledge and intelligence items and the Rohrschach (!) test. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For%C3%...

Really interesting to think about the clinical implications of this.. reactivation of memories without awareness....

My essay review on three new and intriguing edited volumes on history of science and knowledge and urban spaces was just published by BJHS @bshsnews.bsky.social Check it out 🔓 and have a look at the books, too - it was a pleassure to read them! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Spiritualism talk! If you like all things #spiritualism and #occult you can join my public Seed Talk at 21 Soho, London (& online) on Thursday 21st May 7pm. We will uncover the powerful women whose contact with the dead stirred a new way of living. Tickets here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-histor...

Yes, Swiss scientist Fritz Zwicky coined the term “dark matter” which is impressive, but he also coined the term “spherical bastard” to describe people who are bastards no matter which way you look at them, and I think that should be celebrated more.

My 2 and 5 year olds are now doing impressions of Neil.

The publication of this article has managed to get all the white men academics on X really really angry--even if they do not actually do qualitative research and are not qualified to comment. Once again, why are the AIbros so ANGRY when we refuse? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Mental health stigma looks different depending on the diagnosis, and some diagnoses are more stigmatised than other. Jay Watts discusses this issue in an open access chapter link.springer.com/ch... #philsky #epistemicinjustice

Ann Taves (my PhD advisor) visited our lab in October to work on refining her "presence typology." I'm still considering if I think these typologies are useful, as we continue to struggle to find appropriate cross-disciplinary language to talk about "presences."

This thread is amazing.. cognitive processes as chains of activity across cortical areas

New paper 🌟out now in Nat. Neurosci.: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... With advisors @davidpoeppel.bsky.social and @Nai! We show that, while LLMs are optimized to predict the next word, the human brain modulates prediction efficiency by strategically grouping words into constituents. 1/n More 👇

This is fascinating - a key difference between LLMs and Human language? And implications for inner speech maybe?

I'm pleased to share this excellent paper from @abbiebradshawphd.bsky.social with @clarepress.bsky.social that presents an active inference account of speech motor control doi.org/10.3758/s134...

there's actually only one kind of person: the lumper-or-splitter

The understanding of neurodivergent labels is changing | Amy Pearson

I wrote about the unusual phenomenon of *reality shifting* for @psychmag.bsky.social - have a look, and get in touch if you've ever travelled to another world. Yes, we've gone full Narnia.

Reality shifting - at the boundaries of the brain. @aldersonday.bsky.social, with links at the bottom to all our other 'imagination' pieces. www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

a tv show in the style of THE PITT, focussed on universities, called THE ACADEMY. each hour of the show everybody just gets increasingly annoyed about administrative bullshit

New study! SDT used to dissociate body ownership sensitivity from perceptual bias in the rubber hand illusion with partial visual occlusion. Disrupting visually-driven tactile predictions shifts perceptual bias but not visuotactile sensitivity. See below.

"With a free Skynet Edu account, students can gain the career-readiness needed to navigate an exciting future in which they will be hunted by a remorseless, nuclear-armed superintelligence seeking to annihilate the human race—which will later be revealed to be Skynet itself."

Wrote a little something for The Psychologist on our imaginations when reading fiction - exciting little piece!

I wrote about the unusual phenomenon of *reality shifting* for @psychmag.bsky.social - have a look, and get in touch if you've ever travelled to another world. Yes, we've gone full Narnia.

Monkey auditory neurons "did not show enhanced responses to unexpected stimulus repetitions, contrary to predictive-coding theory. However, they did show enhanced responses to unexpected stimulus omissions." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Reimagining imagination through the minds of fiction readers… @georgiapunton.bsky.social (Postdoctoral Research Associate, Durham University). www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

‘Tulpas are not simply a companion imagined into being on a whim’ @dremmaclaire.bsky.social on tulpamancers. www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...