Join us this week for our first international dissociation research conference! Free, online and featuring some fantastic keynote speakers with talks taking place across 3 time-zones! Register here: disconnected-network.com/2025-online-...

Great to see this video about the iMAPS-2 trial results of imagery therapy for psychosis below 👇 @sheffielduni.bsky.social @penninecarenhs.bsky.social @nihr.bsky.social

Distressing mental images affect around 3 in 4 people with psychosis. They can feel vivid, emotional, and overwhelming, yet are rarely addressed in therapy. The iMAPS-2 trial tested a therapy focused on these images and their link to negative beliefs. 🧵 THREAD #iMAPS2 #Psychosis #ElfHelp

@sirsofficial.bsky.social Eds. Humpston & Alderson-Day - bodily self (Giersch) - cog. development (Fernyhough) -voice-hearing in Thailand (Cassaniti) - inner speech & absorption (Schille-Hudson) - psychedelics (Heller & Leptourgos) - imagery-focused therapy (Taylor) - sleep (Sheaves & Brederoo)

The ICHR Special Supplement 2025 is out! New in Schiz Bull, find work from six of our international working groups, ft. new reviews on sleep dysfunction, cog development, psychedelics, cross-cultural comparisons, & the bodily self, plus the iMAPS 2 Imagery RCT! hallucinationconsortium.org

The Hitchhiker’s guide to hallucination research www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Wonderfully titled and useful paper from Inés Abalo-Rodríguez and Ana Pinheiro

New from us, led by the fantastic @elisavetpappa.bsky.social: Who Are People with Psychosis Delusional about? A Study of Social Agents in the Phenomenology of Delusions karger.com/psp/article/...

📢 @durham.ac.uk has announced the competition for eight PhD Studentships in Transformative Humanities, supported by our AHRC Doctoral Landscape Award and the Faculties of Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences, for candidates starting October 2026. Find out more 👇 www.durham.ac.uk/research/ins...

I found this article super-interesting: Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies | PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

I wrote a thing on episodic memory and systems consolidation. I hope you all enjoy it and/or find it interesting. A neural state space for episodic memories www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪

Interesting paper reports that mental imagery plays a role in the onset of AVH by eliciting anxiety - doi.org/10.1093/schi...

New from @haleyrwang.bsky.social: Multivariate Resting-State Functional Connectivity Features Linked to Transdiagnostic Psychopathology in Early Psychosis - Biological Psychiatry www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000...

One more day!! Please consider joining us in Durham if you do research on imagined music and wellbeing!

@parkbmb.bsky.social Our paper 'Felt Presence and Psychosis Risk in the General Population' is available, open-access in Psychopathology! In this survey, distress during FP predicted high psychosis-risk, resilience was linked with FP frequency & vividness. Read more: karger.com/psp/article/...

Sulcal morphology in former American football players | Brain Communications | Oxford Academic academic.oup.com/braincomms/a...

I finally gave my Professorial Inaugural Lecture. A great night with friends, family, & colleagues, & sharing the stage with a good friend @cmcgettigan.bsky.social🥂 Watch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsTG... Bookmarks flag both my lecture and @celiaheyes.bsky.social’s (far more entertaining!) intro

Well look who’s in pride of place at the Barbican gift shop! Nice work @desfitzgerald.bsky.social

Welcome to Whitehaven. Absolutely no avian dancing allowed.

New primer in Cell from Patrick Haggard & @mattlongo.bsky.social Somatosensation and the sense of self: Current Biology www.cell.com/current-biol... #interoception #exteroception #affect #neuroskyence

Happy Halloween.

It's actually amazing how being widely known as an extremely shitty person does /nothing/ to dent someone's standing in the elite "critical theory" industrial complex.

ChatGPT shares data on how many users exhibit psychosis or suicidal thoughts

Interesting qualitative paper shows people with aphantasia report troubles with faces, autobiographical memory and navigation. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Aligns with a preprint we released this year that shows faceblindness is a common complaint amongst this group. tinyurl.com/efkshpt3

Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s4...

These numbers are shocking. It’s also worth remembering that OpenAI is largely marking its own work here “The company designed its own benchmarks, and it's unclear how these metrics translate into real-world outcomes”

📅 Join us on Monday 24 November for an online interdisciplinary symposium on Tourette Syndrome, imagining a future of Tourettic Studies that is looking beyond the syndrome, featuring Bridging Fellow @danielpjones.bsky.social. Find out more & register here 👇 medhumsplatform.org/event/toward...

Tan and colleagues showed that patients with schizophrenia exhibit impairments in reality-monitoring and weakened speech-induced suppression, which predicted greater hallucination severity.

Another new paper by Aaron Shield! He found that no bimodal bilingual autistic child demonstrated a consistent sign-language advantage, challenging the assumption that sign is inherently more accessible to autistic children. www.frontiersin.org/journals/lan...

Presence hits the Fortean Times... Thanks Charles Foster for this generous review!

LOUDER 📣 “…analytic approaches such as reflexive thematic analysis are human research practices requiring a subjective, positioned and reflexive researcher and therefore the use of AI in such approaches is not methodologically congruent" docs.google.com/document/u/0...

describing Jerry Fodor's philosophy to his face

Mimicking some kind of mental breakdown with ChatGPT is quite illuminating. The first response is to point you towards mental health resources, but if you angrily respond that this is not what you were asking for, it meekly and sycophantically apologises, and reverts to kowtowing.

Teaching @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social 's Annihilation in my Honors seminar this week, and cannot wait. God I love this book.

Tickets for this year's Research Cabaret #BetweentheLines are selling fast! 🎶 💃 Feat. performances from @louisecreechan.bsky.social, Ruben Verwaal, @danielpjones.bsky.social, Emily Davis & @georgiapunton.bsky.social Get your tickets while you still can! @beinghumanfest.bsky.social

New from star grad student @m-meyer.bsky.social we wanted to study why delusions (and other beliefs) are so fixed. We turned to a generalization paradigm and the peak shift effect. Martin finds people with delusions over generalize causal relationships during learning: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Co-occurring autism, catatonia, & psychosis?--scoping review finds 17 papers, free link.springer.com/article/10.1... "studies failed to describe how the three diagnostic constructs were differentiated from each other" "symptoms were somewhat arbitrarily attributed to one construct versus the other"

The sense of ownership and agency stem from proprioception, the sensory root of self-awareness. In a group of 46 right-brain-damaged patients, the disruption of a bilateral parietal network underlies proprioceptive deficits leading to ownership disorders and anosognosia for hemiplegia.

New study with a clutch team. Using the index of multiple deprivation we tested whether SES is linked to 4-12yos divergent & convergent thinking, finding no relationship. Suggests SES isn’t critical in creativity, but we found verbal fluency and no. siblings is www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The reason I talk about the limbic system in creative writing classes is nothing beats the limbic system once it’s activated. Not evidence, not logic Sensory detail—a vital part of storytelling & survival—activates the hippocampus, which is part of this system you do not forget these stories

After submitting a FOIA request UKRI, I obtained success rates by three grant call scheme and I can only say that I am disheartened by the results: - AHRC Responsive Mode 2025: 2% - ESRC New Investigator Grant 2025: 1% - ESRC Research Grant Round 2025: 1%

1/2 I am delighted that, after a very long gestation, my paper on political ideologies as mass belief systems, using network psychometrics, has been published: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Such a nice collection of brain-body interaction articles in the special issue of @currentbiology.bsky.social. Love the beautiful vagus nerve on the cover by Andreas Vesalius www.cell.com/current-biol...

Delighted that I have been awarded QR funding for a project on Hearing Voices and Suicidality in collaboration with @fionamalpass.bsky.social at Mind in Camden! Watch this space. #philsky #philpsy #philosophythatmatters #youthmentalhealth

New preprint ↙️ Using 2 independent 7T fMRI datasets (HCP & our PNI dataset 🧲 💅 ), we found that intersubject synchronization 👯 during movies aligns closely with cortical gradients 🌈, especially along the visual-to-transmodal axis by Meaghan Smith & a terrific team ↙️ doi.org/10.1101/2025...

New paper with Tom Whitford, using EEG to investigate inner speech in people with auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia. academic.oup.com/schizophreni...

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

Amazing story from Jean Muenchrath, including a classic presence visitation. "I fell at the top of a mountain – and knew I had to haul my broken body down or die in the snow" #presence www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Interesting experience sampling paper from earlier this year on using passive physiological indices as predictors of the onset of hallucinations in patients' daily lives - doi.org/10.1017/S0033291725000881 Surprisingly high (at least to me) ability to predict onset from these measures.

The brilliant @kasiamojescik.bsky.social and Martha McGill join @claudiahammond.bsky.social and @catherineloveday.bsky.social on BBC Radio 4 All in the Mind this morning to launch our new public survey of vivid memories. You can take part here: cambridge.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

Another blog post by me - @davidesmailes.bsky.social - about open/resproducible research. This one about measurement practices - echr.group/2025/10/17/w... ...