With profound sadness we announce the sudden and unexpected death of our Editor-in-Chief, Tim Meese. A founding editor of i-Perception, Tim was a pillar of the vision science community and instrumental in shaping the landscape of scientific publishing in our field.

Great essay by Ted Chiang on consciousness. He nails the centrality of context. "An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential." www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

today at the grocery store as i went to get bananas, there was a guy stocking bananas with the big fruit cart and everything. he had kind of long blond hair and bangs, a very crude sort of medieval pageboy haircut, it stood out. anyways, he said - "welcome in", and i smiled.

Your eyeballs are riveted with red blood vessels, which deliver the oxygen eyes need to function. But bird eyes, like those shown here, have no blood vessels in sight. How do they see so well without the help of oxygen? www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-bird...

doi.org/10.7554/eLif... more demonstration that world-based spatiotopy isn't a visual cortex thing. Now are we ready to revise the premise? "We perceive the world as stable despite eye movements." No we don't! VC topography isn't invariant to eye movements, and neither is visual perception

Out now in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, we compare & contrast the theories & predictions being tested by @arc-intrepid.bsky.social -- plus some meta-scientific commentary on theory testing, adversarial collaboration, & Bayesian evidence accumulation www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

oh lord How Embarrassing

Neuromatch has been denied our Office of Foreign Assets Control "Iran license" renewal. We had renewed successfully before, but now our request is “inconsistent with current U.S. foreign policy.” I am absolutely gutted by this denial.

next time i hear the old "why IIT say C in PHZ", i will point to this: directed chains looping through FC

catching up on VC vasculature and came across this assertion in Duvernoy et al 1981, which in retrospect makes total sense, except that I'm surprised I've never heard it: "in the striate cortex, **where the most dense vascular network of the nervous system is found** in the internaI granular layer"

I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics. It turns out I was wrong. Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New open-access paper out in Trends in Cognitive Sciences: Explanation, scope, and perspective: sources of schismogenesis in consciousness science Francesco Ellia & Naotsugu Tsuchiya A thread 1/n🧵 www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

🎉 📜 NEW #PREPRINT !! 📜 🎉 Spearheaded by Adam Barrett we tried to tackle some of the challenges of IIT. We confront aspects worth delving into, with an incredible team of collaborators, inc. Pedro Mediano, @frosas.bsky.social, Daniel Bor, Lionel Barnett, and @anilseth.bsky.social.

super interesting tractography study showing fine retinotopic connectivity between occipital visual areas, but only in certain circumstances (maybe full-field in early VC - though they only went out 6deg - but only foveal beyond V3?).

[PDF downloadable for free!] Latest paper from our lab and Qualia Structure. "Explanation, scope, and perspective: sources of schismogenesis in consciousness science": Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni... Congrats @ellia.bsky.social !

"We are wrong because we started the war" should be the anchor point for all coverage of what's happening and it's remarkable how quickly that tends to get obscured. www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-countr...

I think about this Tony Benn speech much more than I used to

Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly

first i look at your figures & tables; then i read your figure captions; then i peruse your methods and results to better understand your figures & tables. i probably don't read your intro or disc at all unless you cited me and/or i'm in a bad mood.

I love this so much. After pushback on his recent "Medicine is the only field that reaches 6 sigma" with "my field, psychophysics is so awesome" he posted this. Hurray all Psychophysicists. LETS CELEBRATE PSYCHOPHYSICS. An island of large effects is us!

my only advice is not to fall off the faculty track and get stuck simply "doing science" - i'm now getting paid less than new postdocs *in my lab* ("the lab i am in") 🤦‍♂️ either become a professor or get a real job, don't take the in-between if you want $$$, that's my ted talk

Jacob Frey: "To ICE -- get the fuck out of Minneapolis"

ugggghhh why do i keep agreeing to review philosophy papers uggghhhh

if you see this post, your actions are: - if you have a spare buck, give it to Wikipedia, then repost this - if you don't have a spare buck, just repost your action is mandatory for the world's best source of information to survive

New - my first piece for @science.org ! Absolutely crazy footage of rat behaviour in Germany. Rats filmed snatching bats from air for first time | Science | AAAS share.google/WAsAIQ8j0MKp...

Happy Fechner Day, to those who celebrate

The unfathomable richness of seeing: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

this is really neat, but couldn't one argue that *all the low-level properties have changed*. every contrast has been rotated and translated - content at every position has been replaced with different content. to see what's "the same" one has to rotate the full image, which is pretty "high level"

i mean, i get why these demos are interesting, but you know.. if "the rays are not coloured", then how could the paint be? (point being, there aren't really 'blue things' or 'grey things', rather just 'blue appearances', etc)

The first major output of the @templetonworld.bsky.social @arc-intrepid.bsky.social adversarial collaboration testing IIT & predictive processing theories of consciousness is out now arxiv.org/abs/2509.00555

These LLM AIs are all suffering from a sort of synthetic Anton's syndrome - they have absolutely no capacity for spatial experience (or simulation of it) and yet are unaware of it - they have all the "high level" stuff you get from seeing, so why not behave as though it's *all* really there?

great thread but this is my favorite part

At first I read this blurb and got all defensive and nitpicky about the obvious misconception of "seeing in N colors" - like "no, color vision is N-d but not in N colors" - but then I thought about it a moment and I think I really like this way of putting it

this method is neat and i want to learn to use it; but seems to me that the study is basically a demonstration that orientation is really important for recognition (like.. yeah!?)

i think a lot about how zotero is actually one of the technologies academia actually should be pushing on students and faculty versus the lake-guzzling, town poisoning, and labor exploiting chatbots

Great illusion (for me) www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/c...

Good night, sweet prince of Darkness

I spent an hour this morning procrastinating by writing this one pager "(One of My) Problems with the Science of Aphantasia" osf.io/hr6w5/?view_...

Happy 107th Birthday, Brenda Milner! Her contributions to neuropsychology shaped the way we understand the human brain. From surviving two world wars and two pandemics, to paving the way for future generations of researchers, Milner’s legacy continues. @mcgill.ca @cusm-muhc.bsky.social

great piece, makes me think about how much and in what ways this same critique applies to experimental psychology (with all its brain data and brain explanations) and, in particular, to study of consciousness (having just returned from #ASSC28, I can attest to there being *lots* of "brain talk"....)

Some arguments for why we should believe that visual experience is the way it seems to be - in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, from myself and Giulio Tononi: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lMzy4sIRv...

Contribute to #NCONSC, the journal of the @theassc.bsky.social, by becoming a reviewer! Our topic is wide (wider than the sky) so knowing all of you is impossible. To make things simpler, fill in this quick form to register your interest in reviewing for #NCONSC!

I don’t j know about you people, but I’m preparing for #ASSC28 by rereading ‘House of Asterion’ for the 67th time

Some arguments for why we should believe that visual experience is the way it seems to be - in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, from myself and Giulio Tononi: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lMzy4sIRv...

Huge if true! #philosophy #PhilPerception theonion.com/study-people...

I agree with this in spirit, yet it seems to me that most of the critiques of an AI reviewer here would also apply to many human reviewers- and also that “reheated leftovers” is an apt description for many scientific publications themselves.

Our latest paper has been published on Neuroscience of Consciousness! Ellia and Tsuchiya 2025: academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

Retinotopy in the millimeters-wide optic lobe of the octopus brain! This is really amazing