Something for reality monitoring from The Truman Show: "We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented. It's as simple as that."

Gone are the days when someone can say there is no theory of consciousness. www.consciousnessatlas.com

Brain-Score is a prominent and an essential benchmark for AI models. But why do these models have highly low behavior score even though they reach ceiling for neural score? If an AI model which has a perfect neural as well as behavior scores, then will that model is a model of consciousness?

Michael X Cohen on why he left academia/neuroscience. mikexcohen.substack.com/p/why-i-left...

Check out our toolboxes: 1. #Wave_Space, a modular Python tool for simulation and analysis of Traveling Waves: github.com/DugueLab/Wav... ➡️Related publication: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/3...

Why is "antitrust" doomed to fail? Because "collusion" is not an action, it's a state. Why is "regulation" powerless? Because "malice" is not an intention, it's an emergence. Why is "human morality" so powerless? Because the physics never morality. #Proof_of_Ineffective_Qualia

AI can now read words from image, different from contrastive learning where image token are learned with text tokens but rather now AI takes the image and reads the text. Definitely something for subitizing, peripheral vision and crowding studies in AI perceptual science. youtu.be/YEZHU4LSUfU?...

Here is a story about a AAAI paper that got 5 human reviews and 1 AI review. The AI generated review contained a page-long counterexample to a proof in the paper. The AI’s counter example contained hallucinated errors. How does one rebut an AI reviewer? www.linkedin.com/posts/omerbp...

when ppl say 'I didn't think about the color of the ball', did they (1) create a full, perceptual-like mental image and then forget (or encode) the color, or (2) really just not think of the color to begin with? (these options showed up decades ago, but weren't studied empirically)

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 in Imaging Neuroscience by Viviana Greco, Penelope A. Lewis, et al: Disarming emotional memories using targeted memory reactivation during rapid eye movement sleep doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Consciousness science as a marketplace of rationalizations my commentary on @smfleming.bsky.social and @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's thought-provoking BBS paper, and more generally about the field. osf.io/preprints/ps...

This paper shows that you can predict actual purchase intent (90% accuracy) by asking an off-the-shelf LLM to impersonate a customer with a demographic profile, giving it a product image & having it give its impressions, which another AI rates. No fine-tuning or training & beats classic ML methods.

Very glad to see that someone is doing the important work of aligning AI alignment. alignmentalignment.ai

Seeing all the consciousness and non-humans/AI (NhA) theories coming up, I feel like there will be a point of "Consciousness Pascal's Wager". 1/n

A fun backstory for my paper: a Blade Runner-style test to distinguish humans from AI using only language. We used network science to probe their imagination and internal world models. This pic is from our first LLM tests. #AI #BladeRunner #NetworkScience #NLP

Imagine a brain decoding algorithm that could generalize across different subjects and tasks. Today, we’re one step closer to achieving that vision. Introducing the flagship paper of our brain decoding program: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroAI #compneuro @utoronto.ca @uhn.ca

Are you an early career scholar interested in learning more about peer review? Join us for our virtual @reviewerzero.bsky.social workshop! We will help you understand how peer review works and give advice on responding to reviewer comments. 9-10:30am PT / 12-1:30pm ET on October 30th. Register👇🏼

Ahem. Mental imagery (& imagery-critical) researchers should read this: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

World models are a highly speculative topic in AI as well as in cognitive science. I’m excited to share my manuscript on investigating internal world models using imagination networks in humans and LLMs! 🧵1/n arxiv.org/abs/2510.04391

Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵

Long time in the making: our preprint of survey study on the diversity with how people seem to experience #mentalimagery. Suggests #aphantasia should be redefined as absence of depictive thought, not merely "not seeing". Some more take home msg: #psychskysci #neuroscience doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Happy to share @c-carrez-corral.bsky.social 1st PhD paper with Pauline Rossel & Carole Peyrin which is now online at link.springer.com/article/10.3... in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics! Thread below👇

Tension shapes memory: Computational insights into neural plasticity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.20.671220v1

In case you missed that paper

While we're on the subject of coffee, one of the espresso influencer gearheads posted this informative video about why different espresso drinks are called what they're called

White text on white background instructing LLMs to give positive reviews is apparently now common enough to show up in searches for boilerplate text.

Emotion, sensory sensitivity, and metacognition in multisensory integration: evidence from the Sound-Induced Flash Illusion: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/vwg7r_v1

"The question of whether machines can think... is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." -Edsger Dijkstra in 1984, still correct for my computer science and gamedev people yep he's the pathfinding Dijkstra, whose work A* is a heuristic optimization of we're still using

More on collective behavior: Our new Annual Review of Biophysics piece - with the stellar Danielle Chase - explores how animals sense, share information, and make group decisions. In honeybees and beyond 🐝 www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Correlation is not cognition.[1] Stop with the nonsense. Everyday we slip further into the abyss. I often regret reading emails from other academics. [1] Guest & @andreaeyleen.bsky.social (2023). On Logical Inference over Brains, Behaviour, and Artificial Neural Networks. doi.org/10.1007/s421...

How would you model our confidence weighting task? Best answer is the one I go try!

While I was on vacation enjoying Finnish summer, Frank Weber finished some PRs and made a new major CRAN release of projpred mc-stan.org/projpred/ (for projection predictive variable selection). This release contains some major features add by me and Frank. 1/4

🇦🇹 #ACL2025NLP 1/2: Bringing back train/test separation in NLP w/ @annarogers.bsky.social and Rob van der Goot. Plus, all the coffee puns ☕️

Understanding collective punishment: A systematic review from a social psychology perspective: https://osf.io/twkz4

Correctness is its own reward: bootstrapping error signals in self-guided reinforcement learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.18.665446v1

Online #fMRI course coming up August 6-8! 3-day intensive with lectures and hands-on analysis for all skill levels. #SPM, #ICA, #DataScience with @vcalhoun.bsky.social and Kent Kiehl. We love teaching this course and meeting students from all areas! Info+Reg here: sites.google.com/dartmouth.ed...

In our model, signal strength determines the experienced intensity of perceptual content (referred to as mental strength), irrespective of whether that content is perceived or imagined. In contrast, signal precision determines whether that content is in turn inferred to be real

Very excited about Alejandro's first paper as a graduate student in my laboratory! Check out his thread describing recent efforts investigating representational geometries for similarity properties. With @meganakpeters.bsky.social and @vincenttd.bsky.social. Looking forward to feedback on this one!

Was just pointed to this important preprint from @minsanally.bsky.social : www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-4... tl;dr: classically "non-responsive" cells are preferentially recruited by top-down inputs and are critical for learning. So, my neuro-friends: Don't ignore untuned cells!!!! 🧠📈 🧪

New paper! Read what R1 described as "one of the best-written, clearest, and most well-argued pieces of work I have reviewed" and R2 tore apart in a 20 point, 3100 word rebuttal letter. Didn't necessarily think I was gonna discuss ERPs in 2025. But first-author Mario Hervault came dressed for war.

Some of my thoughts on OpenAI's o3 and the ARC-AGI benchmark aiguide.substack.com/p/did-openai...

29/ The reason we write research papers in the first place is to communicate our ideas. How do you make the most and get your research out there so it can start having real-world impacts? Our advice, from press to social media, for promoting your research 👇 elifesciences.org/inside-elife...

We built a simple parametric test of this in our paper: Similarity between (crossval) encoding weights tells you whether encoding dims are orthogonal. Similarity between **absolute** (crossval) encoding weights tells you about the selectivity and sparsity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Human cortical pyramidal neurons are larger, with more elaborate branching, and distinct nonlinear biophysical properties compared to rat cortical pyramidal neurons. Are they more functionally complex? Could that boost the human brain’s computational power? and is that what makes us human? (1/11)

What papers do you like that demonstrate the use of 'orthogonal subspaces' for encoding information in neural populations? #neuroskyence #compneuro #neuroAI

Do you know how much CEO pay has skyrocketed since 1978? 100%? 500%? Try 1,085% Meanwhile, the $7.25/hr fed. minimum wage hasn't budged in 15 years and the tipped min. wage has been $2.13/hr since 1991. This is what I mean when I say the system is rigged.

"The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None" osf.io/preprints/ps... (this is a more systematic examination of the thing I was looking at a few days ago)

Lifetime familiarity and episodic familiarity: The role of anterior medial temporal lobe cortices in aging: http://osf.io/ev9zd/

great list! does "orthogonal" in the OP mean that there is some info *after* orthogonalization, or does it require that this step is not necessary? This nuance might be important, but if not, here's a shameless plug: www.nature.com/articles/s41...