“Sure you’re grocery prices are higher and you cannot afford healthcare under Trump/Vance, but at least you don’t have to apologize for being white under our racist regime!” - JD Vance at Turning Point

We’re recruiting a new Lecturer at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social 🎓 Birkbeck offers a collegial, research-intensive environment, with consistently strong performance in the REF. If you’re an early-career researcher looking for a positive change, then Birkbeck could be the right place for you.

Broken. Not broken. Today’s Sunday Age cartoon

This lengthy checking process is now a core, mind-numbing and soul destroying feature of marking of dissertations and coursework essays and the reason why our teaching team are discussing vivas and closed book exams...but hey, the tech bros promise that AI is making everything better. 😭

I just wish someone would be honest and say “we are ending civilian science in favor of science that is focused on serving national security and war”

The big question is this: Can you (will you) sue the AI company/companies which are responsible for these fabrications, which undoubtedly damage your reputation as a scholar in your field? Real accountability, I think it’s over due!

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Congratulations to everyone who wrote an op-ed about how he just wants americans to eat better

I used wiki today and ignored the request for donation, hadn't thought of it in these terms....

Thanks @janhove.bsky.social for taking the time to check the paper — something that paid editors at Nature, as well as unpaid reviewers — apparently did not. Also shows once more that providing statistical code should be mandatory for every single paper. janhove.github.io/posts/2025-1...

Stuck on a Christmas stocking filler? Then why not run out to the shops and get 'Learning: A very short introduction" by me. amzn.eu/d/abLEyUu As this reviewer says "Dr Hazelgrove has made a profession out of experimenting on children" Say it in a sinister voice, for extra festive fun.

Why I'm no longer trying to do fMRI research lol

fMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.” In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes. rdcu.be/eUPO8 funds @erc.europa.eu #neuroskyence 🧵:

Scary stuff

substack.com/@gavanmcnall... scathing piece on the state of research funding in Australia

Morning.

"In 2019 we notified journals about serious integrity concerns in 172 clinical trials. Over five years later, only 22 have been retracted. The 135 unretracted trials have 1989 citations in systematic reviews, clinical guidelines, and consensus statements" [paraphrased] www.bmj.com/content/390/...

New study out today in Nature Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41..., in which we set out to test whether ultrasound could influence the reward-related learning computations of the nucleus accumbens, building on decades of work on dopaminergic prediction error and reinforcement learning. And it did.

Are there any firmly established widely accepted causal arrows pointing from the gut microbiome to literally anything other than gut issues?

📢Generative Models in Neuroimaging Survey We’re running a short survey on how neuroimaging (aka #OHBM) community defines, uses & evaluates generative models, from biophysical simulations to ML-based approaches 👉 t.co/lRQj4qmknO @ohbmofficial.bsky.social @ohbmtrainees.bsky.social

BREAKING: This is huge news, the EU's equivalent of the 🇺🇸Supreme Court's 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling. 🇪🇺Court of Justice just ruled all 🇪🇺countries must recognise same-sex marriages granted in other member states. This effectively legalises gay marriage across 🇪🇺

Congrats to those who were successful and commiserations to those who were not. You're excellent and the system is flawed - we need more funding for Australian science.

This kind of stuff is why I say that I worry that the tools of neuroscience are not properly vetted

Another nail in the coffin for PCA? - doesn’t linearize, distorting similarity metrics - is biased by temporal jitter across epochs - may miss important dimensions for transient amplification If you think there is a state space, use a state space model!

If government actually cared about child safety online, they’d ban targeted ads, not teenagers. But regulating corporations doesn’t win headlines. Punishing kids does. #auspol

new paper by Sean Westwood: With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

My paper is out! Computational modeling of error patterns during reward-based learning show evidence that habit learning (value free!) supplements working memory in 7 human data sets. rdcu.be/eQjLN

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

Social media ban for under 16s hits Australia on Dec 10th

Still time to register for the 2025 Conference of the Australasian Society for Philosophy and Psychology, in-person in Melbourne Nov 24-25! Check details and fab keynotes and program on the site👇 #philosophy #neuroskyence sites.google.com/monash.edu/a...

Keep posting sky pictures, I like being reminded that we're all piles of carbon screaming through space on a rock and we're all just hanging on and hoping for the best.

Hell in a handbag is where we're all heading

Delighted to see this finally out: rdcu.be/eO9oW We tested whether brief striatal dopamine release events influence the vigor of skilled movements. Despite popular belief, we did not find any evidence linking rapid dopamine dynamics to motor vigor on a moment-by-moment basis.

This is a fantastic resource - good to see some behavioural measures in there

New preprint from the lab led by @violetchae.bsky.social! We debut an open EEG dataset for research into food cognition and dietary choices. Featuring data from 117 different brains relating to 120 different food stimuli. @tgro.bsky.social @psychunimelb.bsky.social

Can what you eat (or not eat) save the Planet? I talk with Prof Karen Charlton about @thelancet.com #Planetary #Diet + eating habits to boost planetary health.🎧Spotify shorturl.at/q8OrL 📺YouTube youtu.be/IPS2Syzdgas @nmnteatwell.bsky.social @hmriaustralia.bsky.social @dietitiansaus.bsky.social

Opportunity for early career researchers to spend 3 years working with us in Oxford. Cool surroundings, interesting people. Eligibility: need some UK academic connection. Get in touch if interested! Details: www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/news/2025/11...

🚀 We're hiring ! 🕵️ Seeking a postdoc to study the development & individual-level organization of brain circuits supporting (in)flexible behavior in psychiatric populations. 🧠 Precision functional mapping, fMRI, normative modelling Details 👉 tinyurl.com/3h8tcv2e 🗓️ Apply by Dec 10! Please RT 🙌

This must be what the students are using 😁

I got an invitation to use the "Nature Research Assistant", put up a paper on intuitive physics and asked it for more references to relevant papers; can you guess why I marked those parts in red

First clinical trial with a non-hallucinogenic psychedelic analogue! "Rapid, robust and durable antidepressant effect": ~50% drop on the MADRS. Maybe you don't need the 'trip' for a good antidepressant effect after all? Wild stuff. Only a press release so far... www.businesswire.com/news/home/20...

After a busy semester of teaching it is so nice to be at the Biological Psychiatry Australia Conference. First up today is @foldi.bsky.social and team with the development of a 'library of animal models', which sounds like a fantastic resource for researchers studying clinical symptoms/disorders

This looks very appealing for someone looking to do a PhD in sunny Malaga (Spain) with an excellent mentor and team.

Wow. The dopamine story is constantly evolving and this looks like a very interesting study. We know from the work of @melissajsharpe.bsky.social (and others) that the standard explanations for dopamine function are insufficient, could this help explain a bit more? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

𝗘𝗻𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗶𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗻𝗲𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻?? Astrocytes in the regulation of fear memories! www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence h/t @claeneuro.bsky.social

Debating between the need in science to document and produce evidence and the waste of proving what we all knew. AI as a source for useless research endeavours. 🤔

Sleep is still a bit of a mystery! Beautiful article from @vyazovskiy.bsky.social! aeon.co/essays/two-b...

This article is now published in @plosone.org. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti... New analysis added: seemingly habitual responses are explained because contingency deg didn't work for some participants (in line with recent outcome dev results in our lab and in @clairegillan.bsky.social lab)