Application now open: Career Awards for Medical Scientists (CAMS) is a highly competitive program that provides $700,000 awards over 5 years for physician-scientists, who are committed to an academic career Deadline: 10/07/25 www.bwfund.org/funding-oppo... #bwfcams

Our new paper, “A neural compass in the human brain during naturalistic human navigation” is out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! First-author @zhenganglu.bsky.social led the charge, with Josh Julian and collaborator @gkaguirre.com. www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

By studying the tilt illusion—when the visual cortex sees straight lines as angled—Professors Alan Stocker and Geoffrey Aguirre are making inroads into fundamental computational processes that could inform neuroscience and better AI. @pennmindcore.bsky.social @gkaguirre.com @sas.upenn.edu

🧠✨ Excited to share that our literature review on retinotopic mapping in the human visual cortex is now published! tinyurl.com/5d9ne68b Amazing collab with Noah Benson and Alex Puckett! We hope this will be a helpful resource for pRF modellers and visual neuroscientists!

The next macOS version is bringing the bouba.

My op-ed was published in @al.com ! www.al.com/news/2025/06... @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social

Going through months-worth of Google Scholar Alert emails getting caught up on neuro papers, so I figured I'd share some fun findings here 👇

Such an honor for me to receive this award named after Bob Boynton, who I never knew, but whose approach to science was an inspiration for me. His son just happened to attending #VSS2025 when the award was announced. The apple does not fall far from the tree.

Wishing all the vision scientists safe travels #vss2025

This work with Alan Stocker, @lingqiz.bsky.social, and Jiang Mao is now in print. We benefited from very thoughtful reviewers. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Delighted to announce this spring semester's programme for our Seminar Series "Current Topics in Circadian & Visual Neuroscience", featuring a roster of speakers discussing their cutting-edge research in vision and/or circadian rhythms. Register now! www.tscnlab.org/seminar

We bought a license 6-pack yesterday. License validation is easy. Happy to support the continued development of this useful scientific tool.

🚨New job alert! My lab is hiring a lab manager. Perfect position for a graduating senior who is interested in full-time research before applying to graduate school. #Neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #VisionScience #MLSky Apply here: www.higheredjobs.com/details.cfm?...

We are building a gaze calibration apparatus. The observer positions their head at the center of a large hemisphere. They fixate on LEDs displayed at 3 foot distance at various visual angles while we record from a pupil camera. Today, I found the perfect structure to use for the hemisphere.

I study how perception is altered in neurologic disease. In particular, why some visual experiences are painful (i.e., produce photophobia), especially for people with migraine. These studies use custom devices for presenting stimuli and measuring the environment. Here’s a look at some of these.

Covert consciousness, where unresponsive patients willfully modulate brain activity to command, is gaining attention. But these assessments are fundamentally limited. What if we could just... read their minds instead? 🧵 about our paper in @greenjournal.bsky.social www.neurology.org/doi/10.1212/...

Some people see spontaneous faint flickering flashes in their visual field, a condition known as Visual Snow Syndrome (VSS, not to be confused with @vssmtg.bsky.social). Maybe a visual equivalent of the auditory tinnitus? Here is a very nice study from the lab of @sengelweb.bsky.social.

Looked up some reviews of my new orthopedist and am ☠️

Go Birds.

This lucid set of figures is going in my career advice slide deck.

A great coastal battle was over the organization of the 4th retinotopic, cortical visual area in humans. Split into quarter-fields like the macaque? Or a unified, ventral hemifield representation? Epic stuff, featuring at one point the romantic phrase “venous eclipse”.

Loving this thread. In the future, my coffee order will also be an encephalatte.

You—or someone you know—is likely to have the photic sneeze reflex, an autosomal-dominant trait of sneezing in response to bright light. Lucien and Manuel had a sneezer wear a light logger and found the illuminance recipe that triggers the sneeze. It’s gotta be the ipRGCs that carry this signal…

I especially like the category “hat”.

Welcome to @hansopdebeeck.bsky.social, vision scientist of object categories (and other interesting topics). And congratulations for grabbing the Bluesky handle before that other Hans (the visual artist) did…

What are your favorite conferences? We are debating where to go. #visionscience #cogsci #cogneuro #cognitivescience #cognitiveneuroscience

You gotta get in on this Brain trash talk thread.

Unaware that the whole cortex has no glia whatsoever. Problematic!! Unfollowing cortex now

Great news! @dumoulin.bsky.social, master of the population receptive field (and other matters visual), is here.

After 3 years and *6* submissions an R01 proposal by my UPenn colleague (Phil Gehrman) has received a fundable score. I respect this commitment to exhausting a study section. If all goes well I get to contribute measures of melanopsin and ipRGC function in bipolar disease and disordered sleep.

I'm looking for a research specialist with experience in fMRI analysis to help with a project studying covert consciousness in unresponsive patients, in collaboration with @gkaguirre.bsky.social. Please message me or email me at [email protected] if interested!

darmok and jalad at study section

gonna take this as permission to spam you all again with this book of absurdist short stories i wrote a few years when the pandemic was making life painful and boring www.amazon.com/Possibilia-S...

Beyond the outstanding scientific community, San Sebastián is one of the most beautiful, delicious places on the planet.

Sometimes early career folks ask me if the talk they gave at a colleague's lab meeting at a different university counts as an invited talk. My rule of thumb is that if you gave a lecture on a different campus and were not escorted away by security, it counts.

I am diving into the world of multi-echo fMRI, and am very grateful for the community that @danielhandwerker.bsky.social, @tsalo.bsky.social, et. al. have created. It's a substantial advance for imaging noisy brain bits.

be the minor revise and resubmit you want to see in the world

This is the tilt illusion. In a new study we can provide a satisfying answer to how and where this effect arises in the brain, as well as the teleological "why" a well-designed visual system might have this property. 🧪

you guys the new Time Bandits is so good. over and out.

I was just reading a Superman comic from 1972, and I learned a very cool Superman fact that I never knew before. Superman is at least partly responsible for the existence of the Hubble Space Telescope... 1/

A surprising application of MR-spectroscopy is measurement of fruit maturation. For example, the ripeness of coconuts. 🌴🥥🧪

You may already know that the rate of change of acceleration over time is “jerk”. I was surprised to learn the identities of the 4th through 6th derivatives of position. 🧪

The use of a sphere to measure light and reflectance was formalized by Friedrich Richard Ulbricht in 1900 in the publication "Determining the average spatial light intensity by only one measurement [translated from German]".

I have now purchased a light-integrating sphere, which makes me feel like a grown-up vision scientist.

Measuring light is complicated. Radiance, irradiance, luminance, and illuminance are importantly different but related quantities. This is a gorgeously animated introduction to light and shadow by Bartosz Ciechanowski, who has created many such explainers.

Adrien Chopin (INSERM) has a new way of presenting a scientific poster. He used DALL•E to create a stylish comic that describes his study of how stereo vision influences hand coordination in daily activities. #vss2024 docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Peter Tse (Dartmouth) shows that, when squished within a little, underwater electrode cave, the octopus brain responds to flickering light with a measurable SSVEP. Studies of visual sensitivity and even attention are to follow. #vss2024

The Banyan Breezeway could use more breeze #vss2024

Alice Price et al at Cardiff U have created a thoughtful survey of visual sensitivity, with questions that probe behavioral responses to light (e.g., wearing sunglasses). They find four factors of discomfort: bright, flicker, stripe, and environmental (supermarkets!). Link to her thesis. #vss2024

Tomas Knapen and his colleagues (incl @martinhebart.bsky.social) have found that extrastriate cortex (e.g., face, body area) contains a homuncular map of correlation with primary sensory cortex during movie watching. This head -> toe map has organized reversals across visual areas. #vss2024