1 year retired!

Join the dots 🧵

If you liked this thread / Substack please read @profjanegreen.bsky.social’s brilliant recent piece on Labour and Reform. politicscentre.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/news-and-eve...

Interesting thread. I think Labour have completely lost it and need to get their act together fast.

The obituary of Eleanor Maguire by Georgina Ferry in The Lancet “She kept emphasising that what the hippocampus was involved in was the creation of something she called scenes”, says O’Keefe. “And we now see that she was right"

I type my friend's name "Steve" into the WhatsApp search bar and the AI helpfully suggests "Steven Hawking?"

This one looks intriguing. Arousal "embedding" whole-brain dynamics. 🤯 #neuroskyence #compneurosky doi.org/10.1038/s415...

1/8 How can the brain create countless unique memories using a single, universal metric of space? We’ve been waiting for the answer to this for two decades! Read it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Lab’s latest is out in Imaging Neuroscience, led by Kirsten Peterson: “Regularized partial correlation provides reliable functional connectivity estimates while correcting for widespread confounding”, where we demonstrate a major improvement to standard fMRI functional connectivity (correlation) 1/n

If you’re looking for a new non-fiction read and perhaps want to fill some gaps in your understanding of science, “Why Don’t Things Fall Up?” is just 99p on Kindle and £3 in paperback www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Dont-Thi...

Might be interesting to quantify how much of REF research returns are unfunded (i.e., cheap). I think a five star paper resulting from unfunded research represents excellent value for the taxpayer while a grant that results in only poor quality output is poor value for money.

If you know anyone who has to keep a phone secret, and can safely let them know, it is going to be really, really, important that they know to make sure those phones are switched off, or on airplane mode, before the alert goes through at 3pm.

The President of the United States is threatening to go to war with an American city. This is not a joke. This is not normal. Donald Trump isn't a strongman, he's a scared man. Illinois won’t be intimidated by a wannabe dictator.

Minister LOVES flags!

I heard this and was as appalled by the question as the answer. This is Matt Chorley of the BBC.

Excited to present our new work reading minds! Ok, not *that* kind of mind reading, but we have created a deep learning method capable of using single neuron recordings from people watching episodes of TV that can predict when they recall specific memories from the episode. 1/6

And we're off again for another year of scintillating, surprising and superb chats. Teachers, get your students involved: imascientist.org.uk/signup/t/ Scientists, Mathematicians, Engineers, get yourself involved: imascientist.org.uk/signup/c/

We make predictions based on general knowledge and/or specific memories. Different brain areas are active when these distinct predictions are violated – and hippocampus selectively responds to prediction errors based on episodic memory. Cool work by @chrismbird.bsky.social @ayab.bsky.social et al!

How do we keep track of our sense of direction during navigation? Head direction cells in rodents are well-studied, but what about humans? To answer this question, we used an encoding model to analyze fMRI responses while participants performed a “taxi-cab” task in a VR city.

The latest video is on a hot-off-the-presses paper: Deepmind's new AlphaEarth model www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX5i...

Looks pretty appetising!

Oh, that doesn't look sinister at all. Post from the BBC via @fulelo.bsky.social (tellingly, it looks as if the BBC may have changed this picture now).

🚨 We’re hiring: Associate Professor/Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience 🧠 Lead pioneering imaging-informed cognitive neuroscience research 🌍 Open to international applicants | Visa sponsorship available 📍 Permanent, full-time, on-site 🔗 Apply now: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Thankfully I am now retired, but I did try to understand University finances because the processes seemed utterly bizarre. I never did though. @profserious.bsky.social's summary is useful, but - so far as I could see - the real problems came with the details...

A very useful explanation of how universities sort of (don't) work. I often despair at the number of people who comment on Uni management who clearly haven't spotted the world has moved on since the days of the binary line and free tuition.

Congratulations to Professor Beth Jefferies on the @bpsofficial.bsky.social President's Award. www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

Happy publication day to first author @ewanmurray.bsky.social! A lot of hard work by Ewan went into this, so it is great to see if fully published. A Meta-analytic Review of the Effectiveness of Spacing and Retrieval Practice for Mathematics Learning #cognition #psychscisky #neuroskyence

these are forks

🐙 This Octopus shifts from deep to active rest while "dreaming" for #MicroscopyMonday. REM‑like sleep (color bursts and twitches) filmed in real time by Horst Obenhaus @octoscience.bsky.social‬, currently a 2025 Whitman Fellow at @mblscience.bsky.social. #NESM #Octopus #Neuro #SleepScience #MBL

This thread is incredible.

Ireland launches global talent fund! www.researchireland.ie/funding/glob... If you're a neuroscience professor (assistant/associate/full) and would consider relocating to the vibrant and booming city of Dublin, please get in touch!

From @drrobertchapman.bsky.social. It is perfectly possible for everyone to be neurodivergent. What counts as "normal" is shrinking, and the disabling effects of being different are growing, and there are many, many ways in which we differ.

I assert that MI5 head Ken McCallum looks a lot like TV Choir leader Gareth Malone.

We're hiring. We're looking for someone to take the lynchpin role on @imascientist.org.uk Based in our Central Bath office (with a/c today). More info: mangorol.la/2025/06/job-...

So annoying! And not the only instance of unwanted autocorrect.

I'm wondering how much time I spend uncapitalising the first letter of an email form field which is mystifyingly set to be capitalised. I'm guessing that it might amount to, what, at least 30 seconds per year – 30 long, painful seconds – and it's 30 seconds too long

What shapes the topography of high-level visual cortex? Excited to share a new pre-print addressing this question with connectivity-constrained interactive topographic networks, titled "Retinotopic scaffolding of high-level vision", w/ Marlene Behrmann & David Plaut. 🧵 ↓ 1/n

Sad news that the Beach Boys leader and songwriter Brian Wilson has died. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Since I retired, I lost my university license for PowerPoint and I am trying to go cold turkey. Libre Office is good (excellent for free software), but it a bit like having one hand tied behind your back. I have to admit I did like PowerPoint. So easy to cut/paste from any source.

Another sadly topical Richard Scarry parody, from the genius of @rubenbolling.bsky.social . Do click in.

As I've been having an interesting chat with @harkaway.bsky.social about AI and understanding, I thought it might be a good time to repost this blog in which I use the Beatles' Eight Days A Week to explain how generative AI might relate to human creativity: tomhartley.me.uk/beatles/152-...

Nature Neuroscience Spatial reasoning via recurrent neural dynamics in mouse retrosplenial cortex www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Introducing All-TNNs: Topographic deep neural networks that exhibit ventral-stream-like feature tuning and a better match to human behaviour than the gold standard. Now out in Nature Human Behaviour. 👇

I wanted to do this for years. My bet is that it will turn out that most functional organization can be understood in terms of topographical learning leading to gradients on different scales. No discrete modules except as emergent features of maps.

Publishers: there is a market for 2nd hand books in digital formats; "long tail" as in music.; it would be great if you could start getting the back catalogue online.

Hello! I'm looking for teachers to take part in upcoming research projects for my PhD. If you're a teacher interested in taking part the link is here: york.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_... I'd appreciate it if you could share with any teachers you know too who might be interested!

Interesting. The current term is Physician Associate, the proposed replacements are "Physician Assistant" and "Doctor's Assistant". IMO the original term was crafted to be confusing - they wanted patients to accept cheaper non-medically-qualified primary healthcare...

It should be mandatory when proposing any reform to demonstrate with a peer-reviewed computational model that it will enhance the generation of valid scientific knowledge, and to determine the limits of its application such that it does not undermine unmodelled routes or rely on untested assumptions

Something to read and reflect on wherever you stand on Open Science and the way it is now being turned against science in America.

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