How the brain splits up vision without you even noticing As an object moves across your field of view, the brain seamlessly hands off visual processing from one hemisphere to the other like cell phone towers or relay racers do, a new MIT study shows. picower.mit.edu/news/how-bra... #neuroscience

Welcome to the MIT Consciousness Club sites.google.com/view/mit-con... #neuroscience

Join us tomorrow (9/19) at noon by Zoom for the first seminar of the MIT Consciousness Club sites.google.com/view/mit-con... #neuroscience

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

The MIT Consciousness Club will have a Zoom option for those who would like to join online. First session Friday, Sept 19, 12pm-1:30pm. For more, see: sites.google.com/view/mit-con.... You can register to the email list here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F....

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... my wife (2nd author) just published in Cell working from home is not without pressure you know? #neuroscience

🚨New paper out w/ @gershbrain.bsky.social & @fierycushman.bsky.social from my time @Harvard! Humans are capable of sophisticated theory of mind, but when do we use it? We formalize & document a new cognitive shortcut: belief neglect — inferring others' preferences, as if their beliefs are correct🧵

Thrilled that our new review "Motor Working Memory" is now in press at TiCS! @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social By me + Hanna Hillman We argue that a dedicated research program on 'working memory for movements' is long overdue Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lmMX4sIRv...

Once multisensory information is integrated, participants cannot access the unisensory information to evaluate their perceptual decisions. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper alert🚨 1 + 1 only equals 2 during unconscious processing! Out in JEP: General: doi.org/10.1037/xge0... Here is a thread to explain 🧵

Adam Zeman's response to a quartet of letters regarding his brilliant review of aphantasia research. As he says, wonderful how much energy this young field has right now. Hats off to Adam himself for lighting the spark!

Unconscious perception of ensembles, assessed with a bias-discouraging 2IFC task: osf.io/preprints/ps.... Great work by @patxelos.bsky.social, @dsotob.bsky.social et al.!

Great article, and I love some of the responses from leading thinkers. Nicole and @theamygdaloid.bsky.social in particular point out the importance of studying the phenomenon of conscious feelings as directly as possible.

‪@benhayden.bsky.social‬ @tyrellturing.bsky.social‬ @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social‬ @pessoabrain.bsky.social I see a lot of talk on here about how we should avoid "x does y" talk because the brain is "a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system". But this does not follow. A thread...

Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time — an event-based analog of “object-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

Slight change of schedule: the first session of the MIT Consciousness Club will be Friday September 19. All talks will be in MIT building 46 room 3310. Still working on a zoom option but that should end up happening. sites.google.com/view/mit-con...

New results! Similar destabilization of neural dynamics under different general anesthetics Different anesthetics induce unconsciousness through distinct mechanisms, but cortical destabilization may be their common effect. doi.org/10.1101/2025... #neuroscience

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social #compneuro #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Preprint alert! wiringthebrain.bsky.social and I submitted a commentary on Anil Seth’s forthcoming BBS article, which claims that AI needs to be alive in order to be conscious. We argue that it needs to be a subject, instead. osf.io/preprints/ps... #philsky #neuroskyence

Is it possible to manipulate a high-level visual property while holding ~all low-level visual properties constant? “No!”, you say. Allow @talboger.bsky.social to show you otherwise! Now in press @currentbiology.bsky.social 🐇🐘

@matthiasmichel.bsky.social and I are pleased as punch to present the Fall schedule for the new MIT Consciousness Club. sites.google.com/view/mit-con... #neuroscience

trying this with GPT-5 and charting new frontiers in gaslighting

Here's the schedule for the MIT Consciousness Club this year: sites.google.com/view/mit-con.... I'm looking forward to it! (Rooms will be announced soon; and we're currently working on a zoom option for those who would like to join online)

Minimal Autopoiesis in an AI System One argument against AI consciousness is that consciousness requires autopoiesis (self-maintenance and self-construction), which standard AI systems lack. I describe a minimally autopoietic AI system with only standard engineering features. 1/2 [link in thread]

🚨 New article in #NCONSC Confidence in auditory perceptual completion academic.oup.com/nc/article/2... From Cemre Baykan, Pascal Mamassian & Alexander C Schütz #consciousness 🧠🧪

i agree w/ ‪@sussillodavid.bsky.social‬ that this so-called biopsychism just feels like magicalist thinking. besides the claims that 'maybe' some bio sauce is needed, i just don't hear any concrete arguments as to why. sure maybe we need to take into account survival contexts to understand the ...

New theory: Categorization is Baked Into the Brain Categorization is not a late stage of sensory processing but a core computation that begins at the earliest stages, occurring throughout the cortex as predictive feedback shapes feedforward processing. doi.org/10.31234/osf... #neuroscience

CONVERSATIONS ON CONSCIOUSNESS How the CCN Community Can Contribute Recording now available: hva-uva.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Page... Thanks so much to @meganakpeters.bsky.social, @smfleming.bsky.social, @larsmuckli.bsky.social, @cogcompneuro.bsky.social!

www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... Perceptual Metacognition Beyond Confidence - a little commentary piece by Tomoya Nakayama & yours truly (on @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social, Thomas von Rein, @peterkok.bsky.social, & @smfleming.bsky.social’s recent Neuron paper) 🧠📈

From ancient Greece to the Arabic golden age, scholars have been driven by their curiosity to investigate astronomy, history, philosophy, and sundry other disciplines. Is there a structure to that curiosity? Are astronomers as likely to also be historians or to also be philosophers?

People on twitter will really be like "you believe in computationalism? that pales in explanatory power to my strategy, a non-computational explanation" and then not have a non-computational explanation

"the computational metaphor" in cognitive science is not a metaphor. computational processes are attributed to the mind/brain in the most dead-literal sense. one can disagree with it but (1) it's not as simple as discarding a metaphor and (2) boy is there a lot of data that has to be explained!

Here's the target article, which I truly appreciate for encouraging me to learn more about perception and cognition in #fish and #cephalopods:

I wrote a commentary (mostly) disagreeing with the thought-provoking @smfleming.bsky.social & @matthiasmichel.bsky.social BBS paper about consciousness arising during the transition of animals from sea to land. #consciousness #neuroscience #evolution

All lectures will be recorded and made available a few days later on the wonderful @college-de-france.fr web site: www.college-de-france.fr/en/chair/sta...

#PhiMiSci has recently launched a new special issue on "Structuralism and the Science of Consciousness". It opens with a new paper by David Rosenthal titled "Objective foundations for the study of mental qualities". Have a look!

Excellent piece today in @thetransmitter.bsky.social by @callimcflurry.bsky.social on a paper we’ve discussed at some length here (🧵below); she does a terrific job capturing different reasons to be excited about this work (as well as the controversies). www.thetransmitter.org/emotion-proc...

I’ve been reliably informed that this paper is annoyingly good

electrical stimulation to the dlPFC can alleviate neuropathic pain, but only if we hit the exact right spot osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧠📈

This is an amazing paper and in my opinion a must-read for those interested in the Language of Thought hypothesis.

After five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨ osf.io/preprints/ps...

If you are in Paris on October 1-3 : we are organizing a fantastic cognitive neuroscience conference at Collège de France, on topics ranging from language to math, education and consciousness, with many of my favorite scientists ! Full program here: www.unicog.org/seeing-the-m...

Confidence in absence as confidence in counterfactual visibility: a CogSci proceedings paper with star MSc student Maya Schipper, is now out on PsyArXiv: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵👇

🚨New preprint🚨 out with the dream team @matanmazor.bsky.social @giuliacabbai.bsky.social and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social! We report a novel and robust effect across five different datasets: vivid imagery is reported faster than weak imagery. 📝: osf.io/preprints/ps...

If you are interested in pursuing a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, specially targeting conscious vs. unconscious processing, contact me. We are recruiting 🙏🧠 please RT

what's the best evidence for whether spontaneous fluctuations in fMRI activities are oscillatory or broadband? i.e. whether they are power peaks at specific frequencies above the 1/f curve? could someone point me to your favorite reference for this pls? 🧠📈

Have a look at @neuromorphicboki.bsky.social tour de force: leveraging dynamical independence on #EEG to quantify *and* describe emergent dynamics under different anaesthetics! For #consciousness, less can be more: conscious states show lower emergence but more structured emergent dynamics. 🧠🧪