I still have a copy of this... the Reader's Digest Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary. I spent many an hour in the specific dictionaries of Greek Myth, Heraldry, Science and the Etymology of Names in volume 3.

(daft punk One More Time voice) Auld Lang Syne

Maurice Ketten, 1925

My 15yo gave me a very useful Christmas present. You are welcome to it, my old friends

🧵 Back in 1999, I was hand-rolling the Karhunen-Loève transform using eig() … you may know it as Principal Component Analysis, or as the cool kids now know it by its rapper name PCA. 🎤 I had no fancy toolboxes with the pca() command. Just me, covariance matrices, and youthful determination. ✨

𝗳𝗠𝗥𝗜 (𝗕𝗢𝗟𝗗) 𝘁𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻? Something that everyone using fMRI will be hoping is not very solid, please please... Please BOLD don't go down if oxygen metabolism (neurons?) goes up... And it had to affect "default" regions??? doi.org/10.1038/s415... #neuroskyence

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...

🧩 Academic software fragmentation is real. Your model is in Python, your collaborator needs MATLAB, the bifurcation analysis tool requires Fortran, and someone wants to run parameter sweeps on GPU via PyTorch... PyRates solves this: define your model once, auto-generate code for any backend.

Small at-home workout done. Maintaining the stepping/jogging/running in place is getting a bit easier over time 'cos I ain't leaving my apartment if I don't have to today. It's cold. 🥶 The views: www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxCb... The tunes: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyRp...

New post: cognitivewonderland.... All about scanning fish brains, fMRI statistics, and overzealous skepticism "A little over 15 years ago, some researchers put a salmon into an fMRI scanner."

this, from @kevinbaker.bsky.social, is a better analysis of the intersection between LLMs and academic science than 98% of what's out there.

An academic disliked an Oxford Very Short Introduction (145 pages) in his field so much that he wrote a 200 page book review attacking it. www.pierre-legrand.com/ewExternalFi...

Thank you @rachpips.bsky.social and @suziecro.bsky.social - this is great!! 🤣

Share this with a colleague. This org does grants for academic moms to help with things like childcare at a conference, covering unpaid days off with a sick kiddo, or just getting through a rough patch. We need more stuff like this. 🧪 #WomenInSTEM #BlueSci #SciMom iamas.com/academic-mam...

For reasons that are too complicated to explain, I am reminded of Adam Stuart Smith’s 2005 paper “Are Jaffa Cakes Really Biscuits?”. Here’s his cladogram (it says they aren’t): Full paper here: plesiosauria.com/pdf/smith_20...

*TODAY 9th December 2025 4:00 PM GMT* MathWorks is hosting an interactive session on their new integrated AI assistant - MATLAB Copilot Featuring a live Q&A with Seth DeLand, product manager for Generative AI at MathWorks.

This is probably the most useful thing in the piece... why LLMs are good at learning from code, and less good at learning from language. [and presumably video though they don't mention this].

**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition?** That goes to the top of the list! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Thoughtful review with some good recent historical perspective on the ongoing paradigm shift that is radically changing the way we think about what brain areas do. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We've joined with 15 local and national organisations, setting out 10 practical steps to address the city's road safety emergency and prevent needless deaths on our city's roads. Will you join us by co-signing the asks in 2 minutes?: betterstreetsforbirmingham....

Thanks so much everybody for reposting this 🙏🙏🙏 Please please continue to share it among your networks. I'm hoping there's somebody out there who is as excited about this project as I am.

Next Wednesday Dec 10th, we are excited to have Dr @danieljamesyon.bsky.social join us for our last session of the year. Dr Yon will tell us about how our interactions with others alter metacognitive states of mind. Full details on our website (surl.li/mqtofs). All are welcome in person!

“One mile on a bike is a $.42 economic gain to society, one mile driving is a $.20 loss.” “Which means that Copenhagen, a city of 1.2 million people, saves $357 million a year on health costs because something like 80% of its population commutes by bike.” #CityMakingMath Some costs aren’t costs.

Come join us at the Birmingham Institute of Forest Research, a great place to do research!

A short preprint describing our adoption of more consistent and precise use of terminology related to reproducibility, robustness, replicability, repeatability, and credibility. osf.io/preprints/me...

I had dallied with AI chatbots before July 2024. It was only after reading Ethan Mollick's "Gradually, then Suddenly: Upon the Threshold" www.oneusefulthing.org/p/gradually-... that I gave them a more thorough workout. It is interesting to revisit that article nearly 1.5 years later.

#AcademicSky #PsychSciSky We've hit peak Psychology Humour

This poem is dedicated to anyone making a start on their advent calendar today.

This letter to the British Journal of Psychiatry tells us everything we need to know about current thinking in #autism research. Concise, accessible & powerful. Read it if you think autism = social deficits! #DoubleEmpathyProblem www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Fascinating that #EEG is one of the top trends, while #fMRI is declining. We've just set up a @ucl.ac.uk EEG community and attendance was way over what we expected. Interesting times. #neuroskyence

MATLAB SIG relaunch tomorrow! Wednesday 26th November I really should prepare my slides.... #MATLAB #MATLABambassador

Join us for tomorrow’s Consciousness Club, Wed 19th at 11am UK time! Jianghao Liu A neural model of conscious mental imagery and aphantasia All welcome! For more info please see: metacoglab.org/consciousnes...

This is terrifying. "[AI agents] can... infer a researcher's latent hypotheses and produce data that artificially confirms them." ... "We can no longer trust that survey responses are coming from real people" [email protected]

MATLAB Special Interest Group (re)launch event at the University of Birmingham. Just over a week away! Join us on the 26th of November from 1300.

Very good use of his time. I approve. 👍🏻 www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Our paper on improving statistical reporting in psychology is now online 🎉 As a part of this paper, we also created the Transparent Statistical Reporting in Psychology checklist, which researchers can use to improve their statistical reporting practices www.nature.com/articles/s44...

🌎 New paper in @commspsychol.nature.com 🌍 doi.org/10.1038/s442... There is an urgent need to choose behaviours that mitigate climate change, but these are often more effortful. Can we increase pro-environmental motivation? Joint w/ Luis Sebastian Contreras-Huerta & amazing international team 👇🧵

🚨 MATLAB EXPO starts TOMORROW (Nov 12-13)! 🚨 Two days of FREE online sessions covering everything from AI to robotics, all from the comfort of your screen. MathWorks engineers, academics and industry leaders sharing the latest in MATLAB (and Simulink).

It's out! Such a wonderful evening celebrating the launch of A TRICK OF THE MIND at Pushkin House. So lovely to see so many, and to be able to thank everybody who made my first book happen. Thank you! Available in all good bookshops now! www.penguin.co.uk/books/451515...

This is what the band of the Milky Way would look like at night if your eyes could see radio waves. A hidden beauty. It's a new image created by the Murchison Widefield Array, which scanned the sky in 20 radio "colors" over frequencies from 72 to 231 megahertz. 🧪🔭 www.icrar.org/gleam-x-gala...

1 year residency program at Apple. Cogsci/neuro/ling folks studying neuro interpretability, reasoning, and decision-making under uncertainty to help Apple make progress on similar questions in LLMs. Recent PhD or more senior jobs.apple.com/en-us/detail...

🧠 If you missed last week's Navigating Neuroscience with MATLAB webinar, the MathWorks landing page has everything: 60-min recording, slides, and a comprehensive resource hub. content.mathworks.com/viewer/69047...

DEAR FOLLOWERS - LINKEDIN POSTING SURGE REQUESTED

Bluesky has overtaken Twitter/X as the highest social engagement metric for the entire publication corpus of some universities. Here's all the attention for all research from Rhodes University, ZA. In October 2025 Bluesky mentioned their research more than X/Twitter. 1/2

Dopamine ≠ reward but turns out, also not the learning molecule we thought. If DA RPE is the emperor, this work SCREAMS it was running naked all the time. This paper got quite some attention recently. Let's simplify it a bit. A🧵with my toy model and notes: #neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

"The cognitive psychologist Amos Tversky was reported to have said: ‘Theories are not refuted. They are embarrassed.’ Today the Modern Synthesis does seem to be somewhat embarrassed, but history tells us that scientists can live with embarrassment for a remarkably long time." Jablonka & Lamb (2020)

Does dopamine modulate the willingness to help? New Psychology Today post, "How Dopamine Affects Our Motivation to Help Others", written by me, with special thanks to @drjocutler.bsky.social and @thepsychologist.bsky.social www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-...

🚨 PhD Opportunity! 🚨 Come investigate the mechanistic role of dopamine in emotion processing with Prof Jennifer Cook (and me!) MIBTP-funded PhD - more details here: warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fa... @thechbh.bsky.social Get in touch if interested, and please share!

🎯 Navigating Neuroscience with MATLAB 🎯 *TODAY* 📅 29 Oct 2025, 2:00-3:00 PM GMT 🔗 uk.mathworks.com/company/even... #MATLAB #MATLABambassador

Many thanks to all the researchers who have told us about how they use #TMS - the results are looking really useful and very interesting! We'll keep the survey open until 31st October, so if you can please spare 5 minutes: Complete the #TMS User Survey! forms.gle/95EW1PVC3JQV... 🙏 🧠 🧲 ⚡ 🙏