This one hit me in the feels today

"Machine vision systems—which have neither bodily states nor conscious thoughts—can predict with remarkable accuracy how humans will feel about the things they look at." 👀🔥 The perceptual primacy of feeling (PNAS Jan 2025) www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #neuroskyence #vision #affectsci

What's it like at some agencies right now? I'm fresh off a conference where I got to speak to a bunch of people still at some important agencies. What's the climate like? Why are you staying? Generally the responses felt like this, and we are all Maggie:

All of our neural dynamics tools, software, protocols, datasets, and even hardware plans are now available in one convenient place! Check it out and let us know what you'd like to see next: www.allenneuraldynamics.org/tools 🧠📈

So very excited [these](www.foundationalpapersincomplexityscience.org) arrived today!! I doubt I'll ever get through them all, but I always get inspiration and ambition from the complex systems perspective.

I found joy today, not cold, but slightly chilled, emerging from the shade into the warm sunshine.

Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions - rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking steps to make sure students can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let’s hope others follow suit.

Today I lost an NIH grant training clinicians to do research about intimate partner violence with perinatal women. More women are murdered in the perinatal period than die of obstetric complications. I didn't just lose a grant. We lost an entire cohort of people building careers to prevent that.

From 2010 to 2016 (latest data I have ), NIH research contributed to EVERY drug approved by the FDA

In a new Science study, cryo–electron tomography captures the in-cell architecture of the mitochondrial respiratory chain, illuminating how the coordinated action of molecular machines drives life’s fundamental energy conversion. Learn more in this week's issue: scim.ag/3FA3Ygq

I think we have enough evidence to now argue that AI is not getting exponentially better, or even linearly better. It is asymptotically converging on a level of inadequacy, and even that is only happening because the data thieves are still stealing everything that isn’t nailed down.

Last year, I was overjoyed to receive an NIH NRSA fellowship to study toddler brains and caregiving effects on memory at Columbia. Last night, my grant was terminated.

Have not been able to tear myself away from exploring these just received spatial transcriptomics data from the septum and surrounding nuclei in human 🧠. Fascinating to explore since there are no comprehensive spatial gene expression data across these regions yet available in human brain.

I currently have two fully-funded PhD opportunities in my lab - both providing a chance to work on the incredible LEAF data set that we have been collecting the last couple of years (220 children followed longitudinally from 10-30 months on measures of attention and early EF). Please share!

RFK Jr. Vows To Make Measles Deaths So Common They Won’t Be Upsetting Anymore

Now accepted at Nature Computational Science: Nicole shows how #Bayesian #hierarchical #models can explicitly model major #source of #population #stratification in 10,000 ABCD subjects. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

This looks like amazing new work from my colleagues at Stanford demonstrating the opponent interactions of DA and 5HT in reinforcement learning.

𝗗𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘅 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝘄𝗼-𝘄𝗮𝘆 𝗺𝗶𝗰𝗿𝗼–𝗺𝗮𝗰𝗿𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Interesting paper but top-down causation seems to be way of capturing how micro-level entities respond to *aggregate state* of all other micro-level entities #complexity ht @evanthompson.bsky.social www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

💯 Hallucination is totally the wrong word, implying it is perceiving the world incorrectly. But it's generating false, plausible sounding statements. Confabulation is literally the perfect word. So, let's all please start referring to any junk that an LLM makes up as "confabulations".

🚨New WP🚨 We examine news sharing on 7 platforms: 1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news 2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning 3)But low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE, even BlueSky! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Good news everyone! A new version of graph-tool is just out! @graph-tool.skewed.de graph-tool.skewed.de Graph-tool is a comprehensive and efficient Python library to work with networks, including structural, dynamical, and statistical algorithms, as well as visualization. 1/N #networkscience

"Reproducibility is hard" - nice piece by @petebachant.me on trying reproduce one's previous work.

Took me two solid days of data munging and coding but I finally figured out how to create these gorgeous connectome/circle plot diagrams. This is the Yeo 7-network brain parcellation, with major connections in a group of healthy adults.

Students should study the humanities not because it makes them better workers but because it rips you open and breaks your brain and changes everything you thought you knew. I *promise* you this. I *promise* it has this ability, no matter how smart you think you are. I have seen it countless times.

We've been analyzing emotion regulation patterns of brain activity lately. Depressed people who regulate more when asked, after seeing negative images, regulate better. But those who regulate more when not asked think more about suicide after stress.

Nudge for scicomm (~spring) Many of you (& me) want to help with the next steps in the US. How? Science may take a hit in 2025. Spring is a great time for public-facing efforts that unpack what scientists do and why it matters. *Now is pitch time!* Imagine if we all did 1 thing? To consider:

“Cognitive flexibility as the shifting of brain network flows by flexible neural representations”, a solo paper by yours truly, making the case that brain activity flow shifts are essential to mental flexibility (and quite interesting too!) Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

lmfao what

btw, just a reminder: do NOT buy this book! (it's free for download at the OUP website, coz it is open access) despite the title & cover art, it is a monograph written for nerdy researchers. don't let the false salesmanship fool you. you probably won't like it...

Breathing modulates network activity in frontal brain regions during anxiety 🐀🧠🫁 Journal of Neuroscience www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... #Neuroskyence #affectsci

xcited to share our new results! We (huge team effort led by post-doc extraordinaire Sylvie Lesuis) examined the effects of acute stress on threat memory generalization and engram ensemble architecture. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🎨 In case anyone need… The NIH BioArt Source is an awesome library of *free* professionally drawn illustrations for scientific presentations or figures. Downloadable in HD. Thank you NIH for this invaluable tool 🙏! Check it out 👇 bioart.niaid.nih.gov

A poem for my last day working at the writing center for the semester (by Joseph Fasano)

Last month, I desperately needed a review comparing all the different functional networks proposed over the last 20 years. While collecting literature to start putting one together, I found that @lucinauddin.bsky.social and WHATNET have already covered it with doi.org/10.1162/netn.... Thanks!

This paper is not that well cited, but still one of my favorite papers (I am not an author) showing that resting-state correlations (aka functional connectivity) is biologically meaningful.

I think doi.org/10.1038/s415... is my favorite paper of 2024. Lynch, et al. describe a doubling in size of the salience network in depression, then show it's more trait than state. Now we need to figure out what these networks really mean, both as correlated activity, and from a human perspective.

I just re-read @esfinn.bsky.social's connectome fingerprinting paper doi.org/10.1038/nn.4... today. It's a nice paper that's seeding good ideas for other analyses, and giving me hope that they might work without hours of resting-state data per subject.