🔺 New preprint 🔺 Why does poverty increase time discounting? With W. Frankenhuis and @danielnettle.bsky.social, we argue that current models do not account for discounting in *persistent* poverty, and show that a desperation threshold can! A quick 🧵

𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗲𝗺𝗮-𝗯𝗮𝘀𝗲𝗱 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗳 𝗮𝗯𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 Giovanni Pezzulo et al introduce hierarchical model of goal attainment in PFC. Looks very impressive. #neuroskyence arxiv.org/abs/2601.189...

I am assembling resources for @aial.ie to mitigate/reduce risks (due to our research) from potential: 1)retaliation, defamation lawsuit etc for work on politically charged topics 2)emotional harm from dealing with sensitive issues (CSAM, hate, etc) know of any helpful resources? pls share/repost

According to this, just over a third of people (36%) think AI understands their emotions or is conscious. 58% trust AI chatbots to act in their best interests more than they trust governments to do so.

Writing is thinking "On the value of human-generated scientific writing in the age of large-language models." www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

Paper accepted! 😊 "Reframing the Free Will Debate: The Universe is Not Deterministic" will appear in Synthese. Final version available here: arxiv.org/abs/2503.19672 - with Henry Potter and George Ellis

3/3 The key novelty is showing that genome instability is both relieved by sleep and sufficient to induce sleep in cnidarians, this implies that DNA damage was an ancestral driver of sleep evolution, long before brains or complex cognition existed.

2/3 It is important to remember that we already knew that jellyfish sleep, and that their metabolism is affected by sleep (or lack thereof) in a similar way to ours. The breakthrough in this study is that they have studied how DNA damage leads to sleep (paper, 2020) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1/3 Jellyfish and anemones also sleep, despite not having a brain Not only do they sleep, but their behavior is affected if they lack sleep; they become clumsier and need to catch up on lost sleep. Interestingly, they sleep 8 hours a day, just like us. (paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy just published a revised entry on Animal Consciousness! By Michael Trestman, Jonathan Birch, Colin Allen @wileyprof.bsky.social @birchlse.bsky.social plato.stanford.edu/entries/cons...

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

Crowdsourcing: Scales for degrees of evidence I'm looking for simple scales (eg 0-5) that capture degreees of evidence for (scientific) claims. A bit along the lines of this one proposed by @shansiddiqi.bsky.social et al but perhaps a bit more generic. Know any? www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is how the Andromeda galaxy would appear at night if it were not obscured by interstellar dust. It’s hard not to wonder how this might have shaped human history: the realization that we live in one galaxy among many could have emerged millennia earlier, changing everything @manlius.bsky.social

The surge of AI slop, deceptive synthetic videos & images flooding our feeds, is driven in large part by Agentic AI Accounts (AAAs). aiforensics.org/work/agentic... Key findings: -Over 43,000 mostly AI-made posts generated 4.5 billion views -More than 65% of accounts were created in early 2025 1/

🚨 What if evolution is the ”law”… and networks are the machines that do the work? In this paper (just published) I try to formalize how living systems are non-equilibrium, information-processing, adaptive matter. With a great biological flavor! 🧪🌐🌍🧬🦠 👉 iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... 🧵 1/

We’ve seen research showing LLM chatbots can reduce belief in conspiracy theories in experimental settings: scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=e... But in the wild, it seems that these tools likely contribute to strengthening belief in conspiracy theories for many.

🚨Out in PNAS🚨 Examining news 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)Low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE - even BlueSky! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Loved this paper by @kristinandrews.bsky.social and Noam Miller. A very convincing argument for the function of consciousness.

Postdoc position in individual-level incentives, social learning, and payoff-biased imitation shape group-level accuracy in complex prediction and decision-making tasks in Konstanz files.newsletter2go.com/l3slzozn/s_i...

New preprint 🌟 Psychology is core to cognitive science, and so it is vital we preserve it from harmful frames. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social & I use our psych and computer science expertise to analyse and craft: Critical Artificial Intelligence Literacy for Psychologists. doi.org/10.31234/osf... 🧵 1/

New Phil Trans B issue on the ‘Evolutionary functions of consciousness’ royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

The intelligence of slime mold is that of its materials All of Physarum's intelligent behaviors can be explained by physics, as in non-living materials (e.g., water following the path of least resistance), and do not require a representation of the problem. (preprint) arxiv.org/pdf/2511.08531

1/🧵 Out today in @frontiersin.bsky.social : “Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there?” By @axc.bsky.social @liadmudrik.bsky.social, & me (a CIFAR & @erc.europa.eu production 🧠). www.frontiersin.org/journals/sci...

Beliefs about one's own beliefs in chimpanzees. Five experiments have demonstrated that chimpanzees evaluate their beliefs based on evidence and the source of that evidence (by epistemic defeat). Language is not needed for any of this. (paper) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Does biology play dice? by @elisecutts.bsky.social Some thoughts on nature, nurture, and chance in development www.reviewertoo.com/does-biology... Yes it sure does, is the answer! 🎲🎲👋

Ada Lovelace, first AI denigrator

Can AI simulations of human research participants advance cognitive science? In @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, @lmesseri.bsky.social & I analyze this vision. We show how “AI Surrogates” entrench practices that limit the generalizability of cognitive science while aspiring to do the opposite. 1/

Fully-funded 4-year #PhD in Cultural Evolution! Join my @erc.europa.eu project exploring how compression & compositionality drive cultural innovation: hmc-lab.com/ERCPhDCultur... Apply by Nov 12! Maybe of interest to folks from #COSMOS2025 or @eslr.bsky.social? Please feel free to share! 🙏

Excellent and insightful critique of the recent "Definition of AGI" paper, from @philipcball.bsky.social philipball86.substack.com/p/can-we-fin...

I said it before and I'll say it again: Cognition is rhythmic Contents of visual predictions oscillate at alpha frequencies www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... #neuroscience

Good news: carbon intensity has declined Bad news: carbon emissions increased, due to the rapid rise in world GDP Also bad news: the chance of staying below 2°C remained low, at 17% Better news: chance of going above 3°C has gone down substantially, from 26% to 9%

1/5 Birds around the world use the same alarm call to warn of the presence of brood parasites. They studied 21 species from nine families that were separated by 50 million years of evolution. Perhaps the most interesting finding: the alarm call is learned. (paper) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/4 Psilocybin has evolved twice in fungi The process by which it occurs in the genus Psilocybe is completely different from that in Inocybe. The most interesting thing is that both genera have very different ecological niches. (paper) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone? Our new preprint, led by @anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

Evidence that even when LLMs produce similar results to humans, they “rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification”

📣 You can now check the #CRSy25 ⚪ programme! Explore the main themes: 🔎 Scaling up ➰ Cybernetic Loops 🤖Models and Robots 🎟️ symposium.fchampalimaud.science/registration-1 👉 symposium.fchampalimaud.science/programme 🗓️15-17 October 📍Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, Lisbon @protocollabs.bsky.social

My little book on Schrödinger's famous classic 'What Is Life?' is out! Offering the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of the book's origins, reception, impact, and legacy, it uncovers Schrödinger's motivations in writing it, and shows how it has shaped our current understanding of the cell

Can general artificial intelligence emerge by not following the evolution of complex brains? In this 2022 paper with @brigan.bsky.social we argued that embodiment, mind reading (mirror systems), mental time traveling... are necessary conditions www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24... @anilseth.bsky.social

Finally out: our recent work with Nick Betley is a view into how the brain reshapes its behavior in the face of competing survival needs- and also a potential angle on treatment targets for enduring pain. A brief rundown... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do AI reasoning models abstract and reason like humans? New paper on this from my group: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02125 🧵 1/10

Robot personhood/rights is conceptually bogus and legally puts more power/rights in the hands of those that develop and deploy robots/AI systems firstmonday.org/ojs/index.ph...

This is an awe-inspiring and fascinating study that I thoroughly enjoyed reading. However, the overall framing in terms of "innate versus learned” is unnecessary. The innate versus acquired dichotomy is outdated and has been for a long time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗺 Is consciousness tied to biological brains? Neuro&Philo Salon present+discussion with @anilseth.bsky.social of his BBS target paper! October 23, noon USA eastern #neuroskyence Register: umd.zoom.us/meeting/regi... doi.org/10.1017/S014...

It is often argued that the origin of life must be related to "phase transitions" This concept is often misused, or even abused. In a new paper with @ricardsole.bsky.social we discuss which types of transitions might be involved and some relevant models. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

Delighted that our paper on 'Delegation to AI can increase dishonest behaviour' is featured today on the cover of @nature.com Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In honor of the 75th anniversary of the Turing test, I'm re-upping my short essay, "The Turing Test and our shifting conceptions of intelligence". www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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

@pessoabrain.bsky.social talks to @wiringthebrain.bsky.social, @aliyarumana.bsky.social and Peter Ulric Tse about the need for neuroscience’s traditional mechanistic framework to give way to a richer understanding of how brains generate behavior. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...