My new essay for @thetransmitter.bsky.social. Why is understanding emotion so challenging? The debates around what counts as an "emotion" shed insight. These disputes are multidimensional, principled and fascinating. Here, I unpack them. www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

The psych job market may not be dead... but it is gravely injured 😬 So far it's looking like the Trump administration's attacks on higher ed/research are going to have more than 2x the impact on the job market as the covid-19 pandemic. #psychjobs #neurojobs #academicjobs

Burnout in health care providers is a big issue. It reduces wellbeing and the ability to be effective. (Be kind to your provider!) Encouraging news: In a study of >2,000 providers, the Healthy Minds Program app reduced distress and improved wellbeing 9 mos later. jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

New Open dataset alert: 🧠 Introducing "Spacetop" – a massive multimodal fMRI dataset that bridges naturalistic and experimental neuroscience! N = 101 x 6 hours each = 606 functional iso-hours combining movies, pain, faces, theory-of-mind and other cognitive tasks! 🧵below

The final version (after proof) is now finally out. It provides a detailed spatio-temporal profile of brain mediation of the cue-stimulus integration in the pain context. We interpreted the results in terms of cortical hierarchy. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

"Brown CS faculty members Ellie Pavlick and Suresh Venkatasubramanian @geomblog.bsky.social have just received a $20M NSF grant to found ARIA, a national institute to develop intuitive, trustworthy AI assistants." Great news and congrats! 🧠📈 🧪

A fascinating new #fmri study from Jo He with Kevin Ochsner and co. on social reappraisal. Giving advice to a friend changes our brain responses and helps regulate emotion. Fictive processes (imagination!) can have real consequences in the brain & life. academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

Health is more than the absence of disease, and depends on harmony across multiple brain-body systems. We need more research on whole-person health! The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) @thenccih.bsky.social funds vital whole-person research. RP and #KEEP_NCCIH!

This dashboard on U.S. research spending is one to watch for researchers applying for #NIH, #NSF, #DOD grants and other research grants. Thanks to @alesszimm.bsky.social and @aaas.org www.aaas.org/news/fy-2026...

Online #fMRI course coming up August 6-8! 3-day intensive with lectures and hands-on analysis for all skill levels. #SPM, #ICA, #DataScience with @vcalhoun.bsky.social and Kent Kiehl. We love teaching this course and meeting students from all areas! Info+Reg here: sites.google.com/dartmouth.ed...

A month ago, I shared a draft of the teaching resources list for cog psych (& related) courses. Now that the fall semester is only 4 wks away 😱, I thought I'd ask you to share your favorite books, videos, demos, syllabi, etc., to make this list more complete & more useful for interested folks.

Happy to have contributed together with @lgrabot.bsky.social to discuss #traveling_waves and cognition!

Our study using layer fMRI to study the direction of communication between the hippocampus and cortex during perceptual predictions is finally out in Science Advances! Predicted-but-omitted shapes are represented in CA2/3 and correlate specifically with deep layers of PHC, suggesting feedback. 🧠🟦

🚨New paper in PAIN w/ R. Gopalakrishnan, @torwager.bsky.social, @mcgill.ca Mathieu Roy, et al. Neurophysiological encoding of aversive prediction errors. journals.lww.com/pain/fulltex... @theneuro.bsky.social

Highly recommend!

Serious concerns about a new cortical biomarker for pain sensitivity jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... We (with @tspisak.bsky.social, @christianbuchel.bsky.social) published a commentary on Chowdhury, Bi et al. (2025, JAMA Neurology) raising serious concerns about their reported results. 👇 1/13

I have a new paper on "The Psychology of Virality" with @steverathje.bsky.social We explain how similar psychological processes (eg preferential attention to negativity, social motives, etc.) drive the spread of information across online and offline contexts: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Online #fMRI course coming up August 6-8! 3-day intensive with lectures and hands-on analysis for all skill levels. #SPM, #ICA, #DataScience with @vcalhoun.bsky.social and Kent Kiehl. We love teaching this course and meeting students from all areas! Info+Reg here: sites.google.com/dartmouth.ed...

“This suggests that expectations don’t change early perceptual processing, but rather how we interpret and react to those sensations.” (Generally) true for seeing. But what about pain? Huge open question (and much debate). Here’s some data.

This is a beautiful poem. It makes me think of my dad and the times I’ve felt him with me since he passed away. www.facebook.com/share/v/19G1...

Predictive processing models posit top-down influences of internal models on brain processing at multiple levels...but how deeply does predictive info penetrate into perception? What are the limits? New paper with @rotembot.bsky.social and @fmristats.bsky.social link.growkudos.com/1mmf28pbmkg

I got permission to share this, and I'm extremely grateful for that. The Onion got this letter from one of our subscribers in Alaska. She works with dementia patients and decided to leave a copy in the car for each one. This email made my year. Read it and you'll see what I mean. People are good.

Also, @torwager.bsky.social has been building a nice collection of subcortical atlases, which are being updated here: github.com/canlab/Neuro... This includes Marta's atlas above, but also many more!

Excited to share co–first-authored paper with Jinxiao Zhang and teamwork with @torwager.bsky.social er.bsky.social and @JamesGross @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social ! Emerging findings and a potential framework of neural overlap between emotion generation and regulation at www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

I read this and signed. It advocates for constructive and reasonable views. Like others I have received my share of rejections on grants, some unfair. But all were part of a rigorous, transparent, and scientist-driven peer-review process. The NIH has the world’s best scientific funding model imho.

There is an economic multiplier to every science dollar spent. Just from the University of Arizona, the proposed cuts to NASA/NSF could pull hundreds of millions of dollars out of the southern Arizona economy. We are a place that has "Space is Wildcat country" banners on poles.

Not good news for gravitational-wave or multimessenger astronomy "In FY 2026 NSF will operate only one of the two [LIGO] sites and will support a reduced level for technology development" ☄️⚛️🧪🔭

Elusive Cures is my first book. I was surprised by how much was required to make it happen (beyond writing it). If you're curious, here's the who and how behind it ... 🧵 (My amazing publisher: @princetonupress.bsky.social)

#BREAKING: New HHS document details deep NIH cuts as part of Trump budget request www.statnews.com/2025/05/30/n...

The Northwest Territories shattered significant temperature records on Thursday, with Hay River reaching an unprecedented 34.3°C and becoming the warmest temperature ever documented in the region during the month of May!

Beautiful paper on #biomarkers, #neuromarkers, and psychosocial predictors of chronic pain and associated #chronicdiseases. A tour de force. @mfilling.bsky.social @evp82.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great Sand Dunes National Park from 30,000 ft

Voyager 1’s primary thrusters are working again after being broken for 20 years! The craft has been relying solely on its backup thrusters to keep the spacecraft’s antenna pointing at Earth, but they were at risk of clogging from over-use 🧪🔭 edition.cnn.com/2025/05/14/s...

Chronic #pain involves changes in multiple brain systems for nociception, threat, and reward. What self-management practices can help us live with or even reverse these changes? Cognitive, behavioral, and #digitalhealth strategies can help! New review in Lancet: authors.elsevier.com/a/1l5%7EfV-4...

Check out our new paper! Vision models often struggle with learning both transformation-invariant and -equivariant representations at the same time. @hafezghm.bsky.social shows that self-supervised prediction with proper inductive biases achieves both simultaneously. (1/4) #MLSky #NeuroAI

🕟 It's Wednesday, so it's time for this week's Nilearn drop-in hour! Join us today on Jitsi at 4pm UTC to discuss anything #nilearn. 🧠🚀 Check your local time and grab the Jitsi meeting link here: tinyurl.com/nilearn-drop... Or check our google calendar shorturl.at/O9mCN

Better Code, Better Science - Introducing a new open-source book project on scientific coding using AI tools russpoldrack.substack.com/p/better-cod...

All #NIH grants have now terminated here at #Harvard, including ours, which examined shared/distinct underlying neural & cognitive mechanisms between typical/atypical #arithmetic and #reading skills. Results would have been invaluable for development of #screening, diagnostic, & intervention tools.

Carl Sagan on sensible military spending and climate change.

@theNASEM is hosting a free online workshop May 19 and 21 on the #neurobiology of #empathy and #compassion. Wonderful to see this being studied scientifically -- e&c form the (usually invisible) foundation of any healthy society and healthy people too. www.nationalacademies.org/event/44350_...

I think a lot about what Carl Sagan said in one of his final interviews.

Instant Policy from Vitalis Vosylius and Edward Johns​ of ICL enables *one shot, in-context learning* of new robotics tasks. Thats the dream. (Just won a well deserved best paper at ICLR robot learning workshop) ​

Pls share AMAZING opportunities! Studying Depression? its biology? UCI’s new Depression Res Ctr is hiring 1) Preclinical Models: systems mechanisms of vulnerability, resilience 2) Child Adolescent, Adult Depression 3) Biomed Engineer Deep Phenotype, Intervention recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF09510 508, 507

Super proud of this amazing long breath team effort, to identify prospective longitudinal predictors for post traumatic stress ! www.ru.nl/en/research/...

2 Postdoc positions with my fabulous new colleague @bernhardspitzer.bsky.social - chair of biopsychology @tudresden.bsky.social - thanks for sharing - @dgps.bsky.social @biodgps-dgpa.bsky.social www.verw.tu-dresden.de/StellAus/ste...

Now online with own website - the fantastic CRC/TRR 393 on "Trajectories of Affective Disorders". Check it out 👇 @tudresden.bsky.social @unimarburg.bsky.social @uni-muenster.de @dfg.de @dgps.bsky.social #depression #bipolardisorder www.uni-marburg.de/en/trr-393

SAVE THE DATE: #resilience2025 - the 11th International Symposium on Resilience Research - Mainz, Germany - September 24-26, 2025 Satellite methods workshop: September 23 & many opportunities for early-career researchers Meet the stress resilience research community, get latest insights, spur you

Some wise words from Remi Quirion.

If you are interested in how the different review panels at #NIH work, there's a lot of good information here - the different types of panels - council, study section, BSCs and more, for each institute. ofacp.nih.gov/list-nih-adv...

Nothing will kill more children than the ongoing decimation of CDC, NIH, and USAID work to lift vaccine uptake in the US and world. Child survival rose 75% in the last 50 years. Vaccines account for 40% of that. Measles vax alone was 60% of the benefit. www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...