some interesting discussion from Ruth Millikan and others at the @philosophyofbrains.com blog: philosophyofbrains.com/2025/09/16/r...

Interested in consciousness? Join the club. And join us tomorrow (noon on Zoom) for the first seminar of the MIT Consciousness Club. sites.google.com/view/mit-con...

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....

This is cool! People evaluate agents by the algorithms that drive their behavior direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

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.!

Fun write up of Imagination/perception work from @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social @smfleming.bsky.social and others: www.scientificamerican.com/article/newf... I was just live on Canadian Breakfast radio chatting about it. Bad pun, but this work really has captured the public imagination!

I'm looking forward to "What is consciousness?" tomorrow 9/9, 2:45pm @crick.ac.uk, w/ @profbriancox.bsky.social @smfleming.bsky.social @kathaschmack.bsky.social & Alex O'Connor @cosmicskeptic.bsky.social www.crick.ac.uk/whats-on/a-q...

Thanks Nicole! Briefly, we used "sociocracy", which is a thing invented to make lots of people get along and make decisions. It is used by various collaborations including those at CERN. It aims to achieve "consent" if not "consensus". This might be useful: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The two key studies of the International Brain Laboratory @intlbrainlab.bsky.social are out today! A brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour www.nature.com/articles/s41... Brain-wide representations of prior information in mouse decision-making www.nature.com/articles/s41...

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗱𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗱𝘀 (𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲) 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺? Implications for reinforcement learning. Very interesting paper. doi.org/10.1016/j.ti... #neuroskyence

*Absolutely* beautiful work characterizing the neural transformations between imagery and perception! 🤩

The TiCS issue featuring our paper on "A timeline of cognitive costs in decision-making" is now available online 😄 Honored to have been a part of this awesome interdisciplinary mega-collab led by Christin Schulze (UNSW Sydney) www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Published in @Nature.com today, highlights include: 🧠Decision-making is extremely distributed across the brain 🎯Prior expectations are encoded across the brain, even in early sensory areas 🌍Open data and protocols www.nature.com/articles/s41... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A complete brain-wide activity map at single-cell resolution has been revealed for the first time. Researchers recorded from 650,000+ neurons across 279 brain areas to track decision-making in mice. Read the story: 🔗 www.sainsburywellcome.org/web/research...

New preprint! We are pleased to share our Hierarchical Bayesian framework for Interoceptive Psychophysics! Implemented in rstan, we provide a complete suite of tools spanning model comparison, parameter recovery, multifactor designs, power analysis, and more! 🎯 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Looking forward to this!

So we're providing what is essentially a functional characterization of consciousness and then explaining how that could be done psychologically (i.e. here by monitoring your own states) and for what purpose. We can then turn to empirical evidence to find support for / challenge the view.

I don't think it's Cartesian at all. I'm identifying consciousness with performing a function. A state is conscious when the subject is aware of being in that state; and 'awareness' here is constituted by some kind of monitoring. A state isn't conscious if I'm totally unaware of being in it.

I just finished reading this excellent paper, highly recommended.

New paper in draft, with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, critiquing three recent books that address the moral standing of non-human animals and AI systems: @birchlse.bsky.social's The Edge of Sentience, @jeffsebo.bsky.social's The Moral Circle, and Webb Keane's Animals, Robots, Gods. 1/3

A review just in time for our 59th Wedding Anniversary on 1st September Scenes from a Marriage: How We Found Our Way from Experimental Psychology to Social Neuroscience | Annual Reviews - www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

Super pleased to see this heroic effort finally in print!! Many thanks to Hunter, our amazing study participants, and everyone else who made this fantastic study come true.

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 🐇🐘

Our department is seeking applicants for an Assistant Professor position with a focus on affective science. Please apply and/or pass this along to anyone who might be interested! facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/49...

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

@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

if you saw my & @smfleming.bsky.social's talks at #CCN2025 & want to learn more abt the ARC-ETHOS project, check out this blog post from @templetonworld.bsky.social. and if you missed our talks (we'll forgive you), see abstracts & recordings here! (click livestream) 2025.ccneuro.org/community-ev...

... mechanisms. but once understood, we should be able to engineer. in bio, mechanisms are selected for their functions. substrate-centrism thus denies evolution & is argubly just unscientific. the vitalists were the last guys who tried. it didn't end well. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism

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 ...

Our funders @templetonworld.bsky.social‬, have highlighted ETHOS on their website. See their article here: www.templetonworldcharity.org/blog/how-eth...

The rumors are true! #CCN2026 will be held at NYU. @toddgureckis.bsky.social and I will be executive-chairing. Get in touch if you want to be involved!

Getting involved with CCN organisation was one of the best things I did to get to know a wide network of amazing, friendly, international and interdisciplinary colleagues. Strongly recommend! And @neurograce.bsky.social will be an awesome co-chair :-)

it was such a pleasure to share some of our work with @racheldenison.bsky.social, @jorge-morales.bsky.social, @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social and all our labs with the #CCN2025 community! thank you @lintonvision.bsky.social for coordinating this excellent event!

Tomorrow at @cogcompneuro.bsky.social, check out @pieterbarkema.bsky.social's poster about how postdiction influences representations in deep vs. middle layers of the primary visual cortex. Turns out the present influences the (inferred) past in V1! #neuroskyence #compneurosky

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!

Hello Bluesky! 👋🏻 We’re back with some exciting new episodes in the pipeline…. But in the meantime why not have a browse and a listen of our back catalogue: www.ucl.ac.uk/research/dom...

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) 🧠📈

Awesome piece by Tomoya Nakamura and @hakwan.bsky.social, linking our recent imagination-reality monitoring findings to metacognition: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#neurojob #psychiatry @rcpsych.bsky.social @uclqsion.bsky.social @relmed.bsky.social

CONVERSATIONS ON CONSCIOUSNESS How the CCN Community Can Contribute #CCN2025 on Wednesday 13th (10am 🇪🇺) Livestream link below ➡️ Exploring the possibility of Computational Consciousness Science ➡️ Discussing three Templeton World Charity Foundation Adversarial Collaborations

🚨Amazing opportunity: position available for a new associate/full professor at the FIL @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social @uclbrainscience.bsky.social! Do you have a neuroimaging-focused research program? Get applying! 🚨 www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

Very exciting opportunity here! 👇

We are recruiting a new PI at the FIL @imagingneuroucl.bsky.social, Associate or Full Professor. This is an amazing place to do cognitive neuroscience, in the heart of London. If you or someone you know might be interested, please pass it on. #neuroskyence www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

🚨 Finally out in Nature Machine Intelligence!! "Visual representations in the human brain are aligned with large language models" 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s42...

I love this paper

This is absolutely insane: a LLM of worlds! 🤯🤯 deepmind.google/discover/blo...

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

Celebrating UK publication day! What will it take to understand the most formidable brain disorders, from Alzheimer's to depression? The book is intended for both general readers and scientists. The feedback thus far has been positive, and heartwarming 💙. press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...