“Why are you pouring water over your head?” asked Frog. “I hope that if I pour water over my head, it will help me to think of a story,” said Toad.

New paper out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social 🎉 What determines contextual modulation in V1? Why does the visual surround sometimes facilitate and sometimes suppress a neuron's response to its preferred stimulus?

We talk a lot about surviving #cancer. We talk far less about what that survival feels like. Dr Lauren Heathcote writes for the @wellcometrust.bsky.social's blog series on her work on the mechanisms of anxiety after cancer. www.linkedin.com/pulse/mental...

Aging reorganizes human large-scale brain networks, with consequences for cognition & dementia risk. We’ve now mapped brain network changes over a wide range of the mouse lifespan. The changes mirror key features of human aging, but not entirely New @pnas.org paper🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

At @IOCDF, I was approached by Mr. Milan, who shared with me his long journey searching for relief from #OCD, and I suggested he share his experiences, which may be of kind benefit to many others. We are both happy to share that his piece is now online: psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10....

What if intelligence comes from interaction rather than reasoning? In his early, provocative 1990 paper, Rodney Brooks argued that intelligence emerges from agents embedded in the world, tightly coupling perception and action instead of relying on abstract symbols. www2.cs.sfu.ca/~vaughan/tea...

I wrote a piece about my late friend and colleague Robert (Bob) Bilder, reflecting on the the impact that he had on my career. russpoldrack.substack.com/p/rememberin...

Out today in PNAS: Young children are surprised when a stranger has “insider knowledge” about them—and even make on-the-fly inferences about how that person could have learned it. So much fun working on this with Aaron Chuey and @julianje.bsky.social! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2525150123

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Higher baseline BMI predicts hippocampal atrophy, and greater weight gain significantly exacerbates this atrophy, especially in bipolar disorder. This establishes weight gain as a modifiable risk factor for hippocampal neuroprotection.

How does uncertainty transmit from one head to another? Our new paper out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social reveals how public communication alters private confidence. w/ Einar Andreassen & @cdfrith.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk 🧠📈

An interesting finding on peripersonal space and orientation tuning in V2 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Steinle (1997) talks about exploratory experimentation in this article which, I believe, provides some prescient insight into our replication conundrum which I’ll explain below. https://www.jstor.org/stable/188390

🌙 Heart attacks tend to be less severe at night, but why? ja.ma/3N8sLfq

We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1). If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!

Thank you to the Committee for the Advancement of Women’s Leadership of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, for the opportunity to share thoughts on mentorship and leadership in #psychiatry tinyurl.com/2bpfn2fj Hope it’s useful to others navigating similar paths. #women #neuroscience

#eNeuro | Population-Level Age Effects on the White Matter Structure Subserving Cognitive Flexibility in the Human Brain https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0179-25.2025

#eNeuro | When Familiar Faces Feel Better: A Framework for Social Neurocognitive Aging in a Rat Model https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0422-25.2025

When we have to make a decision that affects other individuals—parents making decisions for children, for instance—our confidence in our decisions declines, making us averse to the responsibility. Learn more in #ScienceAdvances: https://scim.ag/4cMK5ky

Because I wanted to end today on a positive note. It was good to learn about the history of Birmingham AL and jazz jam sessions I have been enjoying for the past 5 years. www.pbs.org/video/tuxedo...

Introducing the #JNeurosci special collection, Central Questions for Social Neuroscience Research, published in today's issue. Read the commentary from Steve Chang and Patricia Lockwood. vist.ly/4svwq

The irony of cognitive neuroscientists, many of which deride my research on bird brains, finding that birding might help mitigate cognitive decline is not lost on me. www.jneurosci.org/content/earl... #neuroskyence #birding

Big paper release! ConversationAlign - methods for computing lexical and affective alignment between interlocutors in dyadic conversation transcripts. Open Access in Behavior Research Methods. link.springer.com/epdf/10.3758...

Correlates of interpersonal physiological synchrony and sources of empirical heterogeneity Review by Ilanit Gordon & Ronny P. Bartsch Web: go.nature.com/4qCff1l PDF: rdcu.be/e4pSE #psychscisky #socialpsych

We review studies showing that when brain areas face similar computational demands in social and non-social context, they perform the same computations. We argue that exaptation (repurposing of traits for new functions) played a key role in brain evolution.

This paper is a model of clarity! It successfully argues that innately biased language learning mechanisms are more plausible than innate language knowledge. Statistical Learning by 8-Month-Old Infants | Science www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Brains learn structure without reward, instruction, or feedback — a process called statistical learning. Human infants do this effortlessly (famous work by Saffran et al 1996), but how does the brain implement it? 2/7 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

LLM, fluency, competence and agency www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

The role of context in continuity and segmentation

These are amazing! www.theatlantic.com/photography/...

Something to think about everyday

Imagination in bonobos! I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko

Cerebellum! radiolab.org/podcast/song...

Growing clinical and scientific evidence makes one thing clear: the mind and body are deeply interconnected. Our Psychology and Neuroscience of Mind-Body Interface MSc, a world-first, blends advanced theory with hands-on, real-world training. Learn more: www.kcl.ac.uk/study/postgr...

We are deeply saddened to share that Dr. Denise C. Park, founder of CVL, passed away on Sunday, Feb 1. A pioneering cognitive neuroscientist, mentor, & leader, Dr. Park shaped the study of memory, aging, & the brain. Read the full remembrance here: cvl.utdallas.edu/in-memory-of-dr-denise-c-park/

Are female economists treated differently than males in academic seminars? These authors wanted to know whether gender shapes how scholars are treated when presenting research. So they built a massive dataset of 2,000+ economics seminars, job talks, and conference presentations from 2019–2023...

Here’s what they found: Women are interrupted more often than men—by about 10–20% in economics seminars. Those interruptions are more likely to: - Cut women off mid-sentence - Come from men - Be adversarial rather than clarifying in nature

They didn’t rely on surveys or self-reports. Instead, what they did was really cool: They had humans and LLMs code audio recordings of talks to measure: -Who interrupts -How often they interrupt -When interruptions occur -Whether interruptions are neutral or adversarial

❄️🎣 What ice-fishing competitions reveal about human decision-making. New paper in @science.org by researchers from @mpib-berlin.bsky.social, @scioi.bsky.social, and the University of Eastern Finland. 👉 Read more: www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/newsroom/new... 📄 Paper: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

#JNeurosci | Findings from Jacobs et al., using male mice, suggests the BNSTa may promote the pursuit of new social situations, which could apply to conditions characterized by altered social behavior, like ASD, schizophrenia, or social anxiety. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1743-25.2026

New in #eNeuro from Dutta Gupta et al: Some older male rats prefer familiarity over new social situations, which can be reversed via transcranial magnetic stimulation without affecting hippocampus-mediated spatial memory. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0422-25.2025

"We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface." -- Henry David Thoreau www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...