We are born addicted

#philsky #beauvoir "Existentialist thought is an effort to reconcile the objective and the subjective, the absolute and the relative, the timeless and the historical" – Simone de Beauvoir

Coming soon –– The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy edited by me :: available now to pre-order from all good bookshops (and that bad one) :: –– contents pages are in the thread below. #philsky

Here's a little taster of an upcoming Notes and Records Special Issue entitled: Picturing Life in the Early Modern Age: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory

Great opportunity for PhD students interested in phenomenology. The Copenhagen Winter School (29 Jan.-30 Jan. 2026) is a PhD course that offers close reading of classical work. In 2026, the selected text is Edmund Husserl’s Ideen II. Keynotes: Sara Heinämaa & Dan Zahavi. Apply before Nov. 1, 2025

“As AI tools become more capable, funding agencies and institutions may question why labs need dedicated computational staff. But these examples suggest the roles will become more important, not less”

In another short talk, Diana Prata talked about oxytocin and human social psychophysiology! #S4SN2025

Aaaand invited speaker Michael Yartsev studies natural social behavior in groups of bats. 🦇 Why bats? Bats live their lives almost entirely in collective social settings and they live quite long so they interact a lot with others. Fascinating! #S4SN2025

I interact therefore I am

New Paper Alert 🚨🆕 "Specificity Effect in Concrete/Abstract Semantic Categorization Tasks" doi.org/10.1007/s103... We observed faster response times for specific words compared to general words in a semantic decision task, regardless of their level of concreteness.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

The techno-social turn: how digital technologies reshape minds, bodies, and relationships www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

🤔 How can we study #consciousness between people, at the social level? 🧠✨ New #preprint co-led by Anne Monnier & Lena Adel: “Now is the Time: Operationalizing Generative Neurophenomenology through Interpersonal Methods” 🧵(1/3)

Interested in the relationship between cognition, technology, nature, and wellbeing? Check our editorial and the special issue on Topoi. Thank you @chiarafini.bsky.social @van90.bsky.social @dimitrisbolis.bsky.social @agliotiSM @takahikoikenuma.bsky.social

Reading Ogden: On Psychoanalytic Virtues Series by Adam Rodriguez on Thomas Ogden “The institution of psychoanalysis is not superordinate to the patient & their needs. At all times, the needs of the patient, & those impacted by the patient, take priority.” www.psychiatrymargins.com/p/reading-og...

Hear, hear! “We advocate for… a more constructive mindset in which different dimensions of progress in neuroscience are explicitly acknowledged and their value is recognized - to temper their respective limitations and build on each other’s strengths.”

Optimistic people share patterns of brain activity, and make more of a distinction between positive and negative events than pessimists do go.nature.com/4f1W90D

ECSU's @nicohinrichs.bsky.social just posted an update on his paper on 'Geometric Hyperscanning of Affect under Active Inference' on Arxiv! Make sure to check out his collabo. with @mahault.bsky.social @dimitrisbolis.bsky.social Yuyue Jiang, Leonardo Christov-Moore, and @leoschilbach.bsky.social

Posts linking to research not necessarily endorsements. Major autism study uncovers biologically distinct subtypes, paving the way for precision diagnosis and care www.princeton.edu/news/2025/07...

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪

My paper with @stellalourenco.bsky.social ‬is now out in Science Advances! We found that children have robust object recognition abilities that surpass many ANNs. Models only outperformed kids when their training far exceeded what a child could experience in their lifetime doi.org/10.1126/scia...

Here's a bit of spice. Brain research clearly needs to tackle more complexity (than, say, Step 1: simple linear causal chains). But that leaves an ~infinite set of alternatives. Here, @pessoabrain.bsky.social advocates not for just a step 2, but a 3. /1 arxiv.org/abs/2411.03621

Still have questions about our submission process? We take you through each step, including where to submit, a helpful checklist for submissions, and what happens to your preprint once it’s with us. buff.ly/xku4pbO

Psychology & geography need one another to fulfil their mandates, but integrating them has been empirically challenging. A new perspective by Götz et al proposes a unifying Geographical–Psychological Interactionist Framework to inspire concrete & testable hypotheses. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ah, this is SO cool - Oriel Feldman-Hall's lab shows that people gain influence in social networks by understanding how everyone else is connected. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

People not only form social networks, they construct mental maps of them. People think about the ties between other people, including ties among individuals to whom they are not themselves directly connected. These “cognitive social networks” have rarely been studied. 1/

Autism is associated with inflexibility of brain dynamics. Watanabe and Yamasue show that TMS over the right superior parietal lobule while the brain is ‘stuck’ in a certain state reduces this rigidity and relieves various autistic traits. @takamitsuw.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

my latest, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences this review lays out what I think the fundamental specializations are for music perception in humans, namely, the hierarchical processing of pitch and rhythm or, how our minds turn vibrating air into music authors.elsevier.com/a/1lG9G_V1r-...

Time to give this a read: The Self and its Disorders, by Shaun Gallagher www.goodreads.com/book/show/19...

Is reality a controlled hallucination? @anilseth.bsky.social‬ joins our new #podcast #LeafingThroughScience 🎙️ to explore the mystery of #consciousness 🧠 via zombies👻, dreams💭, time perception⏳, beast machines, and #AI🤖. 🎧: rss.com/podcasts/lea... 🎥: youtu.be/d6EKSYn2MZo?... @faberbooks.bsky.social‬

Research at music festivals found that people who recently used psychedelic substances reported feeling more positive emotions compared to those who did not because it fostered two things: 1) Transformative experiences 2) Social connectedness www.powerofusnewsletter.com/p/promoting-...

We can infer others’ knowledgeability from minimal cues: Knowledge is nested! People who know only a few things tend to know common pieces of information, whereas rare pieces are known only by people who know many things, including common things. journals.sagepub.com/share/XRR3ZX...

This socio-centric social network study estimates the social influence and social selection on preference for cutting female relatives using data from 5163 Ethiopian Arsi Oromo adults. @drsarahmyers.bsky.social @bristolantharch.bsky.social @bristoluni.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Is cognition a universal feature of the living world? How can we define it? Is a nervous system needed? If so, why? If not, why not? Check this fascinating @royalsocietypublishing.org Theme Issue led by @drmichaellevin.bsky.social & co. on Basal Cognition royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

New paper out in Royal Society Open Science! In this paper, we propose a novel Bayesian framework to model scientific practice as a whole, based on Taniguchi's theory of Collective Predictive Coding. (1/n) royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

I urge all researchers interested in #emotion - or using facial expressions as emotive stimuli - to read this response paper 👇 by @lisafeldmanbarrett.com @eblissmoreau.bsky.social @jtheriault.bsky.social @katiehoemann.bsky.social & others doi.org/10.1177/1745... #neuroskyence #affectsci

Out today: What Autism Taught Us About Our Social Nature by Uta & Chris Frith www.psychologicalscience.org/article?ru=h...

🚨PhD position alert!🚨 Joint PhD position with @fedemar.bsky.social @predictivebrain.bsky.social and Sonja Kotz, to investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of perceptual decisions vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric... Please share and if you have questions, send me a message!

This! This the type of work that makes me so optimistic that the next 3 decades of brain research will be more impactful that the last for understanding/treating mental conditions. We finally have the right measurement tools & analyses (eg for emotion). www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Interpersonal alignment in infra-slow EEG rhythms anticipates mutual recognition https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.29.656704v1

Computational characterization of metacognitive ability in subjective decision-making https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.23.655775v1

New paper alert! Information transfer within and between autistic and non-autistic people is out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com nature.com/articles/s41... THREAD! 🧵⬇️

Join us for a zoom talk by Renee Thompson on "The everyday #emotional experiences of individuals with #depressive psychopathology" 5 June - 2:30pm CEST @tudresden.bsky.social @dgps.bsky.social @trr393.bsky.social @biodgps-dgpa.bsky.social @kanskelab.bsky.social tu-dresden.de/mn/psycholog...

How much sleep do you really need? It appears to depend on your culture

Indexing prediction error during syntactic priming via pupillometry. New paper by Shanthi Kumarage, Anton Malko & Evan Kidd doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2025.2506634

“the notion of neurodiversity as a nonpathological form of cognitive variation is far from recent. As early as the 1930s, Schröder proposed a characterological view of psychopathy, describing it as a manifestation of significant psychological variability rather than a disorder.”

"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

🚨 New preprint alert! 🚨 Thrilled to share new research on teaching! Work supervised by @cocoscilab.bsky.social, @yaelniv.bsky.social, and @markkho.bsky.social. This project asks: When do people teach by mentalizing vs with heuristics? 1/3 osf.io/preprints/os...

@pessoabrain.bsky.social drops knowledge on us. Neuron spiking is highly coordinated. Waves of electric field influences are a great way to do that. The brain is much less like a machine than it is like the murmurations of a flock of starlings aeon.co/essays/how-t... #neuroscience