[reading a book in first person] i dont remember doing any of this

These are essential questions to be asking right now. Ignoring the power of these models (which are only getting smarter by the month) is a recipe for professional obsolescence for one's self and their students.

🧵 I gave Claude two things: a short paper (doi.org/10.1073/pnas...) and a raw behavioural dataset with 3 lines of variable descriptions. Then I asked it to fit three computational RL models described only by equations in the manuscript. No code, no toolbox, no guidance on the fitting procedure. 1/3

🧠 Focused ultrasound changes emotional processing 🔊 In a new study published in Neuron today, we stimulated the human amygdala using transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS) and show it plays a causal role in detecting and resolving emotional ambiguity.

I found the framing of this paper... strange: "Associations Between Meat Consumption and Depression Are Small and Unlikely to Be Causal" journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Visual #workingmemory peeps, you're going to love this. This is super challenging - might give you pause on how we are measuring color memory... My color memory is a 40.4/50. Please do worse so I feel better. dialed.gg?c=3PCHDE

A viral dog rescue from 2016 is now immortalized with a statue in Kazakhstan. When a dog fell into the Sayran reservoir, bystanders formed a human chain to pull him to safety. The statue is a reminder of the value of unity, solidarity and collective action. 14/10 for all

Surely neuroscientists could save a lot of time by asking the philosophers who can imagine exact physical duplicates of their brains for details about what they are imagining.

More Nathan Newby's please, would sort this world right out. And as a Leeds born woman, I hope that man never has to buy his own pint in the city again.

Happy to share our preprint mapping the structure of theories of consciousness and their predictions, with @edenelbaz.bsky.social, @shaifischer.bsky.social, @maorschreiber.bsky.social, and @liadmudrik.bsky.social. Accessible here: osf.io/preprints/ps... Supplementary: osf.io/9xug8/overview

Statement by the Senate of Tel Aviv University

Scientific publishing: Rethinking how research is reviewed and published Review of how the loss of impact factor affected submissions at eLife - uneven drop across countries, but generally holding up remarkably well and shows a new model is possible elifesciences.org/articles/110...

Is mental imagery a single process? Our meta-analysis of 46 fMRI studies suggests not. We find a key divide between object imagery (visualizing an object in rich detail) and spatial imagery (mentally transforming objects). This split mirrors the ventral and dorsal streams of vision

happy to announce the official release of my first R package on CRAN! 🎉 building on the Hmetad toolbox by @smfleming.bsky.social, the hmetad package allows users to fit the meta-d' model of confidence ratings using a familiar brms/lme4-style formula syntax

I've seen a lot of demoralized posts (and emails) from people who didn't get into grad school this cycle. This was one of the worst cycles I've ever seen due to massive cuts to research funding, financial difficulties at universities, and technological disruptions.

📣 New publication 📣 Very excited to share our new paper "A neural signature of adaptive mentalization" out now in Nature Neuroscience (the project started all the way back in 2018!); with @niklasbuergi.bsky.social @drgokhanaydogan.bsky.social @christianruff.bsky.social (1/4)

We're thrilled to announce the Ctrl-Z Award, a US$2,500 prize for researchers “who discover substantial errors in their published work and take meaningful steps to correct the scientific record." Covered by @nature.com today; read more here: centerforscientificintegrity.org/2026/03/10/a...

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 🧠📈

draft lab ai policy, feel free to use, modify, or discuss! todd.gureckislab.org/2026/03/06/g...

This seems right to me.

Maybe of interest: The submission guidelines of Psychological Science now demand an explicit statement on measures taken to reduce the risk of AI-generated responses for all online studies! www.psychologicalscience.org/publications...

#hiring Come work with us to better understand the neuronal mechanism underlying perceptual consciousness! 18 months postdoctoral position at INSERM in Grenoble, France. ⌛Application deadline 10 March 2026. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/408445

Ethical and animal-welfare concerns have long fuelled efforts to curb animal use in research — and now rapid advances in alternative scientific methods are accelerating the shift go.nature.com/3P0OtCB

I'm excited to announce that I had my first (co-authored) book published today! "The Rational Use of Cognitive Resources" with Falk Lieder and Tom Griffiths (@cocoscilab.bsky.social ). You can read it for free! (see thread)

@summerfieldlab.bsky.social and I are very happy to share this paper! Building on work by @scychan.bsky.social, we show that how people learn depends on the distribution of examples they see, and changes in a way that’s very similar to transformer models.

@dotproduct.bsky.social's first first author paper is finally out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! Her findings show that content-specific predictions fluctuate with alpha frequencies, suggesting a more specific role for alpha oscillations than we may have thought. With @jhaarsma.bsky.social. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177... 🧵

New Preprint with @matanmazor.bsky.social: Overcoming both bias and sycophancy requires LLMs to imagine not knowing something they know. Like humans, they struggle with this. But unlike humans, LLMs can do something remarkable: they can, quite simply, *ask their counterfactual selves*.

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

Today, UCL turns 200. 🎉 For two centuries, our community has opened doors, challenged convention and pushed the boundaries of knowledge across every discipline. Thank you to everyone who’s been part of the UCL story, here’s to the next century. ✨ #UCL200 #LoveUCL

checking the status of my manuscript

Introducing “Pretend Battleship”: you’re told where all the ships are but then have to play like you never got that information. Could you do it? And what would your performance reveal about your understanding of your own mind? A joy to be part of this creative project led by @matanmazor.bsky.social

But in both bias and sycophancy scenarios, LLMs can do something amazing that people cannot. They can use their own API to simply *ask themselves* the question with the relevant information redacted. We show this literal self-simulation vastly outperforms prompting.

Give it a try here! self-model.github.io/pretendingNo...

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177... 🧵

Ninth UK university confirms opting out of Elsevier deal. www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-o...

We're starting a PhD programme in Philosophy at Ashoka! Anyone can apply by April 15 for admission this year, and we will ensure that admitted applicants receive enough funding to support them for the 5 year programme. More info here: www.ashoka.edu.in/programme/ph...

לבדו בין כה וכה

Reward models (RMs) are supposed to represent human values. But RMs are NOT blank slates – they inherit measurable biases from their base models that stubbornly persist through preference training. #ICLR2026 🧵

The race is on to re-home 120 ex-commercial laying hens in Didcot before February 8th. The British Hen Welfare Trust is appealing for would-be kind hearted chicken keepers to come forward by 4pm Friday and give the hens a chance at a free range retirement.

My Centre is a unique place to do a PhD in Philosophy, because you can be in constant contact with experts in veterinary medicine, psychology, zoology and policy and be part of a team united by a shared interest in animal minds. We now have our 1st ever PhD scholarship: www.lse.ac.uk/sentience/phd

brass solidarity band performing “stand by me” in the streets of whittier next to alex pretti’s memorial. the crowd started chanting “the people united will never be defeated” so they incorporated it into the song. i love minneapolis

Are you sure there’s no mosquito in the room? With @matanmazor.bsky.social, Chichi Dézier, @nfaivre.bsky.social & Louise Goupil, we study how we combine multiple sensory sources to be confident in presence and absence: While detection rely on one modality, confidence requires both channels to align!

Fascinating. Also....what if the tiny people are real and all around us and the mushrooms just let us see them.

Our new paper is out in @natmed.nature.com 😱! A thread: Can our thoughts and feelings directly affect our physical well-being? Our pre-registered, double-blind RCT investigated this by testing if modulating the brain's reward system could enhance immune responses to vaccination.

Out now in @nconsc.bsky.social 🧠😶‍🌫️ academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

Loulan (19 months old, shoulder height 29cm, 11.5kg) is now in a shelter in Romania, but will arrive in the UK by the end of the month, and is looking for a loving home. abldr.org.uk/applications...

We have never needed this guy more