2024 Swedish study on 2.5M people's data: "Acetaminophen use during pregnancy was not associated with children’s risk of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability... This suggests that associations observed in other models may have been attributable to confounding." jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Luiz Pessoa: Beyond billard ball causation in the brain! www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict... @PessoaBrain

And often contain overarching interpretations of research (programs) not in the journal articles!

Except mostly they are not controversial, just inconvenient.

Hoe ik vertrok uit Gaza – en voor het eerst oog in oog stond met een Israëlische soldaat decorrespondent.nl/16372/hoe-ik...

The US as viewed by latenight comedians in Europe (it’s 20 secs of Dutch, the rest is English. We are so worried about you all we’re specifically trying to reach you through our latenight I guess…)

decorrespondent.nl/16371/de-cor... decorrespondent.nl/16372/hoe-ik...

Sure Alexey, you can follow Panksepp. Great scientist but his work is now outdated by a few decades. Anyway the literature is vast so I prefer to sample very broadly and learn from many viewpoints. A single one is always myopic by definition. And scientific disagreements are good thing for science!

We're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing. As has the lack of urgency/silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.

@dickretired.bsky.social can you give the references of Parnia and Ehhrson?

@macshine.bsky.social I am (re)reading your (and collaborators) recent work from: Müller EJ, Munn BR, Shine JM (2025): The brain that controls itself. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 63:101499. backwards. Do you see a connection between ....

DOI: 10.1017/psa.2025.10115

Important for discussions about agency and free will: Hermida M, Ladyman J (2025): Physical Explanation and the Autonomy of Biology. Philosophy of Science :1–18. #neuroscience #consciousness #freewill #reductionism

Worth listening to every second. #neuroscience

Painting by Dutch artist Kenne Grégoire, 2025.

IMO one study is never enough, and even studies from only one lab or group is rarely enough.

This is the benefit of living according to an internal moral code. You don't (usually) get rich. You don't (usually) get recognised. But you do avoid becoming a hollow shell, a simpering coward who humiliates themselves in pursuit of power. You can look yourself in the mirror. It's worth it.

When reporting on these kinds of claims, the media should ask:

Confused writing is usually a symptom of confused thinking. As we struggle to clarify writing, we clarify our thoughts. AI writing aids rob us of that struggle, leaving clean-looking text and thoughts still confused for lack of inspection. Writing is not just a product; it is a diagnostic tool.

This is what hurts me so much about those who refuse to be vaccinated on personal choice: my safety depends upon collective vaccination. As an immunocompromised patient, I get far less from a vaccine than regular folk. Hence, I need all others to be immunized to stop the viral spread reaching me.

"The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." - Hannah Arendt

Or should you ask whether the system has closure of constraints as @kathrynnave.bsky.social suggests is neccessary for autonomy and normativity? Nave K (2025): A drive to survive: the free energy principle and the meaning of life. ISBN 9780262381673 p. 244.

As far as immortality and mind uploading are concerned I know @philipcball.bsky.social is right. Are there even more destructive fantasies of techbarons than @philipcball.bsky.social describes here?

@nadinedijkstra.bsky.social @mvugt.bsky.social @martijn-arns.bsky.social @haslagter.bsky.social @eikofried.bsky.social @irisvanrooij.bsky.social Weet iemand een goede vertaling van het woord "constraints" of een definitie? Of kan je me naar iemand verwijzen die dat weet?

A reminder that there is no scientific basis for attempts to define people in terms of “good” or “bad” genes - these are discredited views in service of racist ideologies. For the consensus from the experts, see e.g. this 2020 @geneticssociety.bsky.social statement: www.ashg.org/publications... 🧬🧪

Juarrero, Alicia. Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence (p. 178). (Function). Kindle Edition. This way of thinking of hierarchical control rejects the notion of control hierarchies as the arbitrary top-down dictates of rulers and other public officials.

"Authorship is more than a line on a CV—it is an ethical necessity. Every cleaned data set, debugged script, and refined figure deserves acknowledgment." www.science.org/content/arti...

Grrrr. We don't call protein phosphorylation or acteylation epiproteomics. So let's not call RNA modification epitranscriptomics. In fact, realisitically, epigenetics has so many definitions, some of them non-overlapping, that this whole epi-XXXX (genetics/genomics whatever) is just not helping us.

I think it's time to retire the idea that oxytocin is exclusively a 'social' hormone. In our latest preprint, led by @kjerstimw.bsky.social, we argue that oxytocin should be reframed as a behavioral flexibility hormone osf.io/preprints/os...

Something for (G)AI users? "... Freeman Dyson maintained that for living things to survive, control must be analog: “Controlling day to day or millisecond to millisecond behavior in the real world” would be crippled if (an organism) had to rely on digital mechanisms.

And there is a (not obvious) button to download the whole book in one go just under the abstract - rather than the annoying chapter by chapter method....

“the impulsion of mere appetite is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed to oneself is freedom” (Rousseau) cited by Nave K (2025): A drive to survive: the free energy principle and the meaning of life. ISBN 978-0-262-38166-6, p.244 #agency #constraints #neuroscience #freewill

De USA is intussen een fascistische politiestaat.

"... boiling down neuro-cognitive evolution to brain size or numbers of neurons will fail to capture the richness and complexity of the interrelationships between nervous systems, cognition, behaviour and ecology." Barton R, Barrett L (2025): Philosophical Transactions B DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2024.0255

MASA: Make America Sick Again

“It’s a bit of an obscenity that I’m asked so much to speak on this subject because I happen to be Jewish and because I happened, as an infant, to have survived the Holocaust…Why aren’t we listening to the Palestinians?”

EVERY EFFECT of a molecule in the brain is state dependent. "Prosocial effects of oxytocin are state dependent; and more. Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 11 August." www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/pro... #neuroscience #autism #brain

I have seen SO many interviews like this with AI/tech leaders, and not a single one where the interviewer says "Wait, let's burrow into that a bit." Is this perhaps a *condition* of such interviews?

“The cinematic analogy to Nucleus Embryo isn’t GATTACA. It’s The Dropout—the 2022 miniseries about the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos….there are striking parallels in commercializing a research tool into something it isn’t”

I definitely need to read Amitai's proposal, it seems very compelling. But as usual I don't think we need to find anything that is unitary but instead a class of processes. When we consider the diversity of mammals, vertebrates or even beyond, we should *expect* that it's not unitary imo.

Is er ook zoiets in Nederland?

Make it illegal to use polygenic risk scores.

As Philip K. Dick said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."

Its good not having to think. Can we stop that entirely please?

Does anyone know of a direct comparison between EU countries in terms of metrics used to evaluate universities and/or academic researchers? I'm especially interested in whether one can contrast countries that use N publications with those that don't. I suspect it's not so simple though

This is amongst the most impactful two minutes of broadcasting I’ve ever seen. By Emma Murphy, International Editor, ITV News. #Gaza

Introducing five concepts from dynamical systems to decode developmental regulatory mechanisms, have a read! @perez-carrasco.bsky.social‬ @roederlab.bsky.social @mpipz.bsky.social This effort started in a morphogenesis meeting @kitp-ucsb.bsky.social‬ in 2023. journals.biologists.com/dev/article/...

Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵 New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, ‪@spiantado.bsky.social‬, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social 1/8

In the past few weeks, the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has referred to "ethnic cleansing" and "concentration camps" in Gaza, while a former Israeli Attny Gen, a former Israeli general, and one of Israel's most famous authors, have all said it's a genocide in Gaza.