@nancykanwisher.bsky.social Good to see you on Bluesky, How can we get discussions going? Luiz Pessoa is right that there are few threads. .

There is little work on NHPs now. Instead almost all the work is on mice. I can understand that this can tell us about human metabolism. But cognition depends on complex neural circuitry. We need to know what cognitive capacities we share with mice and what capacities are unique to primates or us.

Having just had yet another MRI, I am again struck by what a terrible environment it is for people to think while doing cognitive tasks (on back, noise, stationary etc). OPMs offer a much more comfortable and less noisy environment, and have millisecond temporal resolution.

Trump’s deputy, Stephen Miller, thinks that only Americans (ie white!) should live in America. What a wonderful message for all those scientists working in America who are immigrants and non-white!

I don’t understand why neurophysiologists pay little attention to FMRI because it is a vascular signal. It is just at a macro rather than micro level. But the resolution is similar to the object patches in IT and the patches within prefrontal within which neuronal firing correlates (Constantinidis).

I worry that there is no way of proving that I am not in the blacked out pages of the Epstein files. For all I know the whole British royal household are in there! It is quite absurd that so much is blacked out.

And I’m a big fan of Turing, von Neumann, Shannon, Metcalfe, Hinton, Sejnowski, and all the other algorithmic and computation people. No shade. But data limits still limit understanding of the brain. That’s why the #NIH US BRAIN Init was so important: public investment made new tools.

There’s a lot of talk about vaccines and autism, but what does the science say? This week @pennngg.bsky.social student Nita Rome unpacks the history behind these concerns and how modern studies have debunked this misconception. pennneuroknow.com/2025/11/11/v... #PsychSciSky #SciComm 🧠🟦🧪

I strongly recommend the new biography of Frances Crick by Professor Matthew. It is important for what it tells us about imagination, risk, persistence, error and boundless curiosity.

Worth a read - context is everything. #neuroskyence #immunosky #medsky

Rep. Jeff Van Drew on Republicans' healthcare plan: "The plan is to come up with something better."

doing archival research and happened across this story from 1963 teacher builds lessons around different perspectives, conservative families (backed by john birch society!) object, student *records* teacher in attempt to get her fired sounds familiar! p. 73 here: books.google.com/books?id=Rkk...

#pessoabrain.bsky.social The paper by Rogier Mars and Dick Passingham on A Neuroecological Perspective on Prefrontal Cortex is out. the link is authors.elsevier.com/c/1lyf5Y3M3l... This allows free downloads till Dec 7th.

#neuroskyence New paper on 'A neuroecological perspective of prefrontal cortex' by Rogier Mars and Dick Passingham Click on the link below and you have free access before Dec 7th. OH THE GENEROSITY OF ELSEVIER! And they are so poor. authors.elsevier.com/c/1lyf5Y3M3l...

New paper on 'A neuroecological perspective of prefrontal cortex' by Rogier Mars and Dick Passingham Click on the link below and you have free access before Dec 7th. OH THE GENEROSITY OF ELSEVIER! And they are so poor. authors.elsevier.com/c/1lyf5Y3M3l...

@vincentcostaphd.bsky.social @dickretired.bsky.social The functional side of it all is already completely explained by showing that we create templates. See also: @hugospiers.bsky.social During shopping we execute the exact same template as the mouse does. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

I wonder how much basic academic science funded by the public underlies this new treatment for Huntington’s disease?

#neuroskyence Can someone explain to me: if a huge neural net exposed to a huge corpus of language, and trained to learn the statistics of the next word, can produce excellent grammar, why can’t infants learn in the same way? Of course they are exposed to much less, but they have parental guidance.

#earlmiller.bsky.social It is frequently commented that cells in different areas have similar properties. The reason, of course, is the dense interconnections between areas. But what we need are physiological fingerprints. By this I mean radial plots of the degree of activity on many tasks.

The Allen Institute is working hard at a really tough goal, with impressive results.

Most neuroscientists are materialists. Out of body experiences challenge this, but they occur when the EEG suggests recovery of consciousness after aa heart attack (Parnia et alb2023).

A study by Bartels et al (J Neurosci) showed that decoding what colour one person was seeing also decode what another person was seeing. I haven’t read the study but it is a clever way of trying to find out if your blue is my blue. Not my expertise but worth expert discussion.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Representational Geometries of Perception and Working Memory: A Pilot Study Tomoya Nakamura's first fMRI project ... in which we hereby release a preprint as a way of pre-registration 🧠📈

#TobRegSky #PedSky #MedSky #EpiSky #addictionsci #policysky #polisky #neuroskyence #neurosci #PainResearch 🧪🛟 🫁 We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself Gift link here: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/o...

#TobRegSky #PedSky #MedSky #EpiSky #addictionsci #policysky #polisky #neuroskyence #neurosci #PainResearch 🧪🛟 💊

There are a couple - I reference this one by @scienceimpacts.org the most: scienceimpacts.org

If you could show just ONE chart re: science grant terminations in the US to a group of college students, what chart would it be? #nih #nsf #psycscisky 🧠🟦 #edusky #academicsky #statssky

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "... observers perceive scene images achromatized in the peripheral region (chimera images) as full-color images... inattentional noise increases the occurrence of strong color signals that exceed the internal color detection criterion..." Nishida lab 🧠📈

Enough about mitochondria. I’d like to know what RFK Jr. thinks about the danger from midichlorians.

My post about Robert Kennedy comes from a report in Scientific American.

In case you are worried about whether my post about Robert Kennedy is true, it was reported by Scientific American.

#neuroskyence Robert Kennedy asked a journal to retract a paper because it showed that the aluminium in vaccines causes no harm (eg autism). The journal refused. His demand was an attack on science. Scientists have to accept results even if they go against their ideas or prejudices.

Robert Kennedy asked a journal to retract a paper that demonstrated that the aluminium in vaccines causes no harm. The journal refused (eg no autism). The demand was an attack on science. Scientists have to accept results even if they go against their ideas or prejudices.

The Hill (political newspaper) has a very good article on the evidence that Trump is dementing.

What do graduates and postdocs most want of their PIs?

#neuroskyence Don’t be old. You forget words (benign memory less with age or semantic dementia?). And the sad fact is that you would be the last person to know.

Prefrontal axons going to lots of places! doi.org/10.1016/j.ce... #neuroskyence

I like the term philosopause. It refers to the tendency of old scientists to speculate outside their field of expertise. What worries me more as an old scientist is that I am no longer qualified to speculate within my own field of expertise. Science moves too fast.

@danieljamesyon.bsky.social Daniel, see my further comments on your book.

Managing Technical Debt (or, why you should not rely on random Python packages). The latest in my Better Code, Better Science series russpoldrack.substack.com/p/managing-t...

So the great big bill has passed in the USA. The poor wil l get poorer. at the same time Trump is going for Universities and NiH. and Robert Kenedy is ruining health care. And by withdrawing aid to other countries millions will die. God help America.

The American Supreme Court has said that Tr7mp can issue any executive order that he wishes. That means he is a dictator and can ignore the constitution. Dangerous times.

#PedSky #MedSky #EpiSky #addictionsci #policysky #polisky #neuroskyence #PainResearch #biotechfeed🛟💊 🧪 ‘RFK Jr is a disaster’: Staff describe chaos in ‘anti-science’ regime

I strongly recommend the book called The Story os a Heart by Rachel Clarke. It won a women’s prize. It is a detailed account of the events that lead to the death of a young girl and the transplantation of ger heart into a boy. I know it is not about brains, but it is wonderful.

"The Exit Manual: How to Leave the Free Energy Cult and Still Get Tenure" wow. www.researchgate.net/publication/... 🧠📈🧠💻

The Royal Society is offering £4 million per researcher for scientists in the USA who want to move to the UK. The money offered is £30 million in all for all the Fellowships. These Faraday Fellowships are for 5 to 10 years.

#PedSky #MedSky #EpiSky #addictionsci #policysky #polisky #neuroskyence #PainResearch #addictionsci 🧪🛟 Exclusive: US veterans agency orders scientists not to publish in journals without clearance

The organisation for veteran affais has issued a requirement that all papers be submitted for censorship before publication. Trump REALLY doesn’t like truth. The truth is what he wants it to be. The first lesson in science is that the truth does not follow your whims and ideas.

I send my sympathy to Harvard and it’s international students now that Trump has banned it from having students from abroad. I hope that the legal action that Harvard is taking succeeds.