New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

“Freely explore this environment”: individual differences in exploration behavior and survey knowledge link.springer.com/article/10.1...

What has my research lab been up to in 2025? Time for a wrap up of our research! This image is a gathering of key figures from our 2025 publications: Links to publications in the replies: #spierslab #research #neuroskyence

What has my research lab been up to in 2025? Time for a wrap up of our research! This image is a gathering of key figures from our 2025 publications: Links to publications in the replies: #spierslab #research #neuroskyence

🦋🧪 New research out in Royal Society Open Science! We used #MachineLearning to discover that armed #conflict in #Africa sorts into three distinct types—and found a surprising warning about predicting #violence. 🧵 @royalsociety.org @csh.ac.at @kushwaha doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Was Rosalind Franklin a secret football fan? Cryptic note in her US address book.

𝗖𝗮𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗱𝘆𝗻𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗳𝗠𝗥𝗜? We employed Switching Linear Dynamical Systems to investigate the dynamics of resting-state networks They are dynamic, not static! Work with Xiaoyu Zhao with lots of new methods. Thread. #neuroskyence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

“A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress - though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known" - Bertrand Russell, 1976. Time-lapse video of Vampyrella lateritia eating Spirogyra algae from Science Source/Oliver Skibbe. 🦠

Easy to read this and think - ooh older men might be getting more 'cuddly' late in life... But that misses the role of oxytocin and sex differences. This is also people living in traditional communites in the Amazon! (awesome research)

In this Article, Battiston et al. discuss the emerging technique of higher-order network analysis, and its application to understanding social systems.

#ArtAdventCalendar Day 17 Another #pleinairpainting I really enjoyed painting this one; it was a gorgeous day and I had a lot of friendly farmers stop to say hello. Splendour, 11x14 oil on Board #albertaartist #canadianartist #oilpainter Sivarulrasa.com

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

How do biological agents learn for the future? Our perspective piece on the value of prospective learning in neuroscience is finally out. This is part of a long running collaboration with @kordinglab.bsky.social & Josh Vogelstein (as well as many other people) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Some new coverage of our research expedition this summer in Explorers Web: Understanding How Marshall Islanders Find Their Way at Sea explorersweb.com/understandin...

I've got a fully-funded PhD studentship open at @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social, investigating social learning about metacognition & awareness, w/ behavioural studies & neuroimaging (fMRI) - thanks to @leverhulme.ac.uk More details here: www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DPV831/p... #cogsci #neuroskyence

I wrote this brief talk on why “augmenting diversity” with LLMs is empirically unsubstantiable, conceptually flawed, and epistemically harmful and a nice surprise to see the organisers have made it public synthetic-data-workshop.github.io/papers/13.pdf

I haven't read the full paper, but I think this is this saying that your hippocampus sometimes "goes to sleep" while you're still awake?😮😴 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41381946/

*First preprint from our lab* !!!!! How does the brain learn to anchor its internal sense of direction to the outside world? 🧭 led by Mark Plitt @markplitt.bsky.social & Dan Turner-Evans, w/ Vivek Jayaraman: “Octopamine instructs head direction plasticity” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Thread ⬇️

When your PI presents your work

Thanks to @cnn.com for covering our research on London taxi drivers in their new, rather chatty, format 'Creators' Taxi driver Tom Scullion is the star of this piece. He trains others to learn the knowledge an has so many insights into that process. #neuroskyence www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7df...

Is the over use of SatNavs causing potential future problems for the population. I discuss with writer Moheb Costandi in his section of this article on Five voices on the future of human intelligence: newhumanist.org.uk/articles/648...

Is the over use of SatNavs causing potential future problems for the population. I discuss with writer Moheb Costandi in his section of this article on Five voices on the future of human intelligence: newhumanist.org.uk/articles/648...

Here is a bit of my resignation speech from last night

🤩 + impressive answer 🧭🚕 @ 2:50 “Trust me, knowledge is power” 💀 This is my guy.

Thanks to @cnn.com for covering our research on London taxi drivers in their new, rather chatty, format 'Creators' Taxi driver Tom Scullion is the star of this piece. He trains others to learn the knowledge an has so many insights into that process. #neuroskyence www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7df...

📣Register now for the 50th Anniversary Park City Winter Conference on the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory parkcitywinterconf.org/register/ Deadline tomorrow, Friday, the 12th! Spread the word. 🧠🔬👩‍🔬 ➡️Top 5 reasons to attend: 1/6

🏺 Top tip for British Museum visitors: go across the court, up rotunda stairs, cross bridge into upper floor, head past crowds aiming for Egypt and Mesopotamia, and go straight to Rooms 50 and 51 where the most stunning array of glories from later prehistory await you!

“Northern resident killer whales appear to use dolphins as ‘scouts’, in a surprising cooperative hunting strategy” www.theguardian.com/environment/...

💥 Another excellent study from Clément Naveilhan & Stephen Ramanoel, pushing forward our understanding of how the retrosplenial complex (hashtag#RSC) supports spatial orienting during active movement through space. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Congrats Peter!!

𝗩𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝘃𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺 Looks quite interesting. "Collective coordination" as state where unspecialized cells coordinate behavior through distributed signaling before specialized tissues like the brain can emerge. link.springer.com/article/10.1... #neuroskyence

‪@neuranna.bsky.social‬ and @evfedorenko.bsky.social tackle with neuroimaging a phenomenon identified in the 1970s by the pioneering work of the great Molly Potter: conceptual information processing common to pictorial and verbal input. Thrilled to have played a small part in this exciting work.

What's it like to study Psychology at UCL? Beth, a third year MSci Psychology student gives us a glimpse of what it’s like to study here and where she hopes her degree will take her next. www.youtube.com/shorts/ADssH... @uclpals.bsky.social

This is an amazing article in @nature.com >400,000 years ago evidence for controlled fires created by our close relatives (likey neanderthals) in the UK:

Big new blogpost! My guide to data visualization, which includes a very long table of contents, tons of charts, and more. --> Why data visualization matters and how to make charts more effective, clear, transparent, and sometimes, beautiful. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/salonis-gu...

Join us for a PhD in affective neuroscience at the Donders Institute (Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging) www.radboudumc.nl/en/vacancies...

This is a really excellent summary of the key points for data viz. Its so important in research and often overlooked in training.

Can GPS tracking reveal how #seabirds make use of tidal mixing fronts when foraging? 🧪 New research shows a bird’s use of ocean fronts may relate to its regular foraging areas Read on for more Or read the full paper: doi.org/10.1007/s002... @ellingbry.bsky.social

Lichen collage. On lakeside rock, Northwest Territories, Canada. #lichen #fungi #fungifriends

Rutger Bregman: "Donald Trump is the most openly corrupt president in American history”. A key line from the Reith lectures, which BBC excised without the author's permission. And now BBC is telling its journalists they may not quote the line anywhere. A shocking lapse in basic journalistic ethics.

Even with this quote about Donald Trump removed these lectures feel quite shocking in a period where polls suggest Nigel Farage (a big fan of Trump) is leading on the polls for his party...

Another new paper from the lab: Predictive theories like the SR imply that navigators who navigate differently should have cognitive maps which differ in predictable ways. Here we show that this holds in mouse hippocampal CA1. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

can't stop watching this clip of a tesla Optimus teleoperator taking his headset off before properly logging out the robot

A new study shows electric sensors in the inner ear of pigeons enable magnetic field detection. Don’t miss the in-depth interview with Grégory Nordmann! 🎧 Tune into the Bayern 2 podcast, now in the ARD audio library: www.ardaudiothek.de/episode/urn:...

Artomyces pyxidatus, the Crown-tipped Coral or Candelabra Coral fungus, was not seen in the UK over the entire 20th century, its last record in 1886 until a spate of recent findings around 2022, which is when I found this specimen (in East Kent). Where did it disappear all this time?

Open access via SharedIt rdcu.be/eThTl & Table 1 Suggestions to fostering a lower stress academic workplace for individuals, groups, and institutions >> osf.io/p6yut/files/...

💼 💔 Academia’s toxic love language is playing “hard to get” 🧪 💓 Science is the beautiful pursuit of building knowledge I wrote an essay for Nature Human Behaviour on treating academia as “just a job” www.nature.com/articles/s41... What ideas would you add? 💡 #HigherEd #PhDLife #DiversityInSTEM

New article by @jaquent.bsky.social and co: Graded encoding of spatial novelty scales in the human brain www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Lots of great comments in response to this post / article. Its again a reminder for everyone to consider their own and others privileges. Being a member of staff at a university is a job, but it comes with a huge number of non-job components (probably like many other professions).