Excited to share my first doctoral paper which was just published at Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences! doi.org/10.1111/pcn.... In this research letter, we showcase our take on the "Synthetic Image Evolution" method, in which we use genAI and evolutionary algorithms to... #neuroskyence

Wrote a little microblog on some thoughts on interoception and emotion, curious to hear what y'all think and might develop it into a longer blog post if it sparks any interest :) @nicolecrust.bsky.social @micahgallen.com #neuroskyence

Is emotion interoceptive? While I think the role of emotions is basically a kind of conscious representation of a cost function, in line with recent frameworks like "homeostatic" or "interoceptive" reinforcement learning, I'm not convinced that the basis is really in the internal sense of the body.

I set up a Bandcamp to host a bit of music I wrote for a game jam this past weekend, hopefully more such projects to come :) dariusvalevicius.bandcamp.com/album/fear-n...

Brb gotta cogitate embodidevly

Still waiting to hit a wall with CEMI field theory. I've sent it to two physics grad student friends who say the physics is sound - no evaluations yet from any computational neuroscientists! Surely someone can poke a hole in this for me? #neuroskyence

Does anyone fuck with the CEMI field theory of consciousness? Compatible with recent work on ephaptic coupling championed by @earlkmiller.bsky.social and surprisingly parsimonious... Briefly, the unconscious mind == classic neural computation, concious mind == EM field computation

My greebles aren't behaving so I've been thinking about my backup plan to open a bakery or become a blacksmith or something

I had a transcendent experience after watching Resurrection (2025) in the cinema. Standing on the sidewalk chugging cigs for 25 minutes, staring wide-eyed down the street waiting to come back to reality.

I think we made a mistake when we stopped being little rat creatures, and a second mistake when we accepted modernity. Grooming, cuddling, co-sleeping with your fellow rats, all lost to time.

This came up in a paper (Yin 2014) on basal ganglia control of movement. It reminds me of a critique I had of Feldman-Barrett's predictive processing theory of affect - it seems computationally intractable to predict, with a forward model, the metabolic consequences of everything that happens...

"Yet modern man feels uneasy and more and more bewildered. He works and strives, but he is dimly aware of a sense of futility with regard to his activities. [...] While becoming the master of nature, he has become the slave of the machine which his own hands built." (E. Fromm 1947)

To people who are afraid of rats/mice - would it help if I told you they have human emotions?

What prompted me to say this? 🤔

Baby's first forays into messing around with RNNs 🤓

I'm setting up a little Discord server for informal #neuroskyence discussion and project support (also open to psych and philosophy folks). Trainees especially welcome! I like this platform but sometimes it's a bit tricky to keep a good conversation going :) DM me for an invite if interested!

@nicolecrust.bsky.social The more things change, the more they stay the same (found in the 2008 edition of Chaos by J Gleick) #neuroskyence

How do I bring moral ambition back to my community?

Continuing on the reservoir business, I feel like "echo state network" (another name) is a good description of how it feels to be conscious - echoes of the previous few seconds and snippets of old memories mixing in with the present moment.

Currently obsessed with the concept of reservoir computing - has anyone in the #neuroskyence community looked at this in depth? It seems like thinking of association areas as reservoirs is potentially very powerful, a way of operationalizing Buzsáki's "inside out" hypothesis.

How do I bring hanging out back to my community?

As I'm gearing up to start my own #neuroskyence projects, I have a sort of desperate urge to make sure my time is spent on things that are going to be truly useful to someone, e.g. mental health clinicians and the people they serve. If you're a clinician: What would useful knowledge look like?

I watched The Secret of NIMH (1982) (the animated film about the mice) after only recently connecting the dots and realizing it referred to the National Institute of Mental Health. Nice to see my field represented in the media, if only as an ominous and faceless font of dispassionate cruelty :)

A couple sketches done at the MBAM Montréal fine arts museum today

Little view of Montreal at dusk yesterday

Physio question for #neuroskyence: This figure shows that global BOLD signal is already increasing before the onset of electrodermal spikes (t=0), and falls rapidly afterwards. I get the same pattern in my dataset (also for event-related analysis, GS peaks at t=0). What are potential explanations?

Some more figure drawing this morning. Still working the mechanical pencil, though a more rigid one this time

Need some #neuroskyence advice: What would an interpretation be for massive hypoconnectivity between one region (e.g. OFC or accumbens) and the rest of the brain as a function of a between-subjects variable Z? I.e., the mean of all edges for that node decreases as you go up in Z.

With some trepidation, I'm putting up an article I wrote in 2023 on my personal site. It documents a visit I paid to a friend in a psychiatric intensive care unit that I found quite disturbing and depressing. I offer a little commentary at the end. dariusliutas.com/blog/psych_i...

Watching the Akira Kurosawa adaptation of The Idiot by Dostoevsky with my dad. I wish I had been on tumblr 10 years ago to post stuff like this

Now a PhD candidate :)

I put up an old essay I wrote for a history and #philosophy of #science course on PsyArXiv. It's an overview/exploration of psychosomatic syndromes through the last 150 years or so. I think it still holds up despite writing it back in undergrad! doi.org/10.31234/osf... #psychology

To my #Montreal peeps, I'm accompanying my tall friend Danny Barwick at his gig at L'Escogriffe on Thursday, on the accordion, along with my sis on the violin. Come through for some dreamlike ballads ✌️

This is the kind of paper that makes me wonder, "have we learned anything in the last hundred years?". You hear about the James-Lange and Cannon-Bard theories for all of a out 5 seconds in psych 101, but there are so many interesting threads in this 1927 pub. #neuroskyence doi.org/10.2307/1415...

A big part of the debate between cognitive an precognitive theories of emotion seems to boil down to the question: Can you feel an emotion without being aware of it? So, can you? #psychscisky #neuroskyence #philosophy

@nicolecrust.bsky.social Congrats on what has to be the most massive affective neuro thread on bsky so far, by a long shot (take a look at it on a thread unroller and wow...)

Re: the Theory of Constructed Emotions, I generally try to stay theory-agnostic, but I find I have a definite attachment to "realist" emotion theories. In general, the way I approach psychology and emotional intelligence is as a dialectic between me (my ego) and things in me that I can't control

Wrote up some (cathartic) notes on fMRI multivariate decoding in a blog post! Hope this helps at least one person somewhere, sometime :') #neuroskyence dariusliutas.com/blog/fmri_de...

Revisiting Julian Jaynes, and this is something almost word-for-word that I often think about hypnosis. An aspiring global theory of cognitive or brain architecture needs to have something to say about it. Thoughts? #neuroskence #psychscisky

Folks interested in and/or working in #neuroskyence #psychscisky, what are some questions you have with respect to dissociation, derealization, repression, and mind-body connectedness? No answers, just interested in questions :)

The more that I learn, the more I become anxious that I haven't learnt enough 😬 The curse of a generalist, maybe. On a related note, any advice for a PhD student about comprehensive exams?

Would any affective (neuro)science people on here be interested in a discord group? #neuroskyence #psychscisky

Trying something new - I wrote a plain language summary of my undergrad/master's research for my personal site, partly to break the ice when it comes to writing more blog-style things. Here it is! It deals in the #psychology of #emotion #pain and #music dariusliutas.com/blog/emotion...

In an interview with Mark Solms, @dariusparviziwayne.bsky.social presses the question of whether the "synthetic a priori function of consciousness" may be feeling, or whether the function of feelings could be performed by something unconscious (like a loss function in an artificial neural network?).

If you take magic mushrooms, at increasing doses, your thoughts and perceptions decohere. Eventually, you might lose all sense of time, space, location, and the distinction between self and not-self. Eventually, you are just awareness - BUT, an emotional awareness. Affect is still coherent.

Mark Solms talks about a Patient W he had who had basically his entire frontal lobes (apart from Broca's area) surgically removed as a teenager, due to repeated post-operational infections. This patient was fully conscious (in the responsiveness sense) and reported having mental imagery.

Is dual-aspect monism legit? 🤔 #philsky #philsci #psychscisky #neuroskyence

First time back at life drawing in a little while, happy that I still got it :) #art

Ah, hot off the press :) New game I made with an amazing crew for Global Game Jam 2025, this time writing as well as programming (my first time writing the story and dialogue). A little tale about a fox getting lost in the woods.. sharonku.itch.io/fox-lost #gamedev #itch.io #indiedev #gamejam

It's still not looking good for behavioural (and psychiatric) genetics 🫢