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 🫢

As a welcome counterpoint to sitting through inevitable Air Canada delays, I just found out I'll be giving my first short talk at an international conference at ASSC this year :)

Taking in the last couple views of my home away from home ✌️

I wrote an SKLearn estimator (for brain decoding) that fits in 0.1s and outperforms support vector machines in the regression case ;) It falls a bit short in the classification case, but with this speed it's handy for exploratory analyses. Plus, the weights are interpretable! #neuroskyence

New version of the fear response GIF :) #neuroskyence

In my own experience, contemporary AI is great for introducing you to concepts that are well-documented, and filling in basic knowledge gaps that you didn't know you had. But over-reliance melts your brain - if we keep off-loading thinking, we'll never get to AGI (or get much of anything done).

Since I got added to an artist starter pack I better post a bit more art :') Motivation to get back into #painting

Si tu habites à Montréal, tu fais de l'art et tu veux faire partie du Starter Pack, écris-moi en commentaire go.bsky.app/V6Muy4W #art #montreal #canada

Really missing the days when all that concerned me was how me and all my homies (that includes you 🫵) could heal from our childhood trauma and stuff, instead of being constantly concerned about societal and economic collapse

I'm starting to think that separating neuronal and non-neuronal fMRI signal is like unscrambling an omelette

As an academic vagabond who's moved from psych to neuro, I like the hardcore mechanistic models and difficult epistemic questions of (some of) the field, but I miss the imagination for, and understanding of, the human condition that (some) folks in clin psych pursue. #psychscisky #neuroskyence

My dad told me to watch Seven Samurai to 'understand the Japanese ethos'. Epic sentence, no idea how correct it is. Amazing movie either way. Tōdai-ji temple this evening..

Is RETROICOR still the go-to for peripheral recording-based physiological noise correction in fMRI, or is there something else in use these days? (Does anyone even do recording-based correction?) #neuroskyence

Haven't used a psychometric tool in a while, so - Any recommendations for the following categories? Anxiety, depression, depersonalization/derealization, and mindfulness #psychscisky

Dusty morning in Seoul

Gradually coming out of a news-induced doom spiral since last weekend. Wish there was an end in sight to the craziness. Slava Ukraini. Here's a nosy deer.

Crowdsourcing some more advice. What are some essential considerations for semi-niche scientific software toolboxes? How do you ensure that they have a long and prosperous life? #neuroskyence #science #software