After 20 years studying neuroscience, I can confidently say that the brain is up to something.

cause cortex is just a blanket to keep the basal ganglia warm

Way back in 1999, Kenji Doya sketched a big picture theory of the brain: 1️⃣The cerebellum is specialized for supervised learning 2️⃣The basal ganglia are for reinforcement learning 3️⃣The cerebral cortex is for unsupervised learning How does this hold up in 2026? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"Why procrastination isn’t laziness – it’s rigid thinking that your brain can unlearn" theconversation.com/why-procrast... My brain will start unlearning the procrastination habit soon

"I have never seen a journal publish a paper that was retracted from another journal. Yet here we are..." - @neurocritic.bsky.social neurocritic.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-... @retractionwatch.com

This is quite funny: Remember how Springer Nature decided to retract nearly 40 publications based on a ‘bonkers’ and unethical autism dataset? www.thetransmitter.org/retraction/e... Well, they just today published a new paper using the same dataset! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Given that the cerebral cortex seems to be capable of flexibly learning so many tasks, why is it that we need so many other brain regions? What are the hippocampus, cerebellum and striatum doing that the cortex can't do? Maybe the cortex is less flexible than we think?

Physiological Arousal as a Predominant Source of Individual Differences in Functional Brain Networks www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

"A non-significant, yet consistent pattern emerged" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41453841/ 🙁

Why do we experience vision and hearing as distinct senses? The obvious answer is that they have different sensory organs (eye vs. ear), and their signals arrive at different points in the cortex (primary visual cortex vs. primary auditory cortex). But does that really explain it?

"During smartphone use, the probability of waking cortical slow wave bursts increased" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to you and your brain!

Would you intuitively agree with this statement: If we are conscious of something, it can affect our decisions? (Note - don't confuse this with the contrary statement that 'something can only affect our decisions if we are conscious of it', which is clearly false)

"Socioeconomic status (SES) — not IQ or psychopathology — showed the strongest associations with both resting-state functional connectivity and cortical thickness in the ABCD Study." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

"Brain areas themselves are just one of several equally important organizing principles" of the brain pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41436651/

FDA approves pill form of Wegovy (semaglutide) weight-loss drug www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... This is big, no? Once these drugs get cheap & convenient enough for mass use, obesity rates will start falling. Will history remember 1990s-2020s as the "age of obesity"?

The mechanisms of trap closure for the venus flytrap has all the hallmarks of what we call “decision-making” in animals: a stepping accumulation of evidence and a simple go/no-go rule regulating actions. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Among incels reporting therapy experiences, 70.8% reported negative outcomes and 7.9% reported satisfaction." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41414981/ It's a cliche but it's true: you can't help someone who doesn't want to change, and incels are incels because they refuse to change.

"We have identified a common signature within co-citation networks that accurately predicts the occurrence of breakthroughs in medical research, >5 years in advance" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🤔 Important if true!

"The 2008 Great Recession shifted Americans toward identifying as a lower class" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41417466/

"We introduce a novel effect size measure, termed overlap area (OA)" (Preprint) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Hmm, can this really be new? It's the % of the distributions that overlap. #statistics

The word "decision" is a key word in cognitive neuroscience. But what does it mean exactly? People's intuitions seem to differ on what "decision" means. For example: do animals (say, cats) make decisions? Most people would say yes, but I think some would disagree. Do plants make decisions?

"Some people do believe that they are able to perform relatively well on tasks even when there is little reason for that confidence. Our results support the claim that overconfidence might be a trait." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41401360/

"About 40% of voxels with significant BOLD signal changes during various tasks showed reversed oxygen metabolism, particularly in the default mode network... Our findings challenge the canonical interpretation of the BOLD signal" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41402521/ A BOLD challenge #fmri

A shrimp may fry this rice, forsooth, as well, As LLMs our inner lives compel. So tell me, friends, is linalg our fate? Or symbols buried deep in online spate? 11/n

Academic publishing is in trouble and GenAI is causing these problems to float to the surface in dramatic ways.

Dramatic increases in redundant publications in the Generative AI era pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41361882/ "For example, the association between oxidative balance score and chronic kidney disease using NHANES data was published six times in 1 year."

Answering a single ChatGPT query is estimated to use 0.3 Watt-hours of energy (this is the lowest estimate I've seen; some older ones are much higher). The human brain uses about 20 Watts, so this means a single ChatGPT query uses the same energy as ~1 minute of human brain operation.

Are authors fairly judged by assessing the #journals in which their work is published? @bihutchins.bsky.social &co reveal that most influential papers are published in lower tier journals, and more authors would be better recognized with #ArticleLevelMetrics #ALMs @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4oV58Ed

As soon as i can get off the couch it is all over for my enemies

Springer Nature retracts, removes nearly 40 publications that trained neural networks on ‘bonkers’ dataset www.thetransmitter.org/retraction/e... Looks like a new textbook example of garbage-in-garbage-out. An utterly useless dataset for so many reasons, as @dvbishop.com explains

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/

There's some internal contradictions in this new Nature paper. Title: "Sterilization and contraception increase lifespan across vertebrates" But the abstract says: "survival of women is slightly decreased after permanent surgical sterilization" 🤔 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41372417/

Psilocybin ‘recovering’ forgotten sexual trauma in anorexia patients. It’s the recovered-memory sorcery again, chemically mediated this time. Ethical red flags everywhere. 🤦‍♂️

Persuading voters using AI dialogues pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41345316/ I'm waiting for the first AI to run for office

Men avoid shared experiences (e.g., going to the movies, sharing food) with other men -- The Persistence of Homophobia in Men's Friendship Norms pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41337674/ "I condemn the stigma against intimacy between men. No homo though."

Recovered memory theory is back! Now with psychedelics. "Therapeutic emergence of dissociated traumatic memories during psilocybin treatment for anorexia" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40420197/ n=2, no controls...

On "ontologically challenging psychedelic experiences (OCPEs)" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41329316/ Help me, I realized I don't exist 🫥

Does It Hurt More To Be Called "Gay" or "Pizza Face"? pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41350516/ Ah yes, evidence-based bullying

U.S. Visa Bureaucracy and Its Burdens Among Early Career Scholars www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A preprint on "pessimistic and optimistic cognitive biases in cockroaches" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... A cockroach pessimist believes the trash can is half empty...

Someone should do a study of whether more mistakes happen on days when the date could be valid under either DDMMYY or MMDDYY conventions. For example today is 03/12/25 in the UK, but in the USA that's a valid date for March 12th. Whereas 25th December 25/12/25 can't be mistaken for any other date.

Birds have a higher body temperature than humans. This may be why avian influenzas can be so deadly to humans - they can survive fever temperatures, because they evolved to tolerate heat pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41308154/

This is interesting and weird - a bioRxiv preprint is taken down "following a DMCA takedown notice" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I wonder what happened? @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social

Universal scale-free representations in human visual cortex journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... "Visual information is distributed across the full spectrum of latent dimensions in cortical activity" not just a few high-variance dimensions.

Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain www.nature.com/articles/s41... @tknapen.bsky.social "There's a map of your body in my brain" sounds like a pick-up line but it's actually just factual.

My comment is live on @pubpeer.com, and it’s more detailed than the blog post cc: @deevybee.bsky.social @wiringthebrain.bsky.social @neuroskeptic.bsky.social @smutclyde.bsky.social @steamtraen.eu and @retractionwatch.com (may be premature for you…) pubpeer.com/publications...

I wrote a blog post about the massive new article on "Neural and molecular changes during a mind-body reconceptualization, meditation, and open label placebo healing intervention." It was a bloodbath neurocritic.blogspot.com/2025/11/crea... #neuroscience #neuroskyence #psychology #meditation

The Shifting 'Self' of Science's Self-Governing Capacity: Four Decades of Research Integrity Discussions in Science and Nature pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41199636/