If the great psychologist Roger Shepard were still with us, he might not have been surprised by this. He proposed a helix model for auditory pitch perception, with one octave per turn. There is something very human about this finding. It's like catching an LLM counting on its fingers.

Grid cells are "more like a hash function than a global map or metric" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Grid cell representation is ideally set up to decorrelate and assign easily distinguishable labels to inputs

From a Nature piece on bad peer review comments www.nature.com/articles/d41... While most of these are "go away and never review again" tier, I can relate to a couple of these

A thousand sci-fi body horror stories writing themselves in my mind as I read this abstract

Neuron-to-cancer neurotransmission: lung cancer cells "can form functional synapses and receive synaptic transmission" from neurons pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40931078/ This is creepy

The first children born after the introduction of ChatGPT will be 3 years old in a couple of months. I wonder what children who grow up interacting with LLMs will make of them? Will their intuitions about questions like "are AIs alive" differ from those of us old people?

Many years ago, I was an #autism researcher, and here's a question I've been pondering for a while: Why was autism discovered when it was? Autism was, at the earliest, described in 1925 (Sukhareva) or 1940s (Kanner/Asperger) but presumably it always existed. So why wasn't it recognized before?

"My relationship has very good Saturn" - illustrating the perils of self-report measures with nonsensical questions pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40929053/ I like this, but then I am quite Mars

In 2001, 73.4% of British men reported masturbating in the past month; by 2012 this was up to to 77.5% pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40932457/ 4.1% of men got more honest

"Healing crystals did not demonstrate anxiolytic effects beyond those of the placebo." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40855750/ I mean...

A study on female soccer players has been retracted due to "lack of voluntary informed consent" and "excessive physical burden and harm imposed on the participants" pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... 😧

What is the relation between mind and brain? The mind is like the brain's online persona. The mind is all intelligent and mysterious, but in real life it's just a blob of neurons living in a cramped skull.

Heh, I just noticed a stupid habit of mine and figured out why I do it: because I’m stupid

Confused writing is usually a symptom of confused thinking. As we struggle to clarify writing, we clarify our thoughts. AI writing aids rob us of that struggle, leaving clean-looking text and thoughts still confused for lack of inspection. Writing is not just a product; it is a diagnostic tool.

What makes a fact a "scientific fact" as opposed to just a fact? For example, is "most dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago" a *scientific* fact? I think most people would say so. But why is that statement any more scientific than "the USA was founded in 1776", which is history not science?

"Akin to humans shaking a computer mouse to find the cursor on a screen, we show that head-fixed mice develop an active sensing strategy" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Colada[128] The Best Audit Study and its interesting shortcoming datacolada.org/128

I still can't get over how the biggest research fraud scandal of recent years, is about a researcher who studied lying, cheating and dishonesty journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... It's life imitating art or something. @datacolada.bsky.social

The potential risks of opening the mind's eye with psychedelic therapies pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40850037/ There is just the hint of Lovecraft about this

Lamarck returns? Preprint claims "that olfactory fear conditioning increases the number of odor-encoding neurons in mice that experience odor-shock conditioning (F0), as well as their unconditioned offspring" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I'm a Lamarckist because my father studied Lamarck

The Quantum Diet: "Meal Plan for Planck-Scale Effects at Astrophysical Scale" "This isn’t just another diet fad." medium.com/quantum-psyc... 🤯

Not using ChatGPT turns you green! www.facebook.com/thebrainmaze... 40k likes on this post which doesn't even link to the original research, btw.

Warning: AI chatbots will soon dominate psychotherapy pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40831348/ Hmm, but people value face-to-face conversation over text chats. When you can video call ChatGPT as easily as you can chat with it now, *that*'s when therapists will be in real trouble.

Here's one for data sleuths. A paper was just retracted, due to anomalies in Fig 1 and 3. But I think Fig 2 is also wack www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... This survival plot shows 7 groups of mice. We see big differences between some groups, but very regular death rates within groups. Probably made up?

Most people are overconfident even in the face of extensive, objective performance feedback: "Overconfidence persists in tournament chess, a real-world information environment that should be inhospitable to it." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40808249/

A paper suggesting that "Electrical Testicular Shocks" can treat infertility has been retracted journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.... Here's my graphical abstract of this retraction note:❌⚡🏀

"Cortex-aligned representations" emerge in untrained convolutional neural networks www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... The brain-like architecture of CNNs may be enough to make them (slightly) brain-like even with no training

"The Language of Thought is not Natural Language" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"Cats, and especially pet cats, are natural model systems of human aging" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

"Language Models Use Trigonometry to Do Addition" arxiv.org/pdf/2502.00873 This is pretty remarkable. Who could ever have predicted that LLMs (or anyone) would do it like that?

The #arseniclife paper has finally been retracted, 15 years later www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 2010 was a golden age of scientific social media, and #arseniclife was one of the all-time classics. I can't believe it's been 15 years!

I was going through my open tabs and realized I forgot to highlight this great News & Views in @nature.com by John List and Andrew Simon discussing @standehaene.bsky.social et al's paper showing that a gender gap in math arises soon after children begin school 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

You've heard of vibe coding, how about vibe neuroscience? I asked ChatGPT for a "labelled image of the human brain showing the function of different regions". It's "vibe accurate"!

"Gender differences in retraction rates exist but are modest. Field, country, and publication volume are stronger correlates." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Musk says Grok chatbot was 'manipulated' into praising Hitler www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... The anthropomorphization of AI continues. Up next we'll be hearing that yes the AI said it, but they have since grown, and now deeply regret it.

Neuroscience is more romantic than you might think. Did you know that the brain's thalamus is named after the Greek θάλαμος, which means 'inner chamber' with particular connotations of 'bridal chamber'?

I'm old enough to remember when all the edgy tech nerds were atheist.

Here's a spicy preprint - "how U.S. Republican and Democrat users express distress" differently in online mental health communities arxiv.org/pdf/2506.20377

I'm getting less and less comfortable with AI search results. Search engines used to be tools for finding web pages: they connected people. Search was also great at answering questions, but that was a side effect. With AI results, you just get answers. The original purpose of connection is lost.

For people who accept the Bayesian brain hypothesis - do you think *all* brain functions are Bayesian? So for example, is the respiratory centre that controls breathing Bayesian? Or is it better thought of as a hardwired 'circuit'?

Contrary to some pessimistic views, Bayesian decision parameters *can* be recovered from behavioural data in many cases, this preprint says www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... "We're so back" - Thomas Bayes

New preprint from the team at BCM Neurosurgery, led by superstar neuroscientist / neurosurgeon Vigi Katlowitz! “Attention is all you need (in the brain): semantic contextualization in human hippocampus” 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

You've heard of cognitive System 1 and System 2, but could AI become our "System 0"? arxiv.org/abs/2506.14376 The title's a bit hype, but it's an important idea.

On "honest yet unacceptable research practices" - HURPs pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... Are HURPs the new QRPs?

Here's a question for neuroscientists: compared to 20 years ago, how much better do we understand the workings of the brain?

"I’m really sorry, but an unexpected family obligation has come up" - How well can AIs write social excuses? arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13685

Neurobullshit is alive and well in education research. Reminds me of the good old days of @neuroskeptic.bsky.social on this 10+ years ago

While I am sad that it took eleven years to retract this paper, @PLOS.org journals make good decisions about when to correct or retract. They are also one of the few publishers that keep me informed of retractions. Other publishers should follow their example.

A new cautionary example of overfitting in machine learning has arrived - this paper claims 99% accuracy in predicting stock prices from astrology www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Not exactly... senseandreference.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/r...