Can we learn to voluntarily control our bodily states? 🫀@martager.bsky.social will present a pilot study using autogenic training to assess how people can successfully learn to directly decrease heart rate through the lens of ideomotor theory. 🕐 Thu, June 4th | 15:30-17:00 📍 HS 15 #PuG2026 [3/6]

The dome of UQ's Atrium is giving an excellent rainbow glow ❤️ Love my university #PrideMonth

While I'm sympathetic to this argument, doesn't this imply that emotion and affective science (to name but a few) are similarly constrained? Psychology is rife with subjectively modelled phenomena #neuroskyence

"Nobody needs convincing that a science of the Meaning of Life is the wrong project. I will argue that a science of phenomenal consciousness is wrong for exactly the same reason: neither is amenable to the third-person perspective science requires." by @profdata.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2606.00226

𝗜𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗼𝗳 "𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴" 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻? philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph... #neuroskyence

Cephalopods 🐙 can employ mirror reflections for spatial navigation. They understand the concept of the mirror and can use it to approach otherwise occluded prey. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We all complain about headlines on here, so we should be ready to praise this one, which gets it exactly right (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/06/02/u...

Our article on the relationships between the heartbeat counting task (HCT) and psychological measures is finally out in @royalsocietypublishing.org Following @olivierdesmedt.bsky.social line of research, we found a moderation effect of the instructions on the relationship between HCT and STAI-T.

🚨New dataset just dropped🚨 Introducing Places in the Wild: 67,000 RAW-format photographs (45 mpix) densely sampled from 810 places (260 basic-level categories). This is 11x the number of pixels in ImageNet! Preprint is here: arxiv.org/abs/2606.02481 1/

I'm happy to share the new preprint of my paper "What can meditative experience tell us about affective valence? A computational perspective on the determinants of affect" bit.ly/4ekg4Jd

It seems noticeably quieter here at the moment. Has everyone sneaked away to LinkedIn or something?

A very clear summary of the very stupid thing that is happening. See comments for actions to take.

How can some smells seem stronger than others despite equivalent odor concentrations? @nordenneuro.bsky.social &co show that coordinated neural activity between #OlfactoryBulb & #PiriformCortex tracks how intensely an odor is perceived (rather than concentration) @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4fQxXR5

Spectacular moonrise tonight from Mt Coot-Tha #Brisbane #fullmoon

Am I in a minority in having a broad view of what "computation" means? Example: to me, low-pass filtering is a computation. It can have analog or digital implementation. Some seem to insist that "computation" means "digital implementation". But if so, doesn't "analog computer" become an oxymoron?

"Structure and metabolism should no longer sit in separate boxes. The brain’s wiring could also be part of its fuel strategy. Myelin may be more than insulation; it may also form part of the brain’s adaptive metabolic infrastructure." 🧠👇 #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/metabolism/b...

Little notes like these make marking very rewarding 🤗

Psychology researchers: Got questions about what kinds of submissions we’re looking for at Psych Science (the journal)? (Short answer: empirical research in any area of psychology!) If you’re at #APS26BCN, stop by the APS booth in the exhibit hall between 4-5pm today to chat with me!

The classical definition of computation is the concept of effective method: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effecti... This is the kind of procedure that Turing/Church/von Neumann et al. tried to automate. Of course many people now use the term very loosely. But once upon a time, it had some actual meaning.

An unapologetically angry post about what’s being done to US science:

Did you know that pigeon navigation uses 'superparamagnetic macrophages'? I didn't either but this is wow

Friends don't let friends outsource sense-making in a time of great change and high stakes to machines that are controlled by a sub-group who is trying to influence the direction of all that change.

White House proposes new rules giving political appointees final approval of research grants These proposed Office of Management and Budget regulations would render the federal research grant review process opaque www.scientificamerican.com/article/whit...

I was once considered a twitter influencer (long long ago) & the discourse then was all about democratising expertise, so it could be monetised. But turns out If anyone can be an expert, then no one is an expert. AI is an extension of that.

Super excited by this manuscript led by the amazing @brissend.bsky.social By combining fMRI, TMS, and modeling, we finally have causal evidence that the cerebellum is contributing to brain-wide working memory representations and recall performance! 1/n

Modeling human social vision with cinematic stimuli: An integrative approach jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... 166 people watched full-length films & short clips with varying social content.Pupil size modulated by luminance, scene cuts, emotion;gaze position by human faces, local motion & entropy

Showing how: Adults across cultures use similar representational gestural strategies in demonstrations for children. New paper by Emanuela Campisi, @anitaslonimska.bsky.social & @asliozyurek.bsky.social doi.org/10.1098/rsos.251813

A shared multi-feature population code for sensory reliability across mouse visual cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.21.726824v1

New preprint: When the heart and the brain meet: Cardiac-neural coupling in feature integration Maria I. Cobos Martin, Clara Alameda, Pedro M. Guerra, Ana B. Chica www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... #interoception #neuroscience

How to breathe life back into brain theory 🧠 Short review of Romain Brette's book, "The Brain, In Theory" from Alex Gomez Marin (whose personal near-death experience has informed much of his more recent thinking) #neuroscience www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I know this was a labour of love (and blood, sweat, and tears) by my great colleague Susanne Stoll: the first ever tactile maps of the human finger tip! ☝️ #neuroskyence (not really #psychscisky or #visionscience but tagged it anyway 😉) doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Fantastic opportunity here - Elise is super and Melbourne is my old home town- plus with KU Leuven in the mix I'm kind of jealous (can I just start a second doctorate? 🤣)

Mesmerising. No brain, no neurons, just self-sustained calcium oscillations driving complex adaptive responding from a single cell - just wow! 🧠 #neuroskyence

I always admire when folks publish their papers accompanied by a supplementary-style page on their website - such a high-value and potentially more accessible #openscience way to directly communicate research (plus I imagine it improves peer-review, is there data on that somewhere?)

This is cool! 🧑‍🚀🧠

In which I give AI chatbots a fact checking test and find them sorely wanting. My latest for WIRED.

The locus coeruleus, which provides norepinephrine to the rest of the brain, is even more spatially and functionally diverse than previously thought, new findings suggest. By Holly Barker www.thetransmitter.org/locus-coerul...

I'd really like more delineation between conscious (I'm awake & responsive), attentive (can focus & direct my responses), voluntary (I can inhibit or manipulate my habitual responses), and gain control of all three My hot take? p zombies live on a spectrum

Why are robots threatening to read all the papers even we don't read them all

A survey of 2600 Ph.D. students, postdocs, and other researchers in 65 countries found that top three complaints were that supervisors: 1) used dismissive communication 2) provided little feedback 3) ignored team members’ well-being The main thing they wanted was empathy

Finally! BOOK 2 OUT SOON -- THIS AUGUST (e-book will be Open Access/free): THE SENSES: PERCEPTION AND EXPERIENCE (Cambridge University Press, Elements in Philosophy of Mind, ed. by @keithfrankish.com ) www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...

He's right that AI - literally - doesn't have the guts 🔥

This is why AGI isnt happening. Sense perception, movement, and memory are chemistries coupled to each other and all coupled to direct matter exchange with the environment, like a centrifugal governor. Nothing is representation, interpretation, “info processing”, or math.

Discover 40+ chapters on the science of consciousness: humans, babies, animals, artificial systems, etc! Experts from various disciplines and views came together under the lead of Umberto Olcese and Lucia Melloni A precious resource for anyone interested in #consciousness! www.horizon-minds.com

A short highlight of the beautiful recent work by @varunswadia.bsky.social, Doris Tsao et al., providing single-neuron evidence of the overlap between imagery and perception! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

******INTERSPEECH 2026 SATELLITE EVENT******** The AVSP 2026 Workshop 16th Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing interspeech2026.org/en-AU/pages/... project.inria.fr/avsp2026/cal... We invite authors to submit either a 1-page abstract or a 4-page paper to this email: [email protected]

We have a new preprint out! And one that is especially dear to my heart: "Re-Engineering Wimsatt for Limited Beings" https://zenodo.org/records/18293424 Bill Wimsatt is possibly the most underrated philosopher of science of our times. In this paper, I attempt […] [Original post on spore.social]

I have 3,999 followers - will you be my 4K? 😚 I promise not to start a podcast, if that helps

Spiders in Australia are either capable of killing you or winning best costume at Mardi Gras, there is no in between 🤣

Spontaneous locus coeruleus bursts coincide with transient global brain state changes similar to those elicited by surprise www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...