Reminder that Ritalin floods the brain with dopamine & norepinephrine for 10-14 hrs. Any neuron anywhere in the brain with any of the subtypes of DA or NE receptor is gonna feel it regardless of arbitrarily assigned network

This is your brain on Ritalin. Got your attention? Stimulant medications like Ritalin (methylphenidate) do, but not in the way you might think. They don't act directly on the brain’s attention systems! Find out what's really happening in @cellpress.bsky.social. doi.org/10.1016/j.ce...

🚀 Excited to announce that I'm looking for people (PhD/Postdoc) to join my Cognitive Modelling group @uniosnabrueck.bsky.social. If you want to join a genuinely curious, welcoming and inclusive community of Coxis, apply here: tinyurl.com/coxijobs Please RT - deadline is Jan 4‼️

Are you curious about electrogastrography, but keep getting chicken-related results when googling "EGG"? We have the preprint for you! In this tutorial, we describe how to acquire and analyse gastric data from human participants. Plus FREE software! Read it here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.17260

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

It is hugely fun & we are very lucky to do science for the sake of science. But it is amazing to see work we and many others I admire have done turn into public awareness thanks to excellent science writing. (see also www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/s...)

Today was the last day of our module on the new BSc in Human Neuroscience @uclbrainscience.bsky.social I really recommend giving books as prizes and letting students pick between a few (Mark Solms and @camillanord.bsky.social) Receiving a book from a mentor can sometimes open up whole new worlds

📣I’m excited to share our new preprint on how our body’s energy supply shapes everyday stress experiences: 📄𝐇𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐠𝐥𝐮𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐥𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐬 𝐛𝐮𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐥𝐨𝐚𝐝 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

** Recruiting a postdoc ** We are looking for a postdoc to work on emotion, mental health, and interoception, based in London at @ucl.ac.uk in my lab (Clinical and Affective Neuroscience). Part of a large Wellcome Grant (co-led with the brilliant @camillanord.bsky.social)

There are 3 Oxford-based post doc positions for this Wellcome Trust project that will be advertised soon! If you have experinece in neurostimulation (tms/tus) and/or modelling of cogneuro data in humans do contact one of us (me, @mkflugge.bsky.social @lilweb.bsky.social, Jacinta OShea) to discuss!

📣🔥Thrilled to announce that 2026 Computational Psychiatry Conference will take place in New Haven, CT, btw July 14-16 - www.cpconf.org @robbrutledge.bsky.social @drrickadams.bsky.social @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social @docqhuys.bsky.social @clairegillan.bsky.social Sonia Bishop More info to come soon!

Then we have a new paper led by Nazia Jassim @naziajassim.bsky.social on the neurochemical markers of uncertainty processing and links to trait anxiety: www.nature.com/articles/s41... @natcomms.nature.com

First up, this paper led by Bronagh McCoy: journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... When noise and volatility are independently manipulated people behave differently depending on their anxious traits.

Doing non-causal inference (and being explicit about it), yet using a causal word as second word in the title. If you pay Nature € 10.690, they will publish this in Nature Ageing. I can tell you what I think of that for free. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

I spoke to The Economist @economist.com about dopamine detoxes - thank you @ainsliejstone.bsky.social for the write-up! www.economist.com/science-and-...

A brain injury was reported in a trial using ultrasound, framed as low-intensity TUS. Kim Butts Pauly and I reviewed the case and disagreed with how it's presented. Key acoustic data are missing. Case: doi.org/10.1016/j.br... Letters: www.elsa-fouragnan.com/blog | web.stanford.edu/~kimbutts/Le...

What drives the bidirectional relationship between metabolic and mental ill-health? Read our new metabolic psychiatry paper, “An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health” www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... led by @saramehrhof.bsky.social @hugofleming.bsky.social

We often hear from reviewers: "what about demand effects?" So we developed a method to eliminate them. Something weird happened during testing: We couldn’t detect demand effects in the first place! (1/8)

Brilliant work by @saramehrhof.bsky.social on shared neurocognitive signatures of psychiatric and metabolic disorder at #cpconf2025

New preprint! People vary in healthy food preferences, with some veering towards obsessive. We found #orthorexia associated with disgust-like facial responses to unhealthy foods. BUT: also with appetitive stomach responses! Is it an interoceptive self-control mechanism? doi.org/10.1101/2025... (1/7)

Finally, the amazing Professor Camilla Nord presents on interoception - including some cool lived experience work on body sensations, and work on disgust and gastric rhythms, alongside work on energy conservation. #BAP2025

It’s #BAP2025 time! Kicking us off is Dr Megan Jackson, the winner of the junior non-clinical award talking about animal models of apathy and motivation. Key quote: ‘as scientists, we love a tight error bar’. @bapsych.bsky.social

Today at #BAP2025 we heard from both lived-experience and pharmacology experts that clozapine,“Britain’s most dangerous drug” is lifesaving for people with treatment-resistance— with current thresholds for discontinuation racially unequal (some people have naturally lower but safe neutrophil levels)

'Mental health diagnoses are not just misapplied, but invented.' Camilla Nord on the mental illness epidemic

Summer Books 2025; the mental illness epidemic; teen-centric novels; mass protest in the modern era; a philosophy of eating – and much more www.the-tls.co.uk/issues/cu...

I'm so grateful to write my first magazine article with Psyche Magazine! psyche.co/ideas/how-mu... It features our preprint on 🫁 'Body-Wandering' 🫀 with invaluable guidance from @micahgallen.com and @themindwanders.bsky.social : biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My favorite genre of horrifying but fascinating interoception research - Modification of Human Gastric Acid Secretion with Operant-Conditioning Procedures - Whitehead et al, 1975 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

🚨 New paper out in JAMAPsych: 🦣 project led by the brilliant @anahitm.bsky.social & @docqhuys.bsky.social ’ group. Our meta-analysis found that #dopamine & #serotonin have distinct effects on reinforcement learning. A step toward biomarker guided treatment? jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

There is also good news embedded in the report. We find that taVNS briefly purturbs the correlation of the pupil dilation trace of the left and the right eye. This novel marker is not as strongly associated with sensory ratings. But it makes sense since we stimulate one side of the vagus.

My new paper with Jennifer Cook sets out potential reasons for high rates of Parkinson's disease (PD) diagnosis in the autistic population: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... @mrccbu.bsky.social @thechbh.bsky.social 🧵1/n

Academic life, and sometimes life in general, can feel chock-full of disappointments. But not today, satan! 😈

Look what came in the mail! Looking forward to getting into @camillanord.bsky.social ‘s “The Balanced Brain.” 🥳 I’ve heard good things…

Jeff Dalley presenting our translational animal-to-human collaboration targeting uncertainty in anxiety - a @wellcometrust.bsky.social mental health award led by @beckyneuro.bsky.social at @britishneuro.bsky.social #BNA2025

so, so excited to share our new theory which endeavours to answer why depression and poor metabolic health go hand-in-hand: "An interoceptive model of energy allostasis linking metabolic and mental health" 💪🧠🔋 @saramehrhof.bsky.social @hugofleming.bsky.social osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our lecturer had a picture of a blonde woman up on a slide and clearly expected us to know who she was, but we're all Gen Z so none of us did. I guessed Princess Diana which was incorrect. It's this photo btw

Thrilled to see @lydiajhickman.bsky.social win the BNA Postgraduate Prize @britishneuro.bsky.social in Liverpool. Hard to think of a better start to a conference!

A postdoc in my lab contacted a fellow scientist to get some advice and was told that, because he's currently working on the topic, he "can't give away all his secrets." I find this extremely lame, and yet I keep encountering it. Science is not a zero-sum game!!

Elementary

Fab new pub setting lived experience priorities for interoception research in mental health. Congrats @lydiajhickman.bsky.social‬ & team 👏

Reading The Balanced Brain by @camillanord.bsky.social and finding it fascinating 😀

I just can't remember the story of Charles Darwin writing On the origin of species being that he sliced it into 40 papers while supervising four PhD students, answering 70 emails and attending 4 Microsoft Teams meetings a day while completing an e-Learning course about fire safety in the background

Workshop contributors had a variety of initial thoughts in response to the question: “how are bodily signals related to your mental health?” This was conducted prior to any detailed information about the aims of the workshop, or the field's perceived notions of interoception. 🧵4/n

Patient priorities for interoception research, just out in Lancet eClinicalMedicine 🧠🫁🫀 ⬇️⬇️⬇️ — the first pub from our @wellcometrust.bsky.social Mental Health Award Led by the brilliant @gabmackie.bsky.social & @lydiajhickman.bsky.social

Phase IIb trial of 5-MeO-DMT in depression reports big results: -15.5 MADRS reduction -57% remission by day 8 But where has the placebo response gone? Barely there: 0% remission, +0.3 MADRS at day 8. 🤔 investor.ghres.com/news-release...

I am excited to share our latest paper @Nature where we construct a hi-res spatial map of the human hypothalamus, the brain region central in appetite control. It is a collaboration between @IMS_MRL @Cambridge_Uni & @MPI_Metabolism www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Me in the WSJ today, arguing that the relationship between social media and mental health is not clear cut, and bans for teenagers aren't the answer. (NB I did not pick this title, I would have gone for something kinder. I understand why people are worried.) 1/ www.wsj.com/health/welln...

Publishing in (and reviewing for) eLife rocks. End of.

The mind/body revolution: how the division between ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ illness fails us all

Going beyond integrating value - dopamine responses are more sophisticated: www.nature.com/articles/s41...