Tempo comparison across scales, taxa, modalities, and media. Top left: Spectrogram of cricket(s) chirping for 1 min. Top right: Spectrogram of nearby fireflies flashing for 1 min (N = 21). The colorbars in both heatmaps correspond to Power/frequency (dB/Hz). Bottom: Typical tempos at which different animals signal vs. their respective mean body weights on a logarithmic scale (N = 24). The plot consists of six main groups: insects, amphibians, birds, fish, crustaceans (these last four in an overlapping region due to similar weights—note that the labels here don’t necessarily correspond to specific points as the species are mixed), and mammals. The icons (light bulb, speaker, and a moving human) represent the form of the signal (light, sound, or gesture). Note that the signals are mostly transmitted through air, with two examples through water (both fish, written in blue).

Do animals have a favored tempo for communicating with each other? This study reveals a hotspot of 0.5-4 Hz for #communication across distinct species & modalities, hypothesizing that this may driven by biophysical commonalities of the receivers' #neurons @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4ccWuhh

There’s a point when you get enough citations that your work enters the literature and people don’t necessarily engage with the substance, just the received idea of what it’s about. This has a lot to do with how academics read (or don’t, I think).

Default mode network

‘I see it as trafficking’: the brutal reality of life as a foreign student in the UK The long read: Universities in Britain rely on overseas applicants paying full fees, which has given rise to some unscrupulous recruiters and left many hopefuls and their families deep in debt

'In 2023, UK universities spent a total of £500m on education agents – but there is very little oversight of how these agents operate.'

'Once students got their offers, they were passed on to the visa team, and finally delivered to universities as a fully wrapped, fee-paying package.'

Flexible, abstract rhythm perception in bumble bees Flexible, abstract rhythm perception underpins human music, dance, and speech, but thus far, it has only been demonstrated in a few birds and mammals. In this work, we show that bumble bees also form ...

“Flexible rhythm perception underpins human music, dance & speech. We show that bees form robust abstract rhythm representations. Results suggest an insect brain can encode & generalize arbitrary complex temporal patterns, pointing to deep evolutionary roots for domain‐general rhythm cognition.”😲
🐝🧪

Happy to share our new preprint:

Uncovering the representational geometry of durations

Is time represented along a single mental timeline? We combine behaviour + EEG to show that duration is organised in a richer, multidimensional space.

w/ @lnalborczyk.bsky.social & @virginievanw.bsky.social

Please circulate widely!

Open positions at the Vision Lab, Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
sites.google.com/site/visionl...

How to Apply:
forms.gle/vWa1PwUrcpWf...
Deadline : March 31 2026

Phyllodesmium and Prionospio | Peter Godfrey-Smith, Jürgen Berger, Gáspár Jékely | CC BY 4.0

Registration is now open for our two-day

**"Heidelberg Wild Thinking Workshop - The organism, its self and its environment: from philosophy to physics"**,

www.cos.uni-heidelberg.de/en/wild-thinking-worksho...

an interdisciplinary event on **19-20 […]

[Original post on biologists.social]

Man, one of the most depressing aspects of modern scholarship is finding a great article and then looking up the scholar to see what else they’ve done and just catching a glimpse of an abbreviated career hopping between visiting positions and publishing great pieces before disappearing from academia

What's My JND? Find your Just Noticeable Difference in colour perception. How small a colour difference can you actually see?

For those who want to test their perception of colour, I made a little game called "What's My JND"

www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd...

#consci

Once Thought To Support Neurons, Astrocytes Turn Out To Be in Charge | Quanta Magazine New experiments reveal how astrocytes tune neuronal activity to modulate our mental and emotional states. The results suggest that neuron-only brain models, such as connectomes, leave out a crucial la...

The astrocyte reckoning is nigh!
www.quantamagazine.org/once-thought...

Very happy to see "Pretending not to know reveals a capacity for model-based self-simulation", a collaboration with @chazfirestone.bsky.social and @ianbphillips.bsky.social, out in Psych. Science!

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177...

🧵

#consci

Ph.D. Programme in Philosophy - Ashoka University The PhD in Philosophy programme conforms to all Ashoka PhD programme guidelines. Additional guidelines specific to the Philosophy PhD programme […]

We're starting a PhD programme in Philosophy at Ashoka! Anyone can apply by April 15 for admission this year, and we will ensure that admitted applicants receive enough funding to support them for the 5 year programme. More info here:
www.ashoka.edu.in/programme/ph...

15 yrs since we published this, but some scholars still define (animal) colour vision as just wavelength discrimination independently of intensity. Colour vision requires having vision - and this means seeing an image in which things have colour properties.

PhD Scholarship

My Centre is a unique place to do a PhD in Philosophy, because you can be in constant contact with experts in veterinary medicine, psychology, zoology and policy and be part of a team united by a shared interest in animal minds. We now have our 1st ever PhD scholarship: www.lse.ac.uk/sentience/phd

anyway, it’s very weird that subjective phenomenology turns out to be the area of psychology that’s most amenable to quantitative theorizing and replicable results

If you happen to be in Oxford on Monday, I'll be speaking in @oxexppsy.bsky.social about my recent research on cognition and emotions navigating the Marshall Islands: @oxexppsy.bsky.social

www.psy.ox.ac.uk/events

Is this volleyball sentient? Many lonely castaways feel they're talking to a real person. Scientists say it's time to consider whether they're on to something.

The International Association for Philosophy of Time (IAPT) is pleased to announce its 11th annual conference to be held at Yamaguchi University, Japan, on 25th–27th July 2026.

Call for abstracts: www.philtimesociety.com/calls-for-pa...

#consci

#consci

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

a project I really like, now officially out!

"Shape Guides Visual Pretense"

by Qian and me

paper link: direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

I'll walk through a quick version here

To get a sense of it, first consider:

Would it make more sense to pretend that this block is a car, or a strawberry?

Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology Deep neural networks (DNNs) once showed increasing alignment with primate perception as they improved on vision benchmarks, raising hopes that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) would naturally yield better models of biological vision. However, we present accumulating evidence that this alignment is now plateauing – and in some cases worsening – as DNNs scale to human or even superhuman accuracy. This divergence between artificial and biological perception may reflect the acquisition of visual strategies distinct from those of primates, and these findings challenge the view that advances in AI will naturally translate to progress in neuroscience. We argue that vision science must chart its own course, developing algorithms grounded in biological visual systems rather than optimizing for internet data.

Online Now: Better artificial intelligence does not mean better models of biology

In continuing with this tradition of cataloguing failures to balance social media feeds, here goes for 2025.

New manuscript submissions: 0
Failed attempts at dissertation awards: 2
Conference/workshop rejections: 2
Rejected book proposals: 1
Failed journal editor applications: 1

A new year awaits!

Computational Neurophenomenology in a cabin in the alps! March 22-29, supported by my @erc.europa.eu grant #CONSCIOUS & organised by @singhal.bsky.social @robertchisciure.bsky.social & team. Application deadline extended until *December 28*. Pls spread word: www.uni-bamberg.de/en/bamxi/res...

In the spirit of winter holidays, the deadline has been extended to 28th December!

Last chance to apply to join the Consciousness Cabin workshop ..

#consci #neuroskyence #visionresearch #philsky

"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