‘They can turn a normal city street into a jungle'
Ella Rhodes spoke to Dr Reshanne Reeder @kerblooee.bsky.social (University of Liverpool), who researches extremes of mental imagery, individual differences in mental imagery, and their impacts.
www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...
Ruby and jekyll installed OK, it was the random jupyterlab requirement to view the local version of the website that is tripping up my system...
Update: I tried this and it has issues (maybe windows?) because it seems jekyll relies on jupyter notebooks and I cannot get the install to be recognized on windows... :-(
Thanks, this looks super straightforward! I'd found jekyll before, but the instructions always skipped 10 steps assuming you just know stuff. I'll give it a go!
The last time I paid for Wix, it was a 3-year deal... now it is over and prices have gone up to £240 a year(!!) - I need to get my website on another platform, stat! Can anyone recommend any freelancers who could rebuild my site on Github Pages? DM or comment please!
Cool! A new mental imagery scale that gets rid of the pesky relative rating problem: what if my 4 is your 6? Led by @heidasigurdar.bsky.social:
The Visual Imagery Visually Anchored Scale (VIVAS) reveals dissociable perceptual dimensions and category-specific structure osf.io/preprints/ps...
Somehow this must be useful for vision science 🧠
Targeted optogenetic stimulation⚡leads to predictable, evidence-inspired behavioral changes*.
This seminal ᯡ research has explicit implications for a fundamental difference in the brains of aphantasics 🔣 and hyperphantasics 🍏
*limitations: none! objective evidence is superior to self-report
6/6
Participants in the hyperphantasia induction group 🍏 experienced* what can only be described as imagined transportation to another world 🌏
*note: this includes classic psychedelic symptoms like dilated pupils 👁️, increased galvanic skin response 🥵, and also staring into the distance
5/N
Participants in the aphantasia induction group 🔣immediately began to experience* a limitless internal void of darkness 🌑
*note: 2 independent raters observed that the mice laid on their backs and stared blankly into the distance. When asked to imagine an apple 🍎, they reported absolutely nothing
4/N
The aphantasia induction group received infrared 🟥 stimulation to the fusiform imagery node 🧠(FIN) and the hyperphantasia induction group received the ultraviolet 🟪stimulation.
These frequencies therefore either 'knocked out' 😵or 'amplified' 😱 normal imagery activity in the FIN
3/N
We recruited 40 naive participants with baseline typical mental imagery, and split them into two groups: aphantasia induction 🔣 (N=20)
hyperphantasia induction 🍏 (N=20)
We know from previous research that infrared 🟥 and ultraviolet 🟪 light stimulate at low and high frequencies, respectively
2/N
A Superlab mouse demonstrating the optogenetic equipment. Stimulation at different alternating currents either enhanced mental imagery to synaesthetic levels, or completely eliminated it
Optogenetics induces aphantasia and hyperphantasia in mice
I am thrilled to announce my latest study, providing objective neural evidence for imagery extremes – in mice! 🐁
Read the paper here:
tinyurl.com/ycxnkka7 <----👀
A thread 🧵 1/N
Having weak imagery (hypophantasia) can make ppl feel like they don't belong in aphantasia research. But this is a critical group to study in refuting the "aph=metacognitive issue" hypothesis. Don't neglect the hypophants!
When weak imagery is worse than none:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
That's hopeful, but I'm nervous that it's just a matter of time before Prolific goes the way of MTurk. But maybe I'm wrong
This should be a concern for anyone relying on online data collection (most of us in aphantasia & extreme imagery research)! Added to my lab code of conduct on how to combat bots potentially infiltrating research:
tinyurl.com/2kwwkm2w
& happy to help develop high quality participation databases!
We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif...
Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1).
If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!
Are you aware of the work being done by Phoebe Wallman and Alexandra Lautarescu on this, as well? I don't think they've published anything but I recently saw a talk by the 2 of them on bots infiltrating online studies, mostly from social media recruitment. Bet they would send you their slides!
It shall be called "The Journal of Informed Opinions"
I think peoppe are afraid of what this means for easy online studies. Just yesterday someone said to me "why even recruit students when you can just throw your study on Facebook?" 😱
Welcome - I don't think so!
Please repost!
I have a wonderful colleague seeking a postdoc with expertise in *Bayesian Network Analysis*
Position for 1 year in Liverpool, starting as early as next month (April)!
Informal EOIs to Angelika Stefan: astefan1.github.io
Boomers still using mapquest must be laughing their asses off right now
It's not as much "society-as-a-whole" as "academics-as-a-whole" - the overrepresentation of clever & weird & often also neurodivergent does tend to create pockets of emotional immaturity...
Either my best joke went over everyone's heads or they're busy having a crisis over discovering all their Harvard prof heroes are perverts 🤣
Thank god Robert Langdon is not in the Epstein files
Now available in its entirety, you can read Ruth Rosenholtz's Behavioral & Brain Sciences critique of attention as an explanation tool in vision science and our reaction to her piece.
www.anthonybarnhart.com/news/bbs-pay...
🚨 New preprint! What if individual alpha peak frequency—often treated as a global marker of brain function and clinical phenotypes—actually reflects a mixture of independent alpha rhythms with distinct frequencies and neural origins? That’s what @davidpascucci.bsky.social and I suggest here. #EEG
