Monkey auditory neurons "did not show enhanced responses to unexpected stimulus repetitions, contrary to predictive-coding theory. However, they did show enhanced responses to unexpected stimulus omissions." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
As a face researcher I appreciate work like this👇
It's more helpful when thinking about facial gestures to consider relations and contextual interactions than discrete signals
'risk/reward' seems to capture this better than 'fear' imo
#neuroskyence
✈️ Did you know?
Getting to ECVP 2026 is easy & affordable! Fly via London airports, take coaches from £9.40 (National Express), or use Eurostar. 🏨 Hotels from ~£69. ⏰ Deadline: April 21! #ECVP2026
Neural trajectory plot showing neural activity moving through orthogonal corollary discharge and feedback signal subspaces
New preprint! 🧵🧪🧠
doi.org/10.64898/202...
Upshot: somatosensory cortex contains both feedback *and* intended movement signals (a.k.a. corollary discharge). These two signals exist orthogonally in neural space, flexibly allowing both fast state estimation and external perturbation detection. 1/
Many claim memory biases toward percepts reflect corruption in sensory signals. We challenge this view by showing that ppl adapt their integration rationally w/ experience. w/ @timbrady.bsky.social
Humans adaptively integrate memory and perception based on stimulus history | osf.io/preprints/ps...
Nadine Dijkstra's talk at the MIT Consciousness Club is now available here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=rciv....
Now that it has been out for a week, I thought I’d address a few strange takes regarding our recent mega-analysis on the effects of psychedelics on brain function (specifically, resting-state functional connectivity). 1/15
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧠 the Digital Brain Project is now live:
$5M total · up to $500k per selected team
Let's open-source the modeling of the human brain brain activity!
➡️Apply on: digitalbrainproject.org
How does the brain process information? We found evidence in favour of a hybrid predictive coding-routing model that combines top-down predictions with superficial-layer inhibition. Models are complementary,not competing-w/ @earlkmiller.bsky.social Andre Bastos www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Exciting new PhD opportunity (funded) in the lab of @larsmuckli.bsky.social www.findaphd.com/phds/project...
New from the lab - led by Santiago Castiello - patients with schizophrenia detect speech in sine-wave stimuli and those who hallucinate benefit most from the templates: academic.oup.com/schizophreni...
Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1
On Tues, 4/28, 10am, Host Dr. @brainbodylab.bsky.social & the #BrainBodyResearchInstitute are EXCITED to welcome UCLA's Dr. @skhalsa.bsky.social 👉 "Interoceptive Neuroscience as a Catalyst for the Next Era of Translational Neurobiology" Register Here ➡️ mountsinai.zoom.us/webinar/regi...
We'd love to involve the broader VSS community in this event, starting now. We genuinely want to know where you stand on this topic, so please feel free to give us your open-ended hot takes here (the spiciest takes may be featured in the intro):
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Photo of an eye by Beel coor on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/brown-and-black-eye-illustration-1AIHIjtuNCI
🚨Preprint Alert🚨and Thread 🧵
The Visual Imagery Visually Anchored Scale (VIVAS) reveals dissociable perceptual dimensions and category-specific structure: osf.io/preprints/ps...
Authors: @heidasigurdar.bsky.social, Árnason, Mäekalle, Vésteinsdóttir, @arnig.bsky.social
1/9
What do #neuromodulators do in the #brain? Two recent papers give new insights:
@nishantjoshi.bsky.social shows they do not only reshape individual cellular properties, but also the architecture linking them, thereby expanding the computational repertoire.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
The aim of autopoiesis theory, as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela declared it in 1980, was to understand living systems via a ‘mechanistic’ approach that involved only what can be found ‘anywhere else in the physical world… blind material interactions governed by aimless physical laws’ (p. 74). In service of such a mission, in Maturana's words, ‘any attempt to characterise living systems with notions of purpose or function was doomed to fail’ (p. xiii). A lot can change in a few decades. By 2002 – to the presumed horror of those who had once rejoiced at this naturalistic ‘destruction of teleology’ (Beer, 1980) – we find Varela declaring that there is in fact ‘a real teleology implied in the notion of autopoiesis’, that it is a source of ‘subjectivity, intentionality and meaning’, and thus that, ‘organisms are subjects having purposes according to values encountered in the making of their living’ (Weber & Varela, 2002).
This search for an alternative ‘science of meaning’ is, alongside the rejection of a ‘representation-first’ view of cognition, one of the central pillars that defines Varela et al.'s (1991) presentation of the enactive approach. Yet the term ‘enactivism’ is also used more loosely to refer to the endorsement of the second, anti-representationalist, pillar alone. Disagreement thus persists about whether autopoiesis supplies an adequate basis for an alternative ‘science of meaning’, and indeed whether any such basis is even needed (Barandiaran, 2017; Ward et al., 2017). This broad tent of enactive cognitive science has been pitched across a fault line. On one side: cyberneticists, who hew to Maturana’s machinistic view within which mind may be continuous with life, but only to the extent that both are continuous with non-life and all can be subsumed within the mathematics of dynamical systems theory. On the other: ‘organicists’, who take living systems to constitute a genuinely new sort of organisation – one that is necessary for a system to be cognitive and which cannot be straightforwardly approached via the same modelling strategies used in ordinary physics.
New paper out in Adaptive Behavior!
On why cognitive scientists need a better account of purposive of behaviour, why cybernetics and dynamical systems won't do the trick, and how biological autonomy might.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Last session of the MIT Consciousness Club 04/16! @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social will give a talk on "Distinguishing imagination and reality in a generative brain". More information (including zoom link for those joining online) here: sites.google.com/view/mit-con...
My first foray into explicitly trying to bridge Marr’s levels, with @bealebrains.bsky.social. Inspired by Hahn and Wei’s models (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38360947/), we wondered how the brain could instantiate sensory inference with efficient /decoding/ properties.
1/
GastroPy is now out in early beta! Please to share our Python toolbox for electrogastrography and stomach-brain coupling analyses. It includes tools for cleaning, visualising, and analysing EGG data, plus fMRI stomach-brain coupling workflows. Docs, code, and preprint below. osf.io/preprints/ps...
New article with @oudietted.bsky.social and the @dreamteamicm.bsky.social
Dream-like mental states can occur during wakefulness
Published now in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social
www.cell.com/cell-reports...
Congrats to Nicolas Decat!
New discovery! Spoiler alert: Neural dynamics are key.
Evidence for predictive computations in a brain hierarchy during a visual search task
doi.org/10.64898/202...
Work led by @pinotsislab.bsky.social
#neuroscience
Some of the same *single neurons* in VTC being activated when seeing and imagining the same things!
www.sciencenews.org/article/seei...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYAd...
Only a few more days to apply for the @mindandlifeeu.bsky.social summer research institute, this year focused on the idea of time, and the associated retreat. Both take place in Gomde Austria in July mindandlife-europe.org/events/europ...
My latest feature for @sciam.bsky.social explores the research connecting problems with interoception to a wide variety of mental illnesses, including anxiety disorders, eating disorders, & PTSD. This work is ultimately circling in on a central message: the body & mind are inextricably intertwined.
New paper (with lots of cute animal videos!)
Ever watch your dog "run" while asleep and wonder what’s going on in their brain? In Current Bio we suggest that those twitches aren't just leaky dreams—they’re a vital maintenance system for the most precise movements
www.cell.com/current-biol...
