Back home in China! 🏮 Surprised to find out my dad had surgery last month, but grateful to be here for him.

Also, finally retired my 5-year-old ThinkPad! 💻 Currently breaking it in with Python exercises & prepping for the Logic & Comp minor. Dec burnout is gone; momentum is building for Feb! 🧠🔋

Such a rewarding project! Thanks William for the patient mentorship on GitHub & open data. It even sparked my "1 working memory paper/week" habit—I enjoy reading those amazing research ideas so much! I’ve finally got my energy back after the winter holiday and am ready to dive back in! 🧠✨

London is incredibly quiet today. Depending on how much you enjoy the silence, Christmas is either the best time to be here—or the worst. I personally love it. 🇬🇧🚶‍♂️

How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition? - Nature Reviews Neuroscience Both localized and distributed views on the functional organization of the brain have been put forward. In this Perspective, Rosen and Freedman examine the degree to which these two views account for ...

Thoughtful review with some good recent historical perspective on the ongoing paradigm shift that is radically changing the way we think about what brain areas do.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨UK Biobank has ADHD + ASD + Emotionality questionnaires in an older population now! Huge potential to study ppl born a little early to have been recognized/diagnosed. Especially Women (who are still less likely to be observed to have symptoms and be referred): biobank.ndph.ox.ac.uk/showcase/lab...

Hierarchical interactions between sensory cortices defy predictive coding Perceptual experience depends on recurrent interactions between lower and higher cortices. One theory, predictive coding, posits that feedback from higher to lower brain regions decreases neuronal activity predicted by higher-level representations. Despite the widespread adoption of predictive coding in neuroscience, the correspondence to neurophysiological findings in sensory cortices remains elusive. Here, we review how the canonical patterns of intra- and inter-cortical interactions that occur during perception and shifts of attention deviate from those predicted by predictive coding. We argue that these circuit interactions are better captured by alternative theories, which we summarize under the umbrella term BELIEF. We review how BELIEF theories account for the inter-areal interactions during attentive perception.

Online Now: Hierarchical interactions between sensory cortices defy predictive coding

Concurrent selection of internal goals and external sensations during visual search Internal and external selection processes can codevelop in time to yield efficient search behavior.

Now out in #ScienceAdvances: @baiweiliu.bsky.social and I ask how internal (goal) and external (sensory) selection are coordinated during visual search. The key insight: internal and external selection are not inherently serial, but may develop in parallel in the human brain: doi.org/10.1126/scia...

When does new learning interfere with existing knowledge in people and ANNs? Great to have this out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com

Work with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, @tsonj.bsky.social, Lukas Braun and Jan Grohn
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sensory expectations shape neural population dynamics in motor circuits Nature - Experiments with human volunteers and macaques show that expectations produced by probabilistic cueing of future sensory inputs shape motor circuit dynamics in order to increase the...

Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature!
www.nature.com/articles/s4...

--When was the last time your happiness feeling peaked?
--When my Scientific Programming assignment passed with all greenlights😆

‘I discovered there's a world of phenomena driven by common knowledge’ | BPS Our editor Dr Jon Sutton meets Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and author of new book ‘When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows… Common Knowledge and the S...

‘I discovered there's a world of phenomena driven by common knowledge…’

Prof Steven Pinker @harvard.edu is author of ‘When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows: Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage’.

Repost for your chance to win a copy!

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

Taking courses on AI and consciousness. When we debate "where does consciousness begin in evolution?" I keep thinking of a single cell. It's already this complex, functional system that behaves in a way to actively exclude toxic stimuli from the outside environment.

A new, Short and Sweet open-access paper on how briefly hiding the hand impedes goal-directed arm movements. Briefly is really brief: we find a decrease in performance in goal-directed movements due to just a few ms without vision of the hand (target remains visible). doi.org/10.1177/0301...

There is always so much to learn, so much to comprehend and so much to feel thrilled about. “Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now!”

How do our brains learn when choices affect both ourselves and others?

New work by @shawnrhoadsphd.com, @aa-marsh.bsky.social, @thepsychologist.bsky.social, @drjocutler.bsky.social, et al. in @natcomms.nature.com reveals shared neural computations for prosocial & antisocial learning

rdcu.be/eL8mZ

We (I and @willenjoy.bsky.social) created a toolbox for simulations of EEG/MEG because we needed to simulate data. Our initial aim was to simulate connectivity. For this short clip, I simulated two sources with phase connectivity using our toolbox.
#brainmovie
meegsim.readthedocs.io/en/stable/in...

UCL’s Consciousness Club series resumes tomorrow Wed 22nd Oct with Ken Paller @paller.bsky.social on “Two Sides of Sleep and Memory: Conscious and Unconscious”

3pm-430pm UK time

All welcome, for zoom details please see: metacoglab.org/consciousnes...

Join @matthiasmichel.bsky.social and me (over Zoom), won't you, for next speaker at the MIT Consciousness Club. Today at noon EDT
Rachel Denison (Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Boston University) - "Attentional Distortions of Subjective Perception"
sites.google.com/view/mit-con...

📣 Out in TINS (@cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social):

Neural processing is often described as either externally or internally directed. In our new Forum article, we (@freekvanede.bsky.social & Kia Nobre) propose a multilevel framework for conceptualising external and internal continua of brain processes.

This is a great idea except for the fact that it's wrong. You can obtain the same learning speed across dramatically different interstimulus intervals (T) as long as the intertrial interval (I) is kept in a fixed ratio with the interstimulus interval (Gallistel & Gibbon, 2000).

A brain-inspired agentic architecture to improve planning with LLMs - Nature Communications Multi-step planning is a challenge for LLMs. Here, the authors introduce a brain-inspired Modular Agentic Planner that decomposes planning into specialized LLM modules, improving performance across tasks and highlighting the value of cognitive neuroscience for LLM design.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I've been arguing that #NeuroAI should model the brain in health *and* in disease -- very excited to share a first step from Melika Honarmand: inducing dyslexia in vision-language-models via targeted perturbations of visual-word-form units (analogous to human VWFA) 🧠🤖🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2509.24597

What is agency? How did it emerge through evolution? Why is it key to understanding complexity? Check out this brilliant Open Access book by my dear colleagues Alvaro Moreno & @julipereto.bsky.social. A deep exploration of a crucial concept. Highly recommended! link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Diagram showing three ways to control brain activity with a visual prosthesis. The goal is to match a desired pattern of brain responses. One method uses a simple one-to-one mapping, another uses an inverse neural network, and a third uses gradient optimization. Each method produces a stimulation pattern, which is tested in both computer simulations and in the brain of a blind participant with an implant. The figure shows that the neural network and gradient methods reproduce the target brain activity more accurately than the simple mapping.

👁️🧠 New preprint: We demonstrate the first data-driven neural control framework for a visual cortical implant in a blind human!

TL;DR Deep learning lets us synthesize efficient stimulation patterns that reliably evoke percepts, outperforming conventional calibration.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Wow, there are still new illusions to be discovered in vision!

I love growing all the 3D organoids, but here is cortical neurons appreciation 🧠 iPSC-derived TUJ1 + (green) cells
#FluorescenceFriday

Confronting the connectivity crisis in human M/EEG research The cognitive neuroscience community using M/EEG has not converged on measures of task-related inter-regional brain connectivity that generalize acros…

In our Trends in Cogn Sci paper we point to the connectivity crisis in task-based human EEG/MEG research: many connectivity metrics, too little replication. Time for community-wide benchmarking to build robust, generalisable measures across labs & tasks. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/MABe-mouse-behavior-detection

And we are live!

Excited to announce the 2025 Multi-Agent Behavior Challenge on cross-lab supervised action recognition in mice 🐁🐀🖱️

Running on Kaggle until December 15th, with a $50,000 prize pool going to the top five submissions!

www.kaggle.com/competitions...

Interested in doing a PhD with me and lacns.github.io? Or with any of the incredible fellows in the IMPRS School of Cognition www.maxplanckschools.org/cognition-en - apply before Dec 1st at cognition.maxplanckschools.org/en/application

Out now in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews!

When studying language in the brain, we often look for things that can be model systems for language (songbirds, artificial grammars, etc.). Here, we flip this on its head and argue that language itself is an excellent model system for cognition 🗣️🧏‍♀️🧠