The 6x US memory champion – Nelson Dellis – can memorize a deck of cards in 40 seconds and knows the first 10K digits of pi.
To figure out how, he let us peak inside his brain. Here is what we learned in our precision brain mapping study www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
youtube.com/shorts/MryMq...
Prof. Roy Salomon presenting a lecture titled “Trauma under Psychedelics” in Prague, showing slides with data from the Nova festival survivor study conducted at the University of Haifa, and addressing an audience during a neuroscience talk on trauma, PTSD, and psychedelic experiences.
In the evening at CZEPS x uniMIND Prague, I spoke about Trauma under Psychedelics, presenting findings from our work with Nova festival survivors to a warm, engaged, deeply empathic audience.
Thanks to Allen Fishman, Eva Césarová, Isis Koutrouli, NUDZ, @unimindprague.bsky.social , and CZEPS. (2/2)
Just back from Prague, where, in a typically overambitious move, I gave two talks in one day.
At NUDZ, I spoke about Self and Reality in the Human Brain, and how VR and neuroimaging implicate abnormal "Self" in psychosis. Learned about exciting work on psychedelics and mental health at NUDZ (1/2)
After 5 years of data collection, our WARN-D machine learning competition to forecast depression onset is now LIVE! We hope many of you will participate—we have incredibly rich data.
If you share a single thing of my lab this year, please make it this competition.
eiko-fried.com/warn-d-machi...
On December 16, I gave a talk at Charité on our work with the NOVA survivors on trauma under psychedelics.
In 1933, my grandfather, Prof. Dr. Karl Salomon, was expelled from the Charité for being Jewish. He fled Germany and rebuilt his life in Israel.
Happy to close this circle.
Ok, this is nuts. Once you see it you cannot unsee it. Do you see it?
(OP @drgbuckingham.bsky.social )
So great! To paraphrase @lucinauddin.bsky.social: If we (researchers) aren't clear, it has downstream effects on translation (eg to) psychiatry. We must strive not just to publish papers, but to be clear!
lab preprint! Interopceptive predictions are central to many brain-body interactions theories, but it's unclear if/how they affect bodily physiology. We (fearless Einav Litvak et al) show that insular cortex predictions are essential for glucose homeostasis-THREAD.. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Nice !!
🧪 Friends of all backgrounds: please enjoy this new paper whose findings “reveal that bees engage higher-order cognitive mechanisms under temporal uncertainty, suggesting that core features of awareness may be evolutionarily conserved across distant taxa.”
Yeah. 🫢
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
**How do we make long-lasting emotional memories**
Looks very interesting.
#neuroskyence
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
A table showing profit margins of major publishers. A snippet of text related to this table is below. 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
A figure detailing the drain on researcher time. 1. The four-fold drain 1.2 Time The number of papers published each year is growing faster than the scientific workforce, with the number of papers per researcher almost doubling between 1996 and 2022 (Figure 1A). This reflects the fact that publishers’ commercial desire to publish (sell) more material has aligned well with the competitive prestige culture in which publications help secure jobs, grants, promotions, and awards. To the extent that this growth is driven by a pressure for profit, rather than scholarly imperatives, it distorts the way researchers spend their time. The publishing system depends on unpaid reviewer labour, estimated to be over 130 million unpaid hours annually in 2020 alone (9). Researchers have complained about the demands of peer-review for decades, but the scale of the problem is now worse, with editors reporting widespread difficulties recruiting reviewers. The growth in publications involves not only the authors’ time, but that of academic editors and reviewers who are dealing with so many review demands. Even more seriously, the imperative to produce ever more articles reshapes the nature of scientific inquiry. Evidence across multiple fields shows that more papers result in ‘ossification’, not new ideas (10). It may seem paradoxical that more papers can slow progress until one considers how it affects researchers’ time. While rewards remain tied to volume, prestige, and impact of publications, researchers will be nudged away from riskier, local, interdisciplinary, and long-term work. The result is a treadmill of constant activity with limited progress whereas core scholarly practices – such as reading, reflecting and engaging with others’ contributions – is de-prioritized. What looks like productivity often masks intellectual exhaustion built on a demoralizing, narrowing scientific vision.
A table of profit margins across industries. The section of text related to this table is below: 1. The four-fold drain 1.1 Money Currently, academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it. The dominant four are Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Taylor & Francis, which collectively generated over US$7.1 billion in revenue from journal publishing in 2024 alone, and over US$12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024 (Table 1A). Their profit margins have always been over 30% in the last five years, and for the largest publisher (Elsevier) always over 37%. Against many comparators, across many sectors, scientific publishing is one of the most consistently profitable industries (Table S1). These financial arrangements make a substantial difference to science budgets. In 2024, 46% of Elsevier revenues and 53% of Taylor & Francis revenues were generated in North America, meaning that North American researchers were charged over US$2.27 billion by just two for-profit publishers. The Canadian research councils and the US National Science Foundation were allocated US$9.3 billion in that year.
The costs of inaction are plain: wasted public funds, lost researcher time, compromised scientific integrity and eroded public trust. Today, the system rewards commercial publishers first, and science second. Without bold action from the funders we risk continuing to pour resources into a system that prioritizes profit over the advancement of scientific knowledge.
We wrote the Strain on scientific publishing to highlight the problems of time & trust. With a fantastic group of co-authors, we present The Drain of Scientific Publishing:
a 🧵 1/n
Drain: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820
Strain: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Oligopoly: direct.mit.edu/qss/article/...
Looks very interesting! Bravo @tahnee-engelen.bsky.social
Yes pls
Somehow I love these scientific sleuth stories.
Interior of the Funhouze in Seattle with a can of Nazi Punks Fuck Off beer.
It’s a good night for it.
Honored to speak at the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin on Breaking the Walls of Trauma: Psychedelics and Recovery with Dr. Dimitris Repantis and Prof. Eric Vermetten discussing the opportunities and challenges psychedelics bring to trauma and PTSD recovery. falling-walls.com/programme/br...
Now, Prof Bessel Van der Kolk discussing how trauma is encoded in the mind and body. Stressing the importance of agency and action during the TE for better post traumatic recovery.
Then the outstanding Rick Dublin showed the efforts to advance MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD in many areas of conflict around the world.
Honored to be presenting at the SafeHeart conference on trauma, psychedelics and therapy during wartime. Showed our results of two years work with the Nova survivors.
Amazing conference in Dresden on the Multidimensionalty of Trauma. Amazing morning lineup: Carmen Sandi, Talma Hendler, Eric Vermetten & Hermona Soreq. From tRNA to psychedelic treatments of PTSD stress and trauma effects evident at all levels of neurobiology and cognition.
Check out our latest paper, a collaboration with @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social using gamified computational psychiatry measures to explore brain-behavioral correlates of decision making!
Yesterday, my heart was filled with hope as all live Israeli hostages returned home. Yesterday was also the funeral of Roee Shalev, Nova survivor suffering from PTSD who committed suicide this week. The trauma suffered on both sides is tremendous and there is much work ahead for this to be healed.🙏
Tomorrow will be two years since the attack which began this terrible war. I have lived through several wars, but this one has changed me. I don't believe in an interventionist God, but I am not above praying for peace.... Hostages back home, this war can be over. Amen 🙏
Our World Psychiatry paper is out! we studied responses to trauma experienced under different psychoactive substances and found distinct patterns across substances. Immense gratitude to our collaborators and above all, to the survivors❤️🩹
This is a good question. We examined the possibility of a MDMA "phenotype". However the data shows that most people who used MDMA here used other substances in other occurrences and many who used e.g. LSD in the Nova used MDMA in other parties. We didn't find evidence for a phenotype
Thanks Nicole. Very difficult.
Just published in World Psychiatry our study "Trauma under psychedelics: how psychoactive substances impact trauma processing" . Amazing work led by @ophirnetzer.bsky.social with the brave survivors of the Nova festival attack. Huge team effort, thx to all!
👉 doi.org/10.1002/wps....
