Camillo Golgi, nerve cells in a dog’s olfactory bulb (1885). I love these early neurobiological illustrations so much; they look almost like they could be works of Russian suprematism

Chimpanzees spontaneously prepare for mutually exclusive possibilities, and collective context strengthens this behaviour Abstract. In both humans and non-human animals, collectives can sometimes overcome individual cognitive biases or shortcomings to execute more rational beh

New paper alert! 📢 Out now, fully #openaccess, in a special issue of Phil Trans on the evolution of collective intelligence (1/4) royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article...

Good discussion on city planning with researchers from India, Ghana & Bangladesh, about cycling in countries where it is "not a leisure accessory but the primary means of reaching their destination." www.bloomberg.com/news/article... Based on a paper from Jan, 2026 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Acute requirement for the hippocampus in putatively conscious vision revealed by a mouse model of blindsight The phenomenon of blindsight provides a unique opportunity to uncover brain areas important for conscious vision. Patients with blindsight lose the co…

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

very nice paper on a mice model of blindsight

i'm not sure if i'm fully convinced by their saliency control, but maybe i'm just picking hair

let me explain: (a thread to follow)

This is the first time something like this has really excited me. Proper butterflies. Aristotle writes that Empedocles claims a universal law against killing living creatures, & Cicero says he argues for the same legal standing for humans & animals. But their sources are lost. Will these be them?

Deadline is next week!

I think we can just say this out loud now: the weird performative centre-right McCarthyism around punishing and attacking anyone mentioning or studying high-emissions scenarios has directly served the interests of fossil fuel companies trying to kill regulation of their dangerous product

This study shows that disinformation spreads, not as “false facts”, but as narratives. Compare that to how mis- and disinformation are often operationalized in the big-N quantitative and experimental research in the Nature/Science journals — that’s a major weakness in the field.

Change in India’s annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and cement, year-on-year %, 1990-2025. Source: Analysis for Carbon Brief by CREA.

NEW – Analysis: India’s CO2 emissions in 2025 grew at slowest rate in two decades | @laurimyllyvirta.bsky.social Anubha Aggarwal

Read here: buff.ly/r64g2LV

Hi all. I am very excited that after 6 years I finally got my phylogenetic comparative methods book and online exercises online. Feel free to use and share. The book is here: nhcooper123.github.io/pcm-primer/. Note that it is not finished, we had to abandon it before the sunk costs fallacy broke us

What are the systems in neuroscience that we really have something that we can call “explanation” at all relevant levels, other than reflexive feed-forward like circuits.

Here are a few that I would argue are getting there. Obviously not complete explanations but genuinely satisfying.

1/ The NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program is hiring a Postdoctoral Associate!

The NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program is currently seeking a postdoctoral associate to join an interdisciplinary research project focused on wild animals in urban environments.

Early Career Research Network in Philosophy | London 20-21 April 2026 The SAS Institute of Philosophy (University of London) will host the third annual Early Career Network Workshop at the Senate House in London, on 20-21 April 2026

If you're an early career researcher (postdoc or advanced postgrad) based in/around London, you might be interested in this workshop on April 20-21!

philosophy.sas.ac.uk/news-events/...

Primatologists have long documented that group dynamics can substantially shift in response to different alphas with varying personalities (e.g., Prita & Singh, 1980; Itani et al. 1963).

Might this be evidence of inter-individual variation in personality/ social strategies on group norms?

Interesting that he says "who cancels who" rather than "who cancels whom", suggesting he's fine with nontraditional uses of pronouns

Disgusting and awful from Sheffield Hallum, and far from the first scandalous decision they've made. The leadership team should be shamed out of ever working in the sector again.

Calling Cormac McCarthy’s authorial style a “mistake” that AI no longer makes is so funny

I think this deserves at least as much sustained attention from US media as Claudine Gay's dissertation

If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

it's out!

@hazimi.bsky.social and i explore how higher order representations of *one's own first-order representational uncertainty* -- not representations OF noisiness in the world -- can be studied, including how they are constructed in the first place.

philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

Looking for some good readings for a graduate student who is interested in the philosophy and cognitive science of music #perception. Any recommendations—philosophical or otherwise? #PhilPerception #PhilQ

Society journals are quietly innovating even as MDPI and Frontiers eat their lunch

The neural basis of imagination: An evolutionary perspective The study of imagination has progressed due to its operationalization through a variety of behavioural tasks, initially designed for human participant…

Hot take: the hippocampus isn't actually "evolutionarily ancient" and its not helpful to think of it as such.

The full argument for this take is right here (but you need to scroll down to sections 5-6):
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Given the Roman Catholic majority on the court, this is quite a significant and serious document.

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

Hey linguists -- chickens can distinguish bouba and kiki:

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Hey! Scholars! If you're using someone's work in your class, sometimes it's nice to email them and tell them, because then they might feel good about their research instead of entirely crushed by the academic humanities' ongoing descent into the grave

Guidance for responding to 'A Fairer Pathway to Settlement' consultation We are Amnesty International UK. We are ordinary people from across the world standing up for humanity and human rights.

The UK government is proposing radical and punitive changes to settlement rules. This is settlement, not citizenship. The consultation is open until 12 February; please respond to it and oppose these evil proposals. Amnesty have a good guide: www.amnesty.org.uk/resources/gu...

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...

🧵

Anyone with at least an undergrad degree can apply! I think we could be an attractive option for a wide range of people from around the world, especially for those interested in Indian philosophy (and especially Buddhism)!

Opportunities for Indian (and other Global South) students to study PhDs abroad are rapidly drying up/looking less and less attractive. So we're excited to offer high-quality education in all areas of philosophy accessible to such students!