1. The paper with the implausibly large effects of Omega-3 fatty acids on mental health was now retracted. A little thread on the process where @ianhussey.mmmdata.io and I was involved.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
It's a chapter in this painfully expensive book
doi.org/10.1093/med/...
It was just a paragraph in their chapter, referring to this rather amazing lookback on the single-gene-association era:
doi.org./10.1038/mp.2...
Registration for the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience Teaching workshop, https://www.funfaculty.org/ev_calendar_day.asp?date=7/16/2026&eventid=23
The Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience Teaching Workshop will take place July 15-19 at North Central College, just outside of Chicago. Registration is open (tinyurl.com/fun2026nc) and you can still submit a poster. Keynotes include Michell Miller and Alexxai Kravitz.
#neuroscience
One ray of hope -- meta-analyses of these early candidates were already converging on null results. That's surprising to me, and I wonder what the conditions were that enabled cumulative success.
Here's a fascinating start, assembling the evidence from early studies and from more-recent GWAS studies for 25 leading candidate genes:
Farrell, M., et al. Evaluating historical candidate genes for schizophrenia. Mol Psychiatry 20, 555–562 (2015). doi-org.proxy.cc.uic.edu/10.1038/mp.2...
Despite the enormous body of literature generated (1,727 studies of 1,008 genes), ultimately no unequivocal associations emerged for either positional or functional candidate genes. -- adapted from Lege et al., 2025
Up to 2008 there were over 1700 published gene/schizophrenia association studies implicating over 1000 genes. Now none of these studies are viewed as useful. -- Legge et al., 2025
What a fascinating post-mortem this would make for a meta-science project.
#neuroscience #stats #metascience
BOLD is not a simple monotonic readout of local firing. Instead, it reflects the net activity of two opposing neural populations. Interpreting it may require modeling their latent composition, not just overall activity.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#neuroscience
Brunch With Petra at the Museum
thenewstatistics.com/itns/2026/04...
Just saw David Byrne’s Theater of the Mind and let me save anyone reading this $100: skip it.
No matter how much you like the talking heads or David Byrne. The show is bad, bad, bad: treacly pablum with some neuroscience demos awkwardly mixed in. 75 minutes and $100 you won’t get back.
Simulator of the following (attentional) models:
🔎 Rescorla-Wagner
🔎 Pearce-Kaye-Hall
🔎 Mackintosh Extended
🔎 Le Pelley’s Hybrid
🔎 Rescorla-Wagner with a unified variable learning rate (integrating Mackintosh’s and Pearce and Hall’s quasi-opposing conceptualisations).
github.com/cal-r/PALMS-...
Table of module downloads in jamovi for March 2026 showing 2.751 downloads for esci
CRAN download icon for esci showing 730 downloads per month
esci produces lovely figures of effect sizes with CIs for most common designs.
It's catching on: In March 2026, esci was downloaded over 2700 times in jamovi and another 700 times in CRAN.
Still lots of rough edges-- send feature requests and feedback my way!
github.com/rcalinjagema...
#stats
SCORE, a collaboration of 865 researchers, is now released as three papers in Nature, six preprints, and a lot of data (cos.io/score/). SCORE examined repeatability of findings from the social-behavioral sciences and tested whether human and automated methods could predict replicability.
Who says null results are uninteresting?
Here, our lab shows that most transcriptional changes fade *before* memory expression. This is surprising, and raises lots of interesting questions about how long-term memories are maintained.
#neuroskyence #stats
www.eneuro.org/content/13/3...
Not entirely sure what is going on with the prediction interval in this figure... will need to do some investigating!
Genuinely a thrill to see figures created with esci popping up in papers.
Here's one from a meta-analysis of antibiotic residues in food in Southern Africa... something I know nothing at all about, but apparently esci came in handy. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#stats
Simine drops in for dinner!
thenewstatistics.com/itns/2026/03...
Also, really pleased that my re-analysis of the original oxytocin/trust study by Kosfeld et al. came in handy for this project, and that my belief that there was an error in a key figure held up.
The early intranasal oxytocin and human social behavior field is a cautionary tale, and should be taught in grad schools to help trainees understand how not to do science.
More evidence that intranasal oxytocin does not reliably impact trust: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Cool work from @wviechtb.bsky.social, @leonieseidel.bsky.social, @dhernaus.bsky.social and others.
#neuroskyence #stats.
doi.org/10.1111/jep....
Statistical reform spreads around the world and across disciplines: Beyond the p Value Dichotomy: Alternatives for Statistical Inference—A Critical Review
thenewstatistics.com/itns/2026/03...
We want the best research methods–of course–but should also consider philosophy, ethics, global heating and health.
If you have an idea for a piece for this series, let me know!
Check out the entire collection of Improving Your Neuroscience here: www.eneuro.org/collection/i...
Great papers for you and your trainees on confirmation bias, dealing with non-normal data, teaching rigor, using simulations to plan research and more.
The eNeuro "Improving Your Neuroscience" series continues with a two-part primer on experimental design and blocking from Penelope Reynolds. These new guides will help you up your design game. #stats #neuroscience
www.eneuro.org/content/13/2...
www.eneuro.org/content/13/2...
3 of the researchers were participants... I know I wouldn't have been able to resist, either! Suit me up with my custom-printed barn-owl ears, please!
Why did they do this? To find out if the human auditory system is flexible enough to learn to localize sounds vertically, the way barn owls do. The answer: partly! But honestly, I'm just excited that they *did* this.
Figure from a research paper showing custom-printed barn-owl molds fitted to a human research participant. Don't worry if you can't see them -- they are not nearly as cool as the phrase 'barn-owl ears' would have you expecting.
Scientists created prosthetic barn-owl ears and got human participants to wear them for 3-59 days.
Yes, people walked around with barn-owl ears for up to 2 months *for science*.
This is the type of news I need today to restore a bit of my faith in humanity.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Because traditional NHST doesn't allow the skeptic to win, we've maligned the need to do so: uninteresting, just mistakes, can't prove a negative, etc. But this is just rationalizing our way into accepting the limitations of the tool. Fruitful science must be able to rule in and rule out effects!
"near 0" findings have been just essential for science as "not 0" findings. Pasteur, for example, showed that quantity of bacteria formed under sterile conditions is near 0, disproving the theory of spontaneous generation.
So, just tests with results that we like?
I think you are confusing "effect is near 0" with uninteresting. Not true! Near 0 is interesting (and vital to publish) when a leading theory predicted an effect. It's interesting (and vital) to producing parsimonious models.