The funny thing is even with resting-state, there are increased top-down/decreased bottom-up effects (doi.org/10.1038/s413..., doi.org/10.1016/j.eu...) or bidirectional increases (doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...), but of course REBUS heads don't acknowledge this 🤷🏾
The First WORLD FENCING LEAGUE is happening April 25th!!! I'M GEEKING!!!
Japanese engineers developed this "Sword Tip Visualisation" tracking technology specifically for this event that will make it so much easier for the average person to see what's going on!
I MUST WATCH THIS ENTIRE TOURNAMENT
I wrote about the unusual phenomenon of *reality shifting* for @psychmag.bsky.social - have a look, and get in touch if you've ever travelled to another world.
Yes, we've gone full Narnia.
(3) has sometimes been grounded in brain data, it can lead to the (incorrect) use of brain data (e.g. resting state functional connectivity) to draw conclusions about the phenomenology of beliefs and experiences (e.g. claims about prediction error from the resting functional connectivity of DMN)
...Using (3) to substitute (2) and sometimes (1) can get us in trouble, because it can miss the features of belief that people care about - like fixity
Belief might be illustrative (and similarly challenging). It has:
1) a dictionary definition (assent to some proposition)
2) a folk psychological notion - related to (1) but also connoting "faith", beyond the available evidence
3) a mathematical definition - derived from Bayes theorem...
Think about MMN, as a measure of auditory (or visual) prediction error. It is distributed across brain regions, not confined to primary cortex
Right
Relaxed beliefs under psychedelics, but yours works too :-)
The Biden administration before and now the Trump administration signed support for psychedelic research. As a scientist, I think psychedelics are an essential subject of research––but I think it is important they not be conflated with other cultural/political/religious agendas:
Perhaps a cautionary tale, against building an explanation of phenomenology based on resting state functional connectivity data
1/2) Just out from @alexkwan.bsky.social's group, a study showing that psilocybin silences SST interneurons but activates PV interneurons:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#neuroscience 🧪
Yes - seems like REBUS is not supported. We argued for a top-down explanation of psychedelics a while back: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19475401/
Connecting extinction learning in the laboratory and the wild
Perspective by Patrick Anselme & Onur Güntürkün
go.nature.com/4ckM4fv
That was my thought. I don’t know that the theory demands the single neurons level
Does predictive coding happen in single neurons?
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...
Press cutting Lancashire Telegraph, 20 April 2008: Shepherd's pie recipe rumpus. Subhead: Petrol bomb threat in tomato topping row. By ANDREW BELLARD A dispute over the contents of a shepherd's pie proved to be a recipe for brotherly disharmony. Blackburn magistrates heard that John Garvin thought that the pie his brother Michael made should have been topped with tomatoes but Michael disagreed. The upshot was that John, who was hit over the head with a shovel, reacted by threatening to petrol bomb his brother's flat. And he ended up spending a night in custody to allow tempers to cool. John Garvin, 47, of Montague Street, admitted a breach of the peace and was bound over in £100 to keep the peace for 12 months. Catherine Allan, prosecuting, said the brothers lived in separate flats next to each other. On the day of the culinary dispute they had been drinking together since 7am. "The argument started because there were no tomatoes on the shepherds pie that Michael made for tea and John thought this was wrong," said Miss Allan. John called his brother an offensive name and then said he was going to petrol bomb his flat. "Michael was concerned by this threat because on a previous occasion John had started a fire in his own flat," said Miss Allan. Liz Parker, defending, said her client did not accept making a remark about petrol bombing his brother's flat. "He does say that his brother hit him over the head with a shovel and it is very clear there was a lot of trouble over nothing," she added. (The article has a pullout quote which says “It is very clear there was a lot of trouble over nothing” - LIZ PARKER in large letters) District Judge Peter Ward, who imposed the bind over, asked in court: "You can make shepherd's pie without tomatoes can't you?" But 'legal' opinion at Blackburn magistrates, where the issue became quite a talking point, was divided. A female defence solicitor said it should be made with lamb and topped with sliced tomatoes and that a pie made with b…
And lo, it came to pass that the 18th anniversary of the greatest local news story ever told came upon us, and we were sore amazed
Blinding Integrity in Psychedelic Randomized Clinical Trials: A Systematic Review pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41984443/ TLDR: There isn't any... as I have been warning for 17 years! (neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2009/08/im-o...)
These incredible Buff Tip Moths blend in so well with branches that you might mistake them for sticks. Nature's masters of disguise are truly fascinating!
Virgil Van Dijk celebrates with team mates after scoring a last minute winner against Everton.
LOVE YOU XXX
this is like a miracle
A catalogue listing for a plumbing component: Draw Off Cock Washer
Telling another cowboy to stand down:
this is some really fascinating eye research featuring ratfish relatives @bwjones.bsky.social
What makes adaptive decision-making possible?
New preprint connecting cognitive, social, biological, and computational views! w/ Dorst, FeldmanHall, @smfleming.bsky.social, @catehartley.bsky.social, Gottlieb, Lejarraga, Müller-Trede, @angelaradulescu.bsky.social, and Rosati
osf.io/preprints/ps...
It is wild to be doing philosophy of maths at a time where strange and new things are happening!
This week "GPT-5.4 Pro (prompted by Price)" solved Erdős problem 1196, a conjecture of Erdős, Sárközy, and Szemerédi.
www.erdosproblems.com/forum/thread...
“It’s a couple of things that work beautifully in concert. First: no music. Audiences are so sophisticated, but what they’re not accustomed to is not being told how to feel,” Wyle says. “You take all that out and it forces a level of engagement where you’re now looking for clues within the frame of the screen, which forces you to look up from your phone. And I think that is extremely engaging, especially to young viewers who aren’t accustomed to being asked to participate in a nonpassive way in the viewing experience.
![“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:guthikarwozoldkzhueivkl6/bafkreihklvhtymho7wpemo5mj2f7xaiq6ulvfvcwnzo6hjstg3wixzgesy)
“Second point, shooting it with almost exclusively 50-millimeter or 65-millimeter lenses, which is the most comparable to the human eye—and only shooting from the point of view of a human being that’s present in this space. There are no cameras on gurney wheels going in the hallway. There’s no cameras on the ceiling looking down from a God point of view. You are limited to the perspective of a participant. You can look away, but you can’t leave, and it becomes an endurance test for you to stay on your feet as long as we’re on our feet. Which [brings me to my] third point: real time. Real time has an aggregate sense of tension that you don’t get in any other form of storytelling. What happened before is happening now, and these two things are going to add up to the next thing. And if we throw more ingredients into this cooker and keep ratcheting it up, it’s going to pop.”
Wyle makes eye contact for his next point, delivering it with a Robby-esque matter-of-factness. “Fourth point: The election went the other way,” he says with a shrug. “We could have been a really good show with a lot of nice things to say in a perfectly normal Kamala Harris universe. And instead we became almost a beacon of hope and humanity in an alternative universe. But in the midst of that, fifth point—this is essentially competence porn. You’re watching really smart, dedicated people do what only they know how to do at a level that you don’t know how to do it, and you’re so fucking glad that they’re there doing it, and compartmentalizing their own stuff to put your broken pieces back together. You’re so reassured by knowing that there are people out there that laugh and joke and have the ability to lock in like that.”
this is fucking unreal stuff from Noah Wyle on the magic of The Pitt. www.gq.com/story/noah-w...
Because it’s rigor-theater, minds are already made up, and eyes are on the prize
I want a "conference" where every academic cooks a dish for everyone and we all talk about our work casually while cooking. People can sous chef for each other. We eat and talk about our work in progress. You submit an abstract and a recipe.
