R/Medicine coming May 5-8 - Hackathon tomorrow April 23
R/Medicine Hackathon is tomorrow!
Focusing on the {teal} package, a framework for building interactive exploratory data analysis applications in clinical trials.
Beginners welcome, registration for R/Medicine required.
Sign up, prep, and all the deets here: rconsortium.github.io/RMedicine_we...
The "Version of Record" of my paper with Mike Woodford is finally there. I am very glad with this paper that points to new laws of psychophysics, which we derived from a carefully considered principle of endogenous efficient coding.
Photo of the people listed in the post, including me, doing a "I once ate a meatball *this* big" gesture in front of signs about our panel.
Had a great time today talking transportation with @jeffreytumlin.bsky.social, Darwin Moosavi, and @francessawyer.bsky.social.
Big takeaways:
- SAVE TRANSIT by voting yes on the two Bay Area transit measures
- Policy is personnel: focus on office-holders, not just projects or policies
"In the first major case in which the Court granted emergency relief as a means of shaping nationwide policy, it turns out that the justice who led the charge was the one who was doing quite a bit more than calling balls and strikes."
Me on Saturday's @nytimes.com scoop in today's "One First":
Now that it has been out for a week, I thought I’d address a few strange takes regarding our recent mega-analysis on the effects of psychedelics on brain function (specifically, resting-state functional connectivity). 1/15
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Posted some thoughts on Otsuka's acquisition of Transcend over on the ol' Linke Din. www.linkedin.com/pulse/otsuka...
One of the many weirdnesses of today: AI writing's overuse of certain rhetorical tools is giving them a metallic skunk. For those of us who like writing and reading, it adds an unfortunate adversarial aspect, like Garner's idea of skunked words.
thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/w...
For those interested in the history of psychedelic research…
I wrote a narrative piece describing studies of psychedelic effects on serotonergic neurons in the dorsal raphe, from late 1960s to 1980s:
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
This preprint is about this! THIS!! Mindblowing.
Hungary has chosen Europe.
Europe has always chosen Hungary.
A country reclaims its European path.
The Union grows stronger.
mad pasts mad presence conference UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA APRIL 28-29 BRINGING TOGETHER ACTIVISTS, SCHOLARS, ARTISTS, AND SURVIVORS TO REFLECT ON THE MAD MOVEMENT AND ITS LEGACIES. IN PERSON OR ONLINE. NEW QR CODE
I’m talking about how LSD testing in 1950s Saskatchewan, Canada revolutionized thinking about madness and mental illness at this free hybrid conference at the end of April.
🍄 Our new living systematic review and meta-analysis on MDMA for PTSD is now live on medRxiv. Here's what we found and how we built upon our open science infrastructure to support it 🧵
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6...
🍄 Our new living systematic review and meta-analysis on psilocybin for depression is out now in Nature Mental Health. Here's what we found and the open science infrastructure we built to support it 🧵
Open-Access Link: rdcu.be/fbU5V
His final observation: “Bad breath and body smell next morning.” I wonder if that AE is on track to make the patient package insert. 🤣
As Sasha noted, he was “not aware of effects, but extremely garrulous – talk talk talk [1:15] at a magnificent ++, everything light and warm in the emotional sense… What a winner.”
Bupropion was already approved when Sasha Shulgin and Peyton Jacob III also added a beta‑keto moiety to MDMA in 1993. The result, methylone, turned out to be something special, producing a fast‑acting, antidepressant‑like effect with undertones of MDMA’s warm clarity.
Congratulations to the team at Transcend on this well‑deserved outcome!
psychedelicalpha.com/news/breakin...
We had only written the pilot of Halt and Catch Fire when we read Soul of the New Machine. That book had a huge impact not only on the content of our show, but the tone. The humanity at the center of the work. The book is still on my desk and will be forever. We owe Tracy a lot.
Might be the greatest opening paragraph of anything ever.
Single molecular fluorescence in situ hybridization to outline white matter tracts (green, labeling MBP) and serotonin neurons marked in purple with TPH2
Early for #FluorescenceFriday, but got an early peek in a project meeting - strucure is just so incredible - zoom in of tryptophan hydroxylase 2 labeling 🟣 of serotonin neurons in the dorsal raphe of human 🧠. Experiment and image credit to @ishbeldelrosario.bsky.social @svitlanabach.bsky.social
Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
The figure is a bar chart titled “Distribution of reported MDMA doses (all non-missing responses).” Along the horizontal axis, the total MDMA dose per session is shown in milligrams, increasing from about 0 to 1000 mg. The vertical axis shows how many people reported each dose. Most bars cluster tightly between roughly 100 and 250 mg, forming a single tall peak centered around 200 mg where the highest bar reaches just over 120 reports. Counts drop off quickly on either side of this peak: there are smaller numbers of reports between about 50 and 100 mg and between 250 and 350 mg. Only a handful of people report very high doses above 400 mg, with isolated bars around 400, 500, 600, 800, and 1000 mg each representing just a few responses. Overall, the distribution is strongly right-skewed, with most reported sessions in the 100–250 mg range and rare but extreme high-dose outliers.
I'm analyzing some data collected with an online questionnaire a few years ago. We asked about typical dose and out of 568 responses, only about 2.8% said they typically used under 70 mg. Unclear if what is survey noise or people who don't know what they are taking.
The New York Times recently featured Australia’s MDMA-assisted therapy program, showing what happens when psychedelic therapy meets the realities of healthcare systems.
Read the full article: www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/health/mdma-t...
Finally an article makes the impact of the @connectbayarea.bsky.social measure failing clear - after closing some stations BART would likely shut down ALL service within a couple of years.
We must pass this measure. It's an existential crisis not just for BART but for the Bay Area we know and love.
Found a really nice Dutch grant for turning our WARN-D pipeline that forecasts depression onset for young adults into an actionable system for people at risk. Grant requires a Dutch tech partner, preferably with an existing app that can be adapted to ours needs. Any interest? Please get in touch.
✨ New open-access book✨
I’ve seen how powerful prediction models can be, but also how often they fall short. We wrote a book, covering not just development, but also when models are needed, and how to ensure real-world impact.
www.maastrichtuniversitypress.nl/cpm
Hey friends, my new paper was just published in JAMA Psychiatry. I draw on biological species classification to sketch a new framework for psychiatric nosology.
Brief summary follows below.
Full text link: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
🧪 #PsychSciSky #MentalHealth
New in JAMA Network Open: Psilocybin beat the nicotine patch 4-to-1 for smoking cessation (40.5% vs 10% for prolonged abstinence). Important study and impressive headline — but what happens when you look under the hood? A thread to unpack this finding. 🧵#psychedelicscience
I'm catching up on the past couple weeks' SCOTUS oral arguments, and did we already talk about the fact that Justice Kagan gives a hypothetical about ayahuasca and Justice Barrett says, "I have never heard of the drug. ... Is it real??"
