The end to another Edinburgh Book Festival - had a wonderful time with @thereaderbank.bsky.social once more, fantastic to share a stage with Maggie O'Farrell for the Secret Life of Books Podcast, and great fun talking consciousness with @danieljamesyon.bsky.social & Michael Pollan

The end to another Edinburgh Book Festival - had a wonderful time with @thereaderbank.bsky.social once more, fantastic to share a stage with Maggie O'Farrell for the Secret Life of Books Podcast, and great fun talking consciousness with @danieljamesyon.bsky.social & Michael Pollan

That’s a wrap on #ReaderBank at the @edbookfest.bsky.social! 📚✨ Two brilliant days in the Discovery Zone talking with young readers and teachers about what happens in our imaginations when we read: how characters sound, stories feel, and whole worlds take shape.

We tested the new Imagination Quiz, discovered Reader Types, handed out trading cards and bookmarks, and had some wonderfully imaginative conversations along the way.

Huge thanks to everyone who came to see us! 💭📖 Find out more and get involved with the project at readerbank.org Brought to you by @aldersonday.bsky.social @georgiapunton.bsky.social @aryaray.bsky.social @maryrobbo.bsky.social @nickbarley.bsky.social and funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social

I am currently recruiting for a 2-year postdoc/research fellow role at the University of Auckland here in New Zealand, focusing on auditory perception, hearing, and music in older adults, including people with Alzheimer's disease or other dementias ~NZ$100k/yr, flexible start date, please apply!

Postdoc in The Music Lab // Expression of interest

Note. The below text is a general overview of the sorts of postdocs we often recruit. We are currently recruiting candidates for a 2-year position focusing on auditory perception in aging populations,...

forms.gle

🚨Registration is now open for the 2026 ICHR & ECHR Satellite Meeting in Munich, 19–21 October! Deadline: 30 September 2026 Programme and registration details: sites.google.com/view/echrich... We hope to see many of you in Munich in October!🥨🧠 @theichr.bsky.social&@echrhallucinations.bsky.social

The International Consortium on Hallucinations Research@theichr.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Call for papers: ICHR/ECHR 2026 (deadline June 15) The next meeting of ICHR will be at TU Munich (Oct 19-21), hosted by the fantastic @franziskaknolle.bsky.social! Get your abstracts in and join us for *the* meeting on voices, visions, presences & more - with 5 stellar keynotes 1/n

Brought to you by @aldersonday.bsky.social @georgiapunton.bsky.social Nick Barley @aryaray.bsky.social @maryrobbo.bsky.social Angela Woods, the team at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. Funded by @wellcometrust.bsky.social

🔮We are also excited to introduce them to our new Reader Types for young readers – are you the Shapeshifter, the Fortune-Teller, the Watcher, the Listener, the Storyteller, or the Adventurer? If you miss us at the Festival this year, take part from home by signing up at www.readerbank.org

The ReaderBank team is on the way to the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 26-27 August! 🔮Find us at the Discovery Zone where we will talk to young readers and schoolteachers about how stories manifest themselves in our imagination when we read.

On my way to Edinburgh Book Festival - to consider consciousness this evening with @michaelpollan.bsky.social and @aldersonday.bsky.social @edbookfest.bsky.social

Here is the full suspension letter from UGent that was sent to Nathan Cofnas, it shows ample reason for his suspension and potential termination. Including breach of contract, using the University of Ghent’s name and legitimacy to promote his racial supremacist views and causing reputational damage.

My latest on AI vs two-year-olds - AI as a cultural technology extracting fictional characters from text. humanistreview.ai/issue-1/gopn...

What Children Can Do and AI Can't

Psychologist Alison Gopnik tells three stories about intelligence — a golem, a pot of stone soup, and a digital child — to explain what AI still can't do.

humanistreview.ai

Stoked to find out today that the paper I've co-authored with @lucyosler.bsky.social, "The (Under)diagnosis of Endometriosis: Epistemic and Affective Injustices in the Medical Niche", is officially forthcoming in @journalphp.bsky.social edited by @kmurphyhollies.bsky.social & @eabyrne.bsky.social 🤩

How does the brain make meaning when listening to wordless music? 🧵 on our new paper out today in @natcomms.nature.com (1/) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Music evokes shared neural representations of imagined narratives across sensory modalities - Nature Communications

When people listen to music, they often imagine remarkably similar stories. The authors show these shared imaginings selectively rely on stimulus-specific patterns in a set of modality-general brain r...

nature.com

The line between horror and comedy can be a thin one. Vic and Bob's brilliant Masterchef sketch from 1995 made me laugh out loud while my skin was crawling. "HE IS SAD!"

Behold! Stupid, racist motherfuckers everywhere. As far as the eye can see, From sea to shining sea... He's not even original. The Patti Smiths and the Quentin Tarantinos have already made this fucking argument and we know them for what they are.

The National@scotnational.bsky.social · 2w ago

A Scottish Tory peer has spoken out in defence of using the N-word. Nigel Biggar argued in a blogpost that it is 'stupidly unjust' for people to be punished for using the N-word if they did not mean it in a racist way. Read more: www.thenational.scot/news/2...

So the very opposite of the kind of influence and power that it is being credited with across much of the media right now

The reality of EDI, in academic contexts at least, is that it (like ‘business ethics’) it is separated off and routinised to the point where it carries little weight and ends up being perceived as a drag on more authentically-held goals and beliefs.

Something went wrong the minute British people started talking about DEI (not EDI), proof that their brains had come into contact with the MAGA info supply

Stapel faked years of data, got prosecuted, and went on to write a bloody memoir about it. Hauser and Wansink got to resign and then *not* disappear into obscurity. Gino got fired but Ariely is still in post. Zimbardo was famous for being a foundational case study in ethical failure.

Plenty to reflect about re: the Arday affair, but I'm going to repeat this one thing. The playbook the right used here is effective even though it's not especially sophisticated, as it relies on the audience to do the dirty work. I've been calling it "Trojan horse propaganda", let's go with that. 1/

Or, in fact, not really a news story at all. I don’t believe at all that this was nationally important and certainly not “third on the BBC 6 o’clock news” important as a story. Cofnas started all of this because he’s a racist and the media ran with it.

Nadine Batchelor-Hunt@nadinebh.bsky.social · 2w ago

No, that is not the alternative The alternative was treating like a normal news story, and not a trial by media - one that was so clearly turbocharged by Arday’s ethnic and social background and the growing resentment in the establishment in the UK of having more black people in high places

They were warned that this was a likely outcome, and they made fun of the warnings and carried on anyway.

Has anyone in the history of radio ever played two Linda McCartney tracks in a row? If you’d like to learn more about a) Linda b) Paul McCartney’s experimental tendencies, and c) loads of other stuff, then check out Off The Ground: Paul McCartney In The 1990s.

Apropos of nothing .. but this has been a terrible few weeks to be a PhD student. A few things about PhD examinations specifically: if there are errors in a PhD, and those errors were accepted and passed by the examiners after viva, the case on the PhD is closed. (1/n)

I wrote about a reason not to use generative AI in your writing that I haven't seen anyone talking about. Once I realized this, banning GenAI in our lab's writing became a no-brainer. Feel free to share, I think this is probably useful especially for trainees: www.carlsonlab.bio/thoughts/the...

The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI — The Carlson Lab

Over the last year, our lab has been developing a policy on AI use. To do this, we did three main things: We read a lot of academic publications and tech news. We set up an #ai channel on our la...

carlsonlab.bio

📣 New preprint: Multiple Nested Distributed Language Networks in the Human Brain. 📣 Brain regions specialized for language have been extensively described. But are they organized into one network, or multiple? Our new preprint provides evidence for the latter:
 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Multiple Nested Distributed Language Networks in the Human Brain

Brain regions specialized for language have been extensively described, yet their arrangement into one or multiple networks remains debated. Using precision functional mapping across three independent...

biorxiv.org

Nikolas Fascendini, Stefano Amorosi, Alberto Dell’Eva, Carlo Marchesi & Matteo Tonna explore the subjectivity underpinning #delusions in #schizophrenia and compare the experiential structure of these phenomena with the experience of the sacred doi.org/10.1080/0951... #philsky #philpsy

Primary delusional experiences in schizophrenia and the sacred: a qualitative study

Psychopathology has highlighted the pivotal role of revelation in schizophrenic primary delusions. However, empirical studies on the topic remain limited. Therefore, this research aimed to explore ...

doi.org

Soooo much drivel talked about universities. Soooo much self-serving nonsense. Like they're all Humanities colleges where politics matters loads! Yeah, not so much in the dental school you've never heard of or thought about guys. (1/?)