Now final in @elife.bsky.social: #Synesthetes really do 'see' when reporting colors while reading (typeface gray) numbers: pupils change according to the perceived colors' brightness - if a synesthete sees a bright yellow, the pupils become smaller. elifesciences.org/articles/110...

Christoph Strauch@cstrauch.bsky.social · 5mo ago

We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1). If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!

This graph took me 3 years to make. It's perhaps the largest-ever #metaanalysis of #TMS #BrainStim data. It includes my first real scientific discovery 🧵: When you stimulate the hand with a brief electric pulse, your brain and spinal cord are momentarily less excitable: muscle output decreases 1/n

Nature did a short piece on our preprint about how LLMs will affect the practice of science; my more detailed thread is below.

Scientists using LLMs will ‘do more, less well’, modelling study predicts

Research suggests that the combination of incentives to publish and the use of large language models will lead to more papers, but they will be less refined.

nature.com

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · 2w ago

1. We—@eduede.bsky.social, @mjcrockett.bsky.social, Kevin Gross, and I—have a new preprint on the arXiv today, based on ideas that emerged during an @sfiscience.bsky.social workshop in November 2024: The unintended consequences of large language models as a labor-augmenting technology in science.

This is a really great and well researched article for anyone interested in current AI and its limitations. Did you know you can replace the text in "reasoning" trace with something else without changing performance? These models don't work for the reasons we think they do.

Quanta Magazine@quantamagazine.org · 5d ago

From this week’s Qualia column: “I’ll just say it: What the hell is going on with AI ‘reasoning’?” www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-reason...

We have recently published work in Psych Science and JEP:LMC showing a surprising relationship between initial capture and learned suppression of salient distractors. Ultimately, this has led us to believe that attentional control is much more flexible than often assumed. Read more on my blog!

From Capture to Suppression: How Distraction Shapes Attentional Control

By Nick Gaspelin and Yue Zhang Zhang, Y. & Gaspelin, N. (2026a). From capture to control: Initial capture increases learned suppression. Psychological Science. 37(4), 2…

gaspelinblog.wordpress.com

Goal-directed action selection relies on conjunctive representations that bind goals, actions and expected sensory outcomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.24.740508v1

Our latest work indicates that when we have to choose how to act to reach our goals, we do not just select the correct motor commands; we select between integrated representations of goals, actions, and expected sensory outcomes. Our results invite us to rethink how the brain controls action!

bioRxivpreprint@biorxivpreprint.bsky.social · last wk.

Goal-directed action selection relies on conjunctive representations that bind goals, actions and expected sensory outcomes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.24.740508v1

Another excellent summary by cognitive scientist and grandmother Alison Gopnik: 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

Thrilled to share our new #preprint, and super proud of @zednud.bsky.social and our work on eye–brain dynamics during eyes-closed rest and sleep! Also excited to share that Zach started his PhD with me recently! 🎉 Lots of ideas and cool work ahead. Follow him on Bluesky and check out his thread! 🧵

Zach Nudelman@zednud.bsky.social · 3w ago

Excited to share my first #preprint with @matthiasnau.bsky.social on how gaze behavior shapes brain activity during eyes-closed rest and sleep! Gaze-dependent activity was widespread even during sleep, including in many visual cortices, and altered brain-wide functional connectivity! 🧵 1/8

I am very happy to announce that I have been awarded the NWO VENI grant to carry out research on the interaction between working memory and imagination. I look forward to starting this project in 2027, together with Stefan van der Stigchel at Utrecht University.

Excited to share my first #preprint with @matthiasnau.bsky.social on how gaze behavior shapes brain activity during eyes-closed rest and sleep! Gaze-dependent activity was widespread even during sleep, including in many visual cortices, and altered brain-wide functional connectivity! 🧵 1/8

Brain-wide gaze-dependent activity during eyes-closed rest and sleep

Gaze behavior and brain activity are tightly coupled during perception and mental imagery. Whether this coupling extends to eyes-closed states remains largely unknown, primarily because measuring eye ...

biorxiv.org

This recent post by @earlkmiller.bsky.social got my attention. It shows how abstraction could emerge in the primate PFC. The paper is hard, but the main idea can be simplified to low-dims, so I made fun a little animation. A🧵with my toy model and notes: #neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

🚀 CuttingGardens 2026 registration is underway! 📅 Sept 21–25 🌱 Global distributed event 🧠 M/EEG cutting-edge science Explore the gardens, their program & register here 👉 cuttingeeg.org/cuttinggardens2026/gardens More updates soon… Where will you be joining us from? 🌍

The global neuronal workspace (GNW) is currently the best documented neuroscience mechanism by which conscious processing arises in the human brain — and now Anthropic researchers have discovered a similar workspace inside their large language model ! www.anthropic.com/research/glo...

A global workspace in language models

Interpretability research on Claude's internal thoughts.

anthropic.com

A fundamental discovery ! Immanuel Kant would have loved it.

Edvard I Moser@edvardmoser.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🎉New paper! Expectations bias conscious visual experience more at the fovea than in the periphery. (Who knew vision could teach us a little Zen?) 👉https://tinyurl.com/yfw93tsw With Tim Gastrell, Matt Oxner and David Carmel @lsp-ens.bsky.social #Consciousness #VisionScience #PredictiveProcessing

7/7 Take-home message: core computational architectures for spatial cognition are intrinsically self-organized. Navigational experience aligns and anchors them to the external world.

1/7 🧠 My journey into development begins with this work and question: how does the brain's spatial navigation system develop? We found that the neural networks for spatial navigation (tori and rings) are preconfigured and only later anchor gradually to the world with experience! 🧵

Edvard I Moser@edvardmoser.bsky.social · 5mo ago

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I think this time I am the only attendee of assc26.bsky.social who also attended ASSC1. In 2016 in Buenos Aires I made a presentation of the history of ASSC, you can download it from here: axc.ulb.be/posts/20-yea...

Axel Cleeremans

This is the personal website of Axel Cleeremans, a cognitive psychologist working as a research director of the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where ...

axc.ulb.be

@nadinedijkstra.bsky.social Congrats!

ATTENTION!!! The program of Working Memory Symposium (WMS) 2026 (July 14-17) is out! sites.google.com/view/wmsympo... This year, WMS will feature a single stream presentation of 52 talks (39 talks and 13 blitz) + 1 panel discussion across 4 days. Looking forward to seeing you all!!!

Kristen Wiig: I'm Ready To Party! - Bridesmaids

ALT: Kristen Wiig: I'm Ready To Party! - Bridesmaids

static.klipy.com

Dimensionality reduction is how the brain acquires knowledge. Cool new paper from the late, great, Mark Stokes. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Learning shapes neural geometry in the primate prefrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience

Learning transforms prefrontal cortex activity from flexible, high-dimensional representations into compact, task-relevant and abstract codes, enabling efficient generalization of learned rules to new...

nature.com

What if much of human thought is navigation? 🧠 New open-access review: I argue that the DMN + hippocampal–entorhinal system form a domain-general engine for "mental navigation" across physical and abstract spaces (e.g. social, conceptual, and value). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Lovely to see the full range of excellent commentaries on our BBS article with @matthiasmichel.bsky.social, together with our response, now out: Target article: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Commentaries: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... Our response: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Matthias Michel@matthiasmichel.bsky.social · last yr.

Very happy to announce that our paper “Sensory Horizons and the Functions of Conscious Vision” is now out as a target article in BBS!! @smfleming.bsky.social and I present a new theory of the evolution and functions of visual consciousness. Article here: doi.org/10.1017/S014.... A (long) thread 🧵

I am recruiting a postdoctoral researcher and a PhD student, funded by a new ERC grant. The grant focuses on the role of the hippocampus in visual perception, using 7T fMRI (hippocampal subfields, cortical layers) and MEG+iEEG. The intended start dates for both positions are in early 2027. 🧠🟦 1/3

"Our findings identify behavioral robustness as a fundamental challenge for safe and trustworthy AI agents." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Our paper is now in print in Nature @nature.com. If you're interested in local field potentials, especially #high-gamma activity, and/or #spikes, check it out! TL;DR: High gamma is not mainly filtered spikes, but mainly summed nearby PSPs. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Active dissociation of intracortical spiking and high gamma activity - Nature

A brain–machine interface is used in monkeys to investigate the biophysical underpinnings of cortical high gamma-band activity, a signal that is often studied in the context of many brain functions.

nature.com

New work on the effects of psychedelics on hierarchical cortical propagations out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Counter to our expectations, psychedelics attenuated bottom-up propagations into the Default Mode Network across substances and species. Thread below:

New paper: across 3 EEG experiments, we examined how do we edit WM at test. Imagine you were asked to memorize 4 colored squares during encoding: at test, when you were given a single test probe, are you able to remove the items at irrelevant positions (upper), or do you have to keep'em (lower)? 1/n