The final version of our amygdala dopamine paper is out! BLA dopamine dynamically tracks emotional salience and not value or reward prediction error. Congrats to Dr. Megan Brickner!! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Basolateral amygdala dopamine transmits emotional salience - Nature Communications

The basolateral amygdala dopamine system has received little attention. Here, authors show that BLA dopamine plays a unique role in learning, by encoding the emotional salience of sensory cues to supp...

nature.com

Sensing your body (‘Interoception’) is everywhere in theories of mental health. But when we tested how well hundreds of people sensed their heart and lungs, the link to symptoms was almost nowhere to be found. 💣 🚨New @natmentalhealth.nature.com paper 🚨🎉 asks why 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

New registered report out in #Cortex, after exceptional handling from @pci-regreports.bsky.social! We introduce an instrumental conditioning (IC) task based on artificial grammars, and find nonconscious contributions to IC @andrei-preda.bsky.social @linaskora.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Excited to be at #ESCAN2026! I'll be presenting our new data on cardiac deceleration at varying anticipatory intervals predicting visual detection in the📍O2-7: Phychophysiology session on Friday (14:00). Come chat!

New Registered report (preprint)!📜 Showing that unconscious structures support instrumental conditioning, but only when enabling conscious judgments osf.io/preprints/ps... W/ Andrei Preda, Andrei Costea, and Lina Skora @linaskora.bsky.social W/ support from @cos.io, @templetonworld.bsky.social

Fossil fuels push the world towards autocracy. Were we less dependent on them, there might have been no President Trump, no President Putin, no ayatollahs, no Netanyahu, no perpetual Middle East wars. Democracy depends on unhooking ourselves. This week's column. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

We need to be honest about Iran – and how our rampant greed for oil is causing mayhem | George Monbiot

Oil has empowered capitalism, and some of the world’s most exploitative regimes. Move away from it and we can solve some of the key issues we face, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

theguardian.com

Is interoceptive sensing unified across internal organs? 🫀🫁 Our high-powered psychophysical study (N=241) suggests not. Bayesian evidence indicates interoceptive processes are largely modality-specific—challenging the idea of a unitary interoceptive sense. 🔗 Read here: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Really impressive work led by @martager.bsky.social - everybody use BBSIG! #MindBrainBody #MBBS2026 #neuroskyence

Michael Gaebler@michaelgaebler.com · 5mo ago

Now, @martager.bsky.social presents our Brain-Body Analysis Special Interest Group (BBSIG) to facilitate and harmonise the processing and analysis of cardiac and respiratory data. Try it yourself! 🔗www.bbsig.de #MindBrainBody #MBBS2026

Reporting today as a freshly-minted #MSCA fellow - I will be joining the @epanlab.bsky.social at the @dondersinst.bsky.social 🤩 Over the moon, but also thinking about all the excellent proposals who were not awarded funding in this brutal round - feels more like a lottery than ever.

The EU’s “Digital Omnibus” is being sold as simplification. Analysis shows something else: major changes that tilt the rules toward Big Tech-weakening privacy, AI safeguards, and accountability. corporateeurope.org/en/2026/01/a...

Article by article, how Big Tech shaped the EU’s roll-back of digital rights | Corporate Europe Observatory

In a new analysis we trace Big Tech's fingerprints on the Digital Omnibus proposals - a major deregulation of EU digital laws including the GDPR and the AI Act. They are helped in this attempt by the ...

corporateeurope.org

👇👇👇

Emily M. Bender@emilymbender.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Anthropomorphizing language can be cute when applied to your favorite car, but it helps to muddy the discourse when applied to tech sold as "AI". New from me & @nannainie.bsky.social on @techpolicypress.bsky.social -- how to spot & revise away from anthropomorphizing language applied to "AI"

Out now in Communications Biology 🧠 🫀We show that cardiac oscillations associated with vagal tone influence the strength of the heartbeat as sensed at brain level. We hypothesize that the heart may send information to the brain, encoded by the heartbeat strength doi.org/10.1038/s420...

Cardiac-vagal rhythm echoes on the heartbeat’s mechanosensory imprint in the brain - Communications Biology

Vagal-driven heart rhythm fluctuations modulate the heartbeat strength sensed in the head, linking cardiac rhythms to brain mechanosensation. These findings highlight vagal tone’s role in shaping brai...

doi.org

Excellent theme issue - a much needed spotlight on the functions of consciousness!

Royal Society Publishing@royalsocietypublishing.org · 9mo ago

New theme issue of #PhilTransB on the evolutionary functions of #consciousness. Read: buff.ly/blMm4eR

So happy this paper is now out in @plosbiology.org! We investigated whether fluctuations in MEPs can be explained by phasic influences from internal bodily rhythms, and whether this might happen independently per organ system. #interoception #neuroskyence

PLOS Biology@plosbiology.org · 9mo ago

How do internal bodily rhythms influence #brain activity & motor function? @tahnee-engelen.bsky.social &co show that #cardiac, #respiratory & #gastric rhythms independently modulate motor excitability, revealing distinct #interoceptive profiles across individuals @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4nMtpLT

Complete this sentence, "The brain is ...". What's your favorite answer? I'm team cluster 17/18. Taken from this delightful paper by Taylor Bolt and @lucinauddin.bsky.social; results of text in >4 million peer-reviewed articles + text analytic tools. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39798046/

Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇

Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation

Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...

medrxiv.org

Could the diversity of findings in heartbeat-evoked response (HER) research be due to variability in methods? In our new preprint my co-first authors, Maria Azanova and @willenjoy.bsky.social, and me systematically reviewed 132 M/EEG HER studies and found:

Heartbeat-evoked responses in M/EEG: A systematic review of methods with suggestions for analysis and reporting

Heartbeat-evoked responses (HER), as measured by electroencephalography (EEG) or magnetoencephalography (MEG), have become widely used as a marker of cardiac interoception in the study of brain-body i...

doi.org

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 12mo ago

Heartbeat-evoked responses in M/EEG: A systematic review of methods with suggestions for analysis and reporting https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.08.668923v1

The first step to publishing null results is to learn about equivalence testing, so that you can design studies that statistically support the conclusion that there is no meaningful effect. lakens.github.io/statistical_.... If you are a statistics teacher, include this into 2nd year courses.

Nature@nature.com · last yr.

Scientists overwhelmingly recognize the value of sharing null results, but rarely publish them in the research literature go.nature.com/450KElr

Undoubtedly the most massive group effort I was ever lucky to be involved in. Led by the ever-unwavering @annekeitel.bsky.social, this preprint synthesizes the status quo of what we (don't) know about neural oscillations. Grateful to be part of the @scone-neuro.bsky.social network. #neuroskyence

Anne Keitel@annekeitel.bsky.social · last yr.

Our oscillations consensus paper is finally out as a preprint 🤩 thanks to everyone involved arxiv.org/abs/2507.15639

New preprint with amazing work from @nchalas.bsky.social: How does respiration influence (un-)predictable near-threshold perception? MEG, arousal modulation, excitability states, respiration phase-resolved connectivity changes - it's all there :) #neuroskyence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Respiration as a dynamic modulator of sensory sampling

Respiration dynamically modulates sensory perception by orchestrating transient states of the brain and the body. Using simultaneous recordings of high-density magneto-encephalography (MEG), respirati...

biorxiv.org

'Mental health diagnoses are not just misapplied, but invented.' Camilla Nord on the mental illness epidemic

Are you hurting?

the-tls.com

Out in Cognitive Psychology, led by @maxmaier.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A new lottery task with choices that matter across trials; the risky option has a chance of going extinct, which ends the study. We derive optimal policies and develop a strategy-classification model.

Decision making under extinction risk

In everyday life, people routinely make decisions that involve irredeemable risks such as death (e.g., while driving). Even though these decisions und…

sciencedirect.com

Maximilian Maier@maxmaier.bsky.social · 2y ago

New preprint "Decision Making Under Extinction Risk" with Adam Harris, David Kellen, and @singmann.bsky.social. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Pulsed taVNS elicits pupil dilation. However, if sham feels as intense, there is not much left. Based on our comparatively large sample (94 participants, single-blind crossover), we show that a highly variable sham response explains this. #neuroskyence 🩺 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thanks I hate it. This "let's settle things in the ring once and for all" approach to science is weird as hell. There are no easy formulas, no promised answers, and science isn't to be determined by an agreement between two parties.

Make science more collegial: why the time for ‘adversarial collaboration’ has come

Bringing together proponents of rival theories to test their ideas against each other can advance science — but only if all sides can accept that they might be wrong.

nature.com

Mind-wandering is associated with late modulation of the heartbeat-evoked potential; mind-blanking is associated with greater decoupling of heart-brain phase coupling. New findings from our radically-revised study of spontaneous cognitive & physiological dynamics www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

When your heart isn't in it anymore: Cardiac correlates of task disengagement

Neuroscience is beginning to uncover the role of interoceptive feedback in perception, learning, and decision-making; however, the relation between spontaneous visceral and cognitive dynamics has rece...

biorxiv.org

The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People. A couple of years old now, from @georgemonbiot.bsky.social A long read so get yourself a cuppa. TLDR = 8 billion+ people need an efficient food system not a rural fantasy. #food #sustainability #doughnuteconomics www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/t...

The Cruel Fantasies of Well-Fed People

The astonishing story of how a movement’s quest for rural simplicity drifted into a formula for mass death

monbiot.com

The fun thing abt my job is sometimes I have no idea what will be plopped onto my agenda—which is to say, I got roped into writing about the new wolves. They're neither dire wolves nor "de-extincted," & they have more to do w/ enacting human fantasies than helping animals www.vox.com/future-perfe...

These fluffy white wolves explain everything wrong with bringing back extinct animals

Don’t buy the hype about “de-extinction.”

vox.com

1. One of capitalism’s greatest successes is to shut down our imaginations. With the help of its favoured tools - neoliberalism and fascism - it persuades us that “there is no alternative”. Our first task is to re-ignite our moral imaginations and name our alternatives. 🧵

Can we enhance interoception by controlling the heart? Thrilled to share our new study, led by @ashleytyrer.bsky.social , where we use computational modeling to show that blockading peripheral noradrenaline uniquely alters awareness of heart rate & breathing! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵👇

An important thread on a straggeringly irresponsible Nature(?!) piece ⬇️

Carl T. Bergstrom@carlbergstrom.com · last yr.

Let's talk about this Nature piece in more detail. I've rarely read something so anti-scientific anywhere short of the National Review. www.nature.com/articles/d41...