We're experiencing loneliness epidemic. Could AI chatbots help solve that problem? If you would have asked me up until recently I would say "probably!". But we don't know for sure. To answer this question, researchers in France recently ran a very cool experiment...

🚨Our new reviewed preprint is out at eLife! 🎉 Using bi-daily gamified smartphone 📱 tracking, we ask: • Does depressive mood precede under-confidence, or vice versa? • How does depression affect the integration of local confidence into global confidence over time? elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Interested in doing a postdoc with me in Auckland, New Zealand? 🇳🇿 See info below on a competitive award opportunity, and please spread the word!

Hundreds of free open access journals to receive significant financial support! @ojcollective.bsky.social, which launched in January, has already raised £1.56 million of its £2.65 million target and will start to financially support 297 journals.

How collective funding supports sustainable publishing

Diamond open access publishing brings benefits for social science scholarship through increased usage, higher citations and global reach. How does funding help?

blogs.lse.ac.uk

🧠 Compulsion has a wiring diagram Flip one circuit between cortex and hypothalamus in a mouse and it stops caring about anything but nice food. In people, that same connection tracks body weight and binge eating. www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... 🧪 #Neuroscience #SciComm

A cortical-hypothalamic neural circuit for compulsive eating in mice

Leow et al. identify a prefrontal-hypothalamic circuit that drives compulsive eating despite negative consequences. In mice, binge eating reshapes prefrontal neural dynamics into persistent food-seeki...

cell.com

The thin line between US President policy making satire and reality ... via Arthur Barnes

How does the brain represent the value of knowledge? In our paper--out now at Nature Neuroscience--we identify a representation of intrinsic information value within neural population structures in the orbitofrontal cortex in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02377-y #neuroskyence 🧠🧪 (1/8)

Representations of the intrinsic value of information in mouse orbitofrontal cortex - Nature Neuroscience

Mice are motivated to seek information of no extrinsic value. Recording neural activity in orbitofrontal cortex reveals a representation of the value of information that is distinct from the value of ...

nature.com

Did you know the ARC is on Bluesky? If not, I encourage you to follow them: @arc-gov-au.bsky.social There will be a lot of change over the next couple of years. Tuning into them on here will help raise this channel's priority for their communication with actual researchers.

Super cool paper here, showing that the cerebellum has a credit assignment mechanism solving the weight transport problem and giving every P-cell the right error signal! But, could the neocortex be the same? Could it possibly be hard-wired like this? I suspect not... Mystery to solve! 🧠📈 🧪

Reza Shadmehr@rezashadmehr.bsky.social · last wk.

If an action results in error, each neuron requires an individualized teaching signal that guides change in its output. This is the credit assignment problem of learning. Are there neurons in the brain that can compute such a sophisticated teaching signal? Yes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I believe he can go lower

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com · 7d ago

CNN: "The president's overall approval rating now stands at just 34%. That matches his career low following the January 6 insurrection."

Half the planet is having a massive fight about how to correctly interpret an Ancient Greek poem but go ahead, close some more humanities departments.

Excited to see this line of research continue to grow, from our initial findings in Psych Science to our follow-up work in JEP: LMC. Thanks, Nick, for the great write-up! Check it out if you’re interested in how experience can rapidly reshape attentional control.

Nick Gaspelin@ngaspelin.bsky.social · last wk.

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!

If an action results in error, each neuron requires an individualized teaching signal that guides change in its output. This is the credit assignment problem of learning. Are there neurons in the brain that can compute such a sophisticated teaching signal? Yes. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Climbing fibers encode the gradient of a loss function for the cerebellum

Neurons in the brain are often many synapses away from motoneurons, yet if a movement results in error, each distant neuron needs a teacher that considers its specific contribution to production of th...

biorxiv.org

Your 'doom quote' for today: "Our massive tampering with the world's interdependent web of life ... could trigger widespread adverse effects, including unpredictable collapses of critical biological systems" www.ucs.org/resources/19...

1992 World Scientists' Warning to Humanity

This appeal, written in November 1992, was the World Scientists' Warning to Humanity and was written and spearheaded by the late Henry Kendall, former chair of UCS's board of directors.

ucs.org

Nation Wakes Up From Strange Dream Where They Were Watching Soccer

Nation Wakes Up From Strange Dream Where They Were Watching Soccer

WASHINGTON—Dazed while trying to piece together the series of bizarre yet deeply vivid images, the entire nation reportedly awoke Monday from a strange dream in which it had been watching soccer. “I w...

theonion.com

Interested in the neuroscience of dietary decisions? Check out our lab's latest preprint led by Violet Chae @violetchae.bsky.social ! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... w/ @tgro.bsky.social, @laurencf.bsky.social, Stefan Bode, @paulmgarrett.bsky.social Explainer thread below 1/n

The Centroparietal Positivity Traces the Path of Evidence Accumulation During Dietary Decisions

Each day we make dozens of decisions about food. These choices are informed not only by information that we receive from our senses, but also by our memories, values, cultural norms, and goals. Eviden...

biorxiv.org

same but for academia

Oooh looks like a good read

Leah Banellis@leahbanellis.bsky.social · 2w ago

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...

BREAKING: Canine delivers strongest bipartisan statement of the year.

The Cognition Group in the Psychology dept at Exeter are at risk of redundancy because "basic cognitive psychology research does not align with the current priorities of funding bodies" If you think this is overtly wrong and misguided, please sign this open letter docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Open Letter in Support of the Cognition Group, University of Exeter

To Executive members of the University of Exeter, including Vice Chancellor Prof. Lisa Roberts, Senior Vice-President and Provost Prof. Dan Charman, Pro Vice Chancellor and Executive Dean Prof. Sallie...

docs.google.com

I think we just passed oops.

“Green energy is shielding Australia from a global power price shock″⁣ (8/6) should be compulsory reading for all Australians, but particularly Joyce, Hanson, Abbott, Taylor, Canavan and Rinehart. Tim Douglas, Blairgowrie @theageaustralia.bsky.social letters

FIVE academic jobs currently open in the School of Psychology at UNSW Sydney, across a variety of areas; see links below. Please come and join us! It's an outstanding department with excellent people. tinyurl.com/4p6tp2j3 tinyurl.com/yxm565xs tinyurl.com/2u8m77z8 tinyurl.com/3wu9hnb5

[Tim Robinson generic character voice] Who said that?

𝗜𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗻 𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗼𝗳 "𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴" 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻? philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph... #neuroskyence

Check out our latest profile! Dr. Megan Peters (@meganakpeters.bsky.social) studies how the brain represents & uses uncertainty and she also co-founded the online summer school, Neuromatch Academy. Learn more at the link below! #WomenInNeuroscience #StoriesOfWiN www.storiesofwin.org/profiles/202...

Dr. Megan Peters — Stories of WiN

studies how the brain represents and uses uncertainty and she also co-founded the online summer school, Neuromatch Academy

storiesofwin.org

OFC encodes option values while LPFC tracks spatial locations during both overt (eye movements) and covert (internal) attention. Effects of overt and covert attention on decision-making dynamics in prefrontal cortex doi.org/10.64898/202... #neuroscience

New preprint (doi.org/10.64898/202...) shows that where you look next is an economic decision. Saccades trade off effort-costs (measured via pupil) against monetary rewards. 1) By default, participants have strong saccade direction preferences (e.g., cardinal over diagonal, up over down) (1/4)

Our brains don’t think in a steady stream. They rhythmically “scan” different alternatives, using attention cycles to sample and compare choices. Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain - Nature Communications

How humans process competing information when making multi-alternative decisions remains unclear. Here, the authors show that the brain resolves the trade-off between “evaluating within” and “comparin...

nature.com

Are Ultra-Processed Foods (#UPF) killing us? I talk with A/Prof @philbakernz.bsky.social @sydney.edu.au for #NutritionScieneBites on ultra-processed foods & health 🎧Spotify tinyurl.com/y9zhmr29 📺 Youtube youtu.be/kbUHIULQk_Q @nmnteatwell.bsky.social @nutritionorg.bsky.social

Are Ultra-Processed Foods (UPF) killing us? ... with Prof Phillip Baker

YouTube video by Nutrition Science Bites

youtu.be