Two programs of research diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both...
1) Work that incrementally advances human knowledge
2) The replication crisis
Congratulations to the Brazilian Reproducibility Initiative -- a remarkable effort by a remarkable team. This is a wonderful acknowledgement of an incredible contribution to assessing and improving research quality.
Ericsson & Simon (1980) takes the middle cell psycnet.apa.org/record/1980-...
Now, your nominations for minimal citation impact but moderate actual impact?
A contribution that altered policy or practice...
A paper that extinguished an active area of research...
An uncredited gem...
A diagram showing how 13 minutes' walk gets you to just 75% as many places as a 15-minute walk
My new newsletter is out, in which we use basic high-school maths to complain about street design
simple.ghost.io/lets-do-the-...
detection d' is generally overestimated, coz we tend to be too lazy to collect the necessary data in order to correct for the unequal variance between target present vs absent distributions. turns out we can do this for free - using reaction times data. so, let's do it~
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🧠📈
Last year a study of >2.4 million kids born in Sweden looked at Tylenol exposure and autism
At first, it seemed like there was a small association.
But then they compared siblings where one was exposed in utero and the other wasn’t and found no increased risk jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Are you a woman in midlife (or older) who has struggled with an eating disorder as an adult? A new anthology, “This Is Not Your Mother’s Eating Disorder,”is looking for your story in the form of a personal essay!
You can read more about the anthology and submit your writing here!
If there’s one place on Earth you don’t want to be, it’s in the mouth of a Komodo dragon.
Not convinced? No problem - you can see all of their deadly dental secrets in this week’s #SurprisingScience 🦎 ☠️
too many people only ask one question when they see the impact of disinformation
(how do we stop this disinformation)
when you should really ask a second
(how do we stop the sentiment that made these people seek out disinformation and accept it uncritically)
Ever thought that food tastes bland when you have a cold? In this piece, I explain how that happens as I summarise my latest article on the neural encoding of odours in the canonical taste cortex!
theconversation.com/smell-trigge...
Thank you, Ian!
Our findings highlight the insula's crucial role in flavour integration, explaining why smells are so vital to our perception of taste. So next time you enjoy a meal, appreciate the complex interplay happening in your brain! 🧠🍽️ #Neuroskyence #FlavourPerception 10/10
This implies that the insula encodes a property that doesn't change throughout the session, such as identity. Meanwhile, the convergence in the OFC suggests that it likely encodes something that dynamically changes throughout the session, e.g. subjective value. 9/10
In fact, we developed a method to examine runwise representational drift of flavours in the insula, and we saw a slight divergence between similar and different flavours in the insula over the course of a session, but we could see the opposite effect in the OFC. 8/10
We're the first to show this direct shared encoding between retronasal odours and tastes in humans at the neural level, challenging the current consensus that this integration only happens further downstream in the OFC. 7/10
Why does this matter? Imagine reducing sugar or salt in foods without sacrificing flavour! If certain aromas can trick your brain into perceiving sweetness or savouriness, we could design healthier foods that still taste great. #HealthInnovation 6/10
This integration isn't just anywhere in the insula. We pinpointed it to specific subregions – the dysgranular and agranular anterior insula. Meanwhile, only tastes could be decoded from the activation patterns in the granular subregion. 5/10
What was most interesting, however was that a decoder trained on the tastes and tested on the odours (and vice versa) also performed significantly above chance. This showed that that retronasal odours (aromas) elicit similar activations to their associated tastes in the insula. 4/10
We then used mass-univariate GLM to identify a taste activation map. Within this map, a decoder was able to separate the sweet and savoury tastes. Interestingly, it could also separate 'sweet' and 'savoury' odours. 3/10
We first familiarised participants with sweet & savoury flavours (taste + aroma). They then attended two fMRI sessions where they received just the taste (without smell) or just the smell (without taste). 2/10
Excited to share my first postdoc project in collaboration with @jseubert.bsky.social and @margaveldhuizen.bsky.social , now published with @natcomms.nature.com, where we describe a potential mechanism for flavour integration in the insula. #NeuroSkyence #FlavourScience doi.org/10.1038/s414... 1/10
Police and military brutality in Indonesia is escalating exponentially. Military personnel are laying siege to universities (Unispa & Unpas) in the middle of the night, with rubber bullets and tear gas. youtube.com/shorts/IeuDh...
tiktok taking down their live feature in indonesia while the protests are happening shows they understand the ability that app had to show people what was really happening in gaza and they intend not to let it happen again
Literally haven't seen this mentioned on any of my socials but Indonesia has erupted after a cop ran over a delivery courier.
Come by and have a chat about crossmodal flavour representation in the insula! #OHBM2025
Good read on the need for us to integrate fMRI research with other fields of neuroscience. Now to look at how I can do it in my own work... 🤔
The time is now: accounting for time-of-day effects to improve reproducibility and translation of metabolism research | Nature Metabolism
Great collaboration led by Satchin Panda and team! Happy to contribute.
Time to take timing into consideration!!
www.nature.com/articles/s42...
🚨I promised I'd say more on the Royal Society and Elon Musk, so here it is. 🚨
I've resigned my position as Associate Editor at Royal Society's journal Open Science in protest at their lack of action over Elon Musk.
My op-ed in @theguardian.com
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
Replacing "I hope this email finds you well" with "Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation." in all emails from now on.
