Neuroskeptic
@neuroskeptic.bsky.social
Universal scale-free representations in human visual cortex journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... "Visual information is distributed across the full spectrum of latent dimensions in cortical activity" not just a few high-variance dimensions.
Universal scale-free representations in human visual cortex
Author summary The human cerebral cortex is thought to encode sensory information in population activity patterns, but the statistical structure of these population codes has yet to be characterized. ...
journals.plos.org
November 27, 2025 at 6:06 PM
Universal scale-free representations in human visual cortex journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol... "Visual information is distributed across the full spectrum of latent dimensions in cortical activity" not just a few high-variance dimensions.
Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain www.nature.com/articles/s41... @tknapen.bsky.social "There's a map of your body in my brain" sounds like a pick-up line but it's actually just factual.
November 27, 2025 at 6:00 PM
Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain www.nature.com/articles/s41... @tknapen.bsky.social "There's a map of your body in my brain" sounds like a pick-up line but it's actually just factual.
Reposted by Neuroskeptic
My comment is live on @pubpeer.com, and it’s more detailed than the blog post
cc: @deevybee.bsky.social @wiringthebrain.bsky.social @neuroskeptic.bsky.social @smutclyde.bsky.social @steamtraen.eu and @retractionwatch.com (may be premature for you…)
pubpeer.com/publications...
cc: @deevybee.bsky.social @wiringthebrain.bsky.social @neuroskeptic.bsky.social @smutclyde.bsky.social @steamtraen.eu and @retractionwatch.com (may be premature for you…)
pubpeer.com/publications...
November 21, 2025 at 9:49 PM
My comment is live on @pubpeer.com, and it’s more detailed than the blog post
cc: @deevybee.bsky.social @wiringthebrain.bsky.social @neuroskeptic.bsky.social @smutclyde.bsky.social @steamtraen.eu and @retractionwatch.com (may be premature for you…)
pubpeer.com/publications...
cc: @deevybee.bsky.social @wiringthebrain.bsky.social @neuroskeptic.bsky.social @smutclyde.bsky.social @steamtraen.eu and @retractionwatch.com (may be premature for you…)
pubpeer.com/publications...
Reposted by Neuroskeptic
I wrote a blog post about the massive new article on "Neural and molecular changes during a mind-body reconceptualization, meditation, and open label placebo healing intervention." It was a bloodbath neurocritic.blogspot.com/2025/11/crea...
#neuroscience #neuroskyence #psychology #meditation
#neuroscience #neuroskyence #psychology #meditation
November 14, 2025 at 10:30 PM
I wrote a blog post about the massive new article on "Neural and molecular changes during a mind-body reconceptualization, meditation, and open label placebo healing intervention." It was a bloodbath neurocritic.blogspot.com/2025/11/crea...
#neuroscience #neuroskyence #psychology #meditation
#neuroscience #neuroskyence #psychology #meditation
The Shifting 'Self' of Science's Self-Governing Capacity: Four Decades of Research Integrity Discussions in Science and Nature pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41199636/
November 10, 2025 at 5:51 PM
The Shifting 'Self' of Science's Self-Governing Capacity: Four Decades of Research Integrity Discussions in Science and Nature pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41199636/
"17 pairs of female friends (N = 34; ages 16-18 years) spent two nights in a sleep laboratory: one night online socialising with their friend in another room (WhatsApp + Netflix), and one night watching Netflix alone without socialising" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41189527/ Sleep lab sleepover!
November 10, 2025 at 5:50 PM
"17 pairs of female friends (N = 34; ages 16-18 years) spent two nights in a sleep laboratory: one night online socialising with their friend in another room (WhatsApp + Netflix), and one night watching Netflix alone without socialising" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41189527/ Sleep lab sleepover!
In languages with a grammatical gender, do AIs have a gender? For example, in French is it "le ChatGPT" or "la ChatGPT"?
October 30, 2025 at 3:10 PM
In languages with a grammatical gender, do AIs have a gender? For example, in French is it "le ChatGPT" or "la ChatGPT"?
"ANN instances showed consistent variation in their alignment with specific human subjects." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... This particular network is just like me fr!
Human-like individual differences emerge from random weight initializations in neural networks
Much of AI research targets the behavior of an average human, a focus that traces to Turing’s imitation game. Yet, no two human individuals behave exactly alike. In this study, we show that artificial...
www.biorxiv.org
October 29, 2025 at 6:30 PM
"ANN instances showed consistent variation in their alignment with specific human subjects." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... This particular network is just like me fr!
"Slow Transition to Low-Dimensional Chaos" story of my life www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Slow Transition to Low-Dimensional Chaos in Heavy-Tailed Recurrent Neural Networks
Growing evidence suggests that synaptic weights in the brain follow heavy-tailed distributions, yet most theoretical analyses of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) assume Gaussian connectivity. We syste...
www.biorxiv.org
October 29, 2025 at 4:07 PM
"Slow Transition to Low-Dimensional Chaos" story of my life www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The brain is the stupidest object in the universe.
Every misunderstanding and bad idea in history came from a brain.
Before brains, no one was wrong about anything.
Every misunderstanding and bad idea in history came from a brain.
Before brains, no one was wrong about anything.
October 26, 2025 at 2:17 PM
The brain is the stupidest object in the universe.
Every misunderstanding and bad idea in history came from a brain.
Before brains, no one was wrong about anything.
Every misunderstanding and bad idea in history came from a brain.
Before brains, no one was wrong about anything.
"For-profit journals disproportionately cite other for-profit journals, academia-friendly journals preferentially cite other academia-friendly journals, and non-profit journals likewise favor citations to non-profit sources." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
October 25, 2025 at 4:22 PM
"For-profit journals disproportionately cite other for-profit journals, academia-friendly journals preferentially cite other academia-friendly journals, and non-profit journals likewise favor citations to non-profit sources." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
The neuroscience of hanger: "When confronted with food and an intruder, hangry mice alternated between feeding and fighting" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
A line attractor maintains aggressiveness during feeding in “hangry” mice
Aggression evolved to protect resources such as food from competitors, but animals must balance fighting and feeding so that they facilitate rather than hinder re-establishment of energy homeostasis. ...
www.biorxiv.org
October 25, 2025 at 2:17 PM
The neuroscience of hanger: "When confronted with food and an intruder, hangry mice alternated between feeding and fighting" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
If you say ANYTHING with your vocal cords, you NEED to get Broca's Area. I talk pretty much all day every day and Broca's Area makes my talking better. It actually is... correcting everything as I'm saying it.
October 21, 2025 at 8:09 PM
If you say ANYTHING with your vocal cords, you NEED to get Broca's Area. I talk pretty much all day every day and Broca's Area makes my talking better. It actually is... correcting everything as I'm saying it.
Vaccines are off the hook for the autism caper. They've got Tylenol in custody now.
Did vaccines point the finger at Tylenol to save their own skin?
Are vaccines a snitch?😡
Did vaccines point the finger at Tylenol to save their own skin?
Are vaccines a snitch?😡
September 30, 2025 at 11:50 AM
Vaccines are off the hook for the autism caper. They've got Tylenol in custody now.
Did vaccines point the finger at Tylenol to save their own skin?
Are vaccines a snitch?😡
Did vaccines point the finger at Tylenol to save their own skin?
Are vaccines a snitch?😡
Sensory neurons drive pancreatic cancer progression through neuron-cancer pseudo-synapses pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41005304/ "Hello, is this pancreas?" "Pancreas can't come to the phone right now. This is cancer." ☹️
September 30, 2025 at 10:31 AM
Sensory neurons drive pancreatic cancer progression through neuron-cancer pseudo-synapses pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41005304/ "Hello, is this pancreas?" "Pancreas can't come to the phone right now. This is cancer." ☹️
Reposted by Neuroskeptic
If the great psychologist Roger Shepard were still with us, he might not have been surprised by this. He proposed a helix model for auditory pitch perception, with one octave per turn.
There is something very human about this finding. It's like catching an LLM counting on its fingers.
There is something very human about this finding. It's like catching an LLM counting on its fingers.
September 22, 2025 at 4:36 PM
If the great psychologist Roger Shepard were still with us, he might not have been surprised by this. He proposed a helix model for auditory pitch perception, with one octave per turn.
There is something very human about this finding. It's like catching an LLM counting on its fingers.
There is something very human about this finding. It's like catching an LLM counting on its fingers.
Grid cells are "more like a hash function than a global map or metric" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Grid cell representation is ideally set up to decorrelate and assign easily distinguishable labels to inputs
Not a global map, but a local hash: grid cells decorrelate the representation of position and scramble long-range distance information
Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex construct an intriguing multiperiodic representation of space whose properties have been the subject of much theoretical speculation. Here we combine modelin...
www.biorxiv.org
September 22, 2025 at 8:55 AM
Grid cells are "more like a hash function than a global map or metric" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Grid cell representation is ideally set up to decorrelate and assign easily distinguishable labels to inputs
From a Nature piece on bad peer review comments www.nature.com/articles/d41... While most of these are "go away and never review again" tier, I can relate to a couple of these
September 21, 2025 at 9:08 AM
From a Nature piece on bad peer review comments www.nature.com/articles/d41... While most of these are "go away and never review again" tier, I can relate to a couple of these
Reposted by Neuroskeptic
A thousand sci-fi body horror stories writing themselves in my mind as I read this abstract
September 19, 2025 at 9:30 AM
A thousand sci-fi body horror stories writing themselves in my mind as I read this abstract
Neuron-to-cancer neurotransmission: lung cancer cells "can form functional synapses and receive synaptic transmission" from neurons pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40931078/ This is creepy
September 19, 2025 at 9:14 AM
Neuron-to-cancer neurotransmission: lung cancer cells "can form functional synapses and receive synaptic transmission" from neurons pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40931078/ This is creepy
The first children born after the introduction of ChatGPT will be 3 years old in a couple of months.
I wonder what children who grow up interacting with LLMs will make of them? Will their intuitions about questions like "are AIs alive" differ from those of us old people?
I wonder what children who grow up interacting with LLMs will make of them? Will their intuitions about questions like "are AIs alive" differ from those of us old people?
September 15, 2025 at 2:56 PM
The first children born after the introduction of ChatGPT will be 3 years old in a couple of months.
I wonder what children who grow up interacting with LLMs will make of them? Will their intuitions about questions like "are AIs alive" differ from those of us old people?
I wonder what children who grow up interacting with LLMs will make of them? Will their intuitions about questions like "are AIs alive" differ from those of us old people?
Many years ago, I was an #autism researcher, and here's a question I've been pondering for a while:
Why was autism discovered when it was?
Autism was, at the earliest, described in 1925 (Sukhareva) or 1940s (Kanner/Asperger) but presumably it always existed.
So why wasn't it recognized before?
Why was autism discovered when it was?
Autism was, at the earliest, described in 1925 (Sukhareva) or 1940s (Kanner/Asperger) but presumably it always existed.
So why wasn't it recognized before?
September 13, 2025 at 7:10 PM
Many years ago, I was an #autism researcher, and here's a question I've been pondering for a while:
Why was autism discovered when it was?
Autism was, at the earliest, described in 1925 (Sukhareva) or 1940s (Kanner/Asperger) but presumably it always existed.
So why wasn't it recognized before?
Why was autism discovered when it was?
Autism was, at the earliest, described in 1925 (Sukhareva) or 1940s (Kanner/Asperger) but presumably it always existed.
So why wasn't it recognized before?
"My relationship has very good Saturn" - illustrating the perils of self-report measures with nonsensical questions pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40929053/ I like this, but then I am quite Mars
September 13, 2025 at 4:38 PM
"My relationship has very good Saturn" - illustrating the perils of self-report measures with nonsensical questions pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40929053/ I like this, but then I am quite Mars
In 2001, 73.4% of British men reported masturbating in the past month; by 2012 this was up to to 77.5% pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40932457/ 4.1% of men got more honest
September 13, 2025 at 10:56 AM
In 2001, 73.4% of British men reported masturbating in the past month; by 2012 this was up to to 77.5% pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40932457/ 4.1% of men got more honest
"Healing crystals did not demonstrate anxiolytic effects beyond those of the placebo." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40855750/ I mean...
Placebo effects in alternative medical treatments for anxiety: false hope or healing potential? - PubMed
Healing crystals did not demonstrate anxiolytic effects beyond those of the placebo. Symptom change was mediated by expectancy and conditioning, particularly in individuals inclined toward intuitive o...
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
September 13, 2025 at 10:50 AM
"Healing crystals did not demonstrate anxiolytic effects beyond those of the placebo." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40855750/ I mean...