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dickretired

@dickretired.bsky.social
4.4K followers 255 following 1.1K posts

Neuroscientist

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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
@nancykanwisher.bsky.social Good to see you on Bluesky, How can we get discussions going? Luiz Pessoa is right that there are few threads. .
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
There is little work on NHPs now. Instead almost all the work is on mice. I can understand that this can tell us about human metabolism. But cognition depends on complex neural circuitry. We need to know what cognitive capacities we share with mice and what capacities are unique to primates or us.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 19/01/2026
Having just had yet another MRI, I am again struck by what a terrible environment it is for people to think while doing cognitive tasks (on back, noise, stationary etc). OPMs offer a much more comfortable and less noisy environment, and have millisecond temporal resolution.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
Trump’s deputy, Stephen Miller, thinks that only Americans (ie white!) should live in America. What a wonderful message for all those scientists working in America who are immigrants and non-white!
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 28/12/2025
I don’t understand why neurophysiologists pay little attention to FMRI because it is a vascular signal. It is just at a macro rather than micro level. But the resolution is similar to the object patches in IT and the patches within prefrontal within which neuronal firing correlates (Constantinidis).
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 24/12/2025
I worry that there is no way of proving that I am not in the blacked out pages of the Epstein files. For all I know the whole British royal household are in there! It is quite absurd that so much is blacked out.
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Mark Histed @markhisted.org · 15/11/2025
And I’m a big fan of Turing, von Neumann, Shannon, Metcalfe, Hinton, Sejnowski, and all the other algorithmic and computation people. No shade. But data limits still limit understanding of the brain. That’s why the #NIH US BRAIN Init was so important: public investment made new tools.
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Penn NeuroKnow 🧠 @pennneuroknow.bsky.social · 11/11/2025
There’s a lot of talk about vaccines and autism, but what does the science say? This week @pennngg.bsky.social student Nita Rome unpacks the history behind these concerns and how modern studies have debunked this misconception. pennneuroknow.com/2025/11/11/v... #PsychSciSky #SciComm 🧠🟦🧪
pennneuroknow.com
Vaccines and autism: Let’s talk about it
The conversation around autism and vaccines has become an increasingly hot topic of late (to put it mildly), but did you know that this debate began over 25 years ago? Here is a brief overview of t…
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 11/11/2025
I strongly recommend the new biography of Frances Crick by Professor Matthew. It is important for what it tells us about imagination, risk, persistence, error and boundless curiosity.
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Monica Carson @brainimmunity.bsky.social · 09/11/2025
Worth a read - context is everything. #neuroskyence #immunosky #medsky
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 02/11/2025
Rep. Jeff Van Drew on Republicans' healthcare plan: "The plan is to come up with something better."
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Doug Mack @douglasmack.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
doing archival research and happened across this story from 1963 teacher builds lessons around different perspectives, conservative families (backed by john birch society!) object, student *records* teacher in attempt to get her fired sounds familiar! p. 73 here: books.google.com/books?id=Rkk...
Crucial Issue Splits a Town: Should School Be a Forum for Free Ideas?

HELL BREAKS LOOSE IN PARADISE

Screenshot of page from Life magazine; full text in story linked in post
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
#pessoabrain.bsky.social The paper by Rogier Mars and Dick Passingham on A Neuroecological Perspective on Prefrontal Cortex is out. the link is authors.elsevier.com/c/1lyf5Y3M3l... This allows free downloads till Dec 7th.
authors.elsevier.com
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
#neuroskyence New paper on 'A neuroecological perspective of prefrontal cortex' by Rogier Mars and Dick Passingham Click on the link below and you have free access before Dec 7th. OH THE GENEROSITY OF ELSEVIER! And they are so poor. authors.elsevier.com/c/1lyf5Y3M3l...
authors.elsevier.com
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
New paper on 'A neuroecological perspective of prefrontal cortex' by Rogier Mars and Dick Passingham Click on the link below and you have free access before Dec 7th. OH THE GENEROSITY OF ELSEVIER! And they are so poor. authors.elsevier.com/c/1lyf5Y3M3l...
authors.elsevier.com
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Alfred Nobel @alfrednobel.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
@vincentcostaphd.bsky.social @dickretired.bsky.social The functional side of it all is already completely explained by showing that we create templates. See also: @hugospiers.bsky.social During shopping we execute the exact same template as the mouse does. www.researchgate.net/publication/...
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Drug Monkey @drugmonkey.bsky.social · 24/09/2025
I wonder how much basic academic science funded by the public underlies this new treatment for Huntington’s disease?
media.tenor.com
a man sitting at a table with the words it 's a lot on his face
ALT: a man sitting at a table with the words it 's a lot on his face
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 22/09/2025
#neuroskyence Can someone explain to me: if a huge neural net exposed to a huge corpus of language, and trained to learn the statistics of the next word, can produce excellent grammar, why can’t infants learn in the same way? Of course they are exposed to much less, but they have parental guidance.
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darren32359.bsky.social @darren32359.bsky.social · 21/09/2025
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 19/09/2025
#earlmiller.bsky.social It is frequently commented that cells in different areas have similar properties. The reason, of course, is the dense interconnections between areas. But what we need are physiological fingerprints. By this I mean radial plots of the degree of activity on many tasks.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 17/09/2025
The Allen Institute is working hard at a really tough goal, with impressive results.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
Most neuroscientists are materialists. Out of body experiences challenge this, but they occur when the EEG suggests recovery of consciousness after aa heart attack (Parnia et alb2023).
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
A study by Bartels et al (J Neurosci) showed that decoding what colour one person was seeing also decode what another person was seeing. I haven’t read the study but it is a clever way of trying to find out if your blue is my blue. Not my expertise but worth expert discussion.
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hakwan lau @hakwan.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Representational Geometries of Perception and Working Memory: A Pilot Study Tomoya Nakamura's first fMRI project ... in which we hereby release a preprint as a way of pre-registration 🧠📈
biorxiv.org
Representational Geometries of Perception and Working Memory: A Pilot Study
This study aims to compare the neural representational geometry of visual perception and visual working memory using human fMRI. In our pilot experiment, observers viewed a face-scene blended image (s...
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Dr. Sven-Eric Jordt #TobRegSky @sejordt.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
#TobRegSky #PedSky #MedSky #EpiSky #addictionsci #policysky #polisky #neuroskyence #neurosci #PainResearch 🧪🛟 🫁 We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself Gift link here: www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself
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Dr. Sven-Eric Jordt #TobRegSky @sejordt.bsky.social · 06/09/2025
#TobRegSky #PedSky #MedSky #EpiSky #addictionsci #policysky #polisky #neuroskyence #neurosci #PainResearch 🧪🛟 💊
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Leslie @irishgoodbyephd.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
There are a couple - I reference this one by @scienceimpacts.org the most: scienceimpacts.org
scienceimpacts.org
SCIMaP - Impacts of Federal Cuts to Science and Medical Research
Developed by an interdisciplinary research team, this website shows how funding cuts reduce economic activity and employment nationwide
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Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
If you could show just ONE chart re: science grant terminations in the US to a group of college students, what chart would it be? #nih #nsf #psycscisky 🧠🟦 #edusky #academicsky #statssky
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hakwan lau @hakwan.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... "... observers perceive scene images achromatized in the peripheral region (chimera images) as full-color images... inattentional noise increases the occurrence of strong color signals that exceed the internal color detection criterion..." Nishida lab 🧠📈
sciencedirect.com
Inattentional noise leads to subjective color uniformity across the visual field
Humans perceive a vividly colored world coherently across the visual field, even though our peripheral vision has limited color sensitivity compared t…
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BWJones @bwjones.bsky.social · 29/08/2025
Enough about mitochondria. I’d like to know what RFK Jr. thinks about the danger from midichlorians.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
My post about Robert Kennedy comes from a report in Scientific American.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
In case you are worried about whether my post about Robert Kennedy is true, it was reported by Scientific American.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
#neuroskyence Robert Kennedy asked a journal to retract a paper because it showed that the aluminium in vaccines causes no harm (eg autism). The journal refused. His demand was an attack on science. Scientists have to accept results even if they go against their ideas or prejudices.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 28/08/2025
Robert Kennedy asked a journal to retract a paper that demonstrated that the aluminium in vaccines causes no harm. The journal refused (eg no autism). The demand was an attack on science. Scientists have to accept results even if they go against their ideas or prejudices.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 17/08/2025
The Hill (political newspaper) has a very good article on the evidence that Trump is dementing.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
What do graduates and postdocs most want of their PIs?
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
#neuroskyence Don’t be old. You forget words (benign memory less with age or semantic dementia?). And the sad fact is that you would be the last person to know.
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PessoaBrain @pessoabrain.bsky.social · 15/07/2025
Prefrontal axons going to lots of places! doi.org/10.1016/j.ce... #neuroskyence
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
I like the term philosopause. It refers to the tendency of old scientists to speculate outside their field of expertise. What worries me more as an old scientist is that I am no longer qualified to speculate within my own field of expertise. Science moves too fast.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 14/07/2025
@danieljamesyon.bsky.social Daniel, see my further comments on your book.
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Russ Poldrack @russpoldrack.org · 08/07/2025
Managing Technical Debt (or, why you should not rely on random Python packages). The latest in my Better Code, Better Science series russpoldrack.substack.com/p/managing-t...
russpoldrack.substack.com
Managing technical debt
Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 3, Part 7
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
So the great big bill has passed in the USA. The poor wil l get poorer. at the same time Trump is going for Universities and NiH. and Robert Kenedy is ruining health care. And by withdrawing aid to other countries millions will die. God help America.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 28/06/2025
The American Supreme Court has said that Tr7mp can issue any executive order that he wishes. That means he is a dictator and can ignore the constitution. Dangerous times.
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Dr. Sven-Eric Jordt #TobRegSky @sejordt.bsky.social · 21/06/2025
#PedSky #MedSky #EpiSky #addictionsci #policysky #polisky #neuroskyence #PainResearch #biotechfeed🛟💊 🧪 ‘RFK Jr is a disaster’: Staff describe chaos in ‘anti-science’ regime
thetimes.com
‘RFK Jr is a disaster’: Staff describe chaos in ‘anti-science’ regime
Officials in US health agencies fear ‘people will get sick’ as programmes are slashed and scientists are fired under the constant surveillance of Doge
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
I strongly recommend the book called The Story os a Heart by Rachel Clarke. It won a women’s prize. It is a detailed account of the events that lead to the death of a young girl and the transplantation of ger heart into a boy. I know it is not about brains, but it is wonderful.
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hakwan lau @hakwan.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
"The Exit Manual: How to Leave the Free Energy Cult and Still Get Tenure" wow. www.researchgate.net/publication/... 🧠📈🧠💻
researchgate.net
(PDF) The Exit Manual: How to Leave the Free Energy Cult and Still Get Tenure
PDF | This manual is not a plea. It is a jailbreak from a cult—the Free Energy Principle, a theoretical metastasis that began in computational... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on Res...
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 05/06/2025
The Royal Society is offering £4 million per researcher for scientists in the USA who want to move to the UK. The money offered is £30 million in all for all the Fellowships. These Faraday Fellowships are for 5 to 10 years.
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Dr. Sven-Eric Jordt #TobRegSky @sejordt.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
#PedSky #MedSky #EpiSky #addictionsci #policysky #polisky #neuroskyence #PainResearch #addictionsci 🧪🛟 Exclusive: US veterans agency orders scientists not to publish in journals without clearance
theguardian.com
Exclusive: US veterans agency orders scientists not to publish in journals without clearance
Move that seeks political control of doctors’ and scientists’ published research fits a pattern of censorship by the Trump administration, veterans advocates say
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 02/06/2025
The organisation for veteran affais has issued a requirement that all papers be submitted for censorship before publication. Trump REALLY doesn’t like truth. The truth is what he wants it to be. The first lesson in science is that the truth does not follow your whims and ideas.
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dickretired @dickretired.bsky.social · 23/05/2025
I send my sympathy to Harvard and it’s international students now that Trump has banned it from having students from abroad. I hope that the legal action that Harvard is taking succeeds.
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