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Max Levinson

@maxlevinson.bsky.social
123 followers 165 following 16 posts

visual phenomenology, active vision, cognitive neuroscience postdoc @ NYU maxlevinson.net

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Reposted by Max Levinson
Biyu Jade He @biyuhe.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
📣 My lab at NYU currently has two open post-doc positions. We are interested in understanding perception, thinking, and hallucinations. We employ a range of cutting-edge techniques in human neuroscience (e.g., 7T fMRI, MEG, iEEG/DES) and computational approaches (e.g., DNN modeling).
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
A different perspective on my PhD work is now out in House House Magazine
househousemagazine.com
Two Poems — House House Magazine
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Reposted by Max Levinson
Grumpy Philosopher @stevecooke.org · 24/05/2026
Somewhat overstated, but yet again we see humans quicker to grant rights to rivers, mountains, ecosystems, or forests than to other animals. The river gets rights against being polluted by industrial chicken farming, the chickens themselves get ignored. Dispiriting.
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Sasha Gusev @sashagusevposts.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
I assigned random gender/ethnicity labels to scientific abstracts from the literature and then asked Claude to do a thematic analysis. Claude identified a clinical versus computational split for female/male authors and a DEI focus for Black/URM authors. All in completely random data.
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
These findings support a hierarchical framework in which visual and "motor" systems jointly shape transitions in conscious visual experience. [6/6]
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
But once the boundaries are lost, what process determines what we consciously see next? Our data suggest that the brain infers visual uniformity–causing the colors to blend–using cortical areas related to perceptual decision-making and motor control. [5/6]
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Surprisingly, RIFT (aka excitability) increased! We think that, instead, neuronal *inhibition* decreased. This means visual input may actually remain strong, but circuit-level E/I balance is impaired. Interestingly: involuntary microsaccades delay filling-in by restoring this balance. [4/6]
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
It is typically thought that filling-in requires neuronal adaptation. When visual input weakens, we might no longer see boundaries between features. We tested this by measuring visual cortical excitability with rapid invisible frequency tagging (RIFT) in human MEG. [3/6]
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
When we keep our eyes still for a long time, things start to look weird. The brain can blend distinct visual features, like colors, to create perceptual content that is not found in the physical input. How does this illusion (“perceptual filling-in”) happen? [2/6]
Top row: The presented stimulus is a grey circle on a purple square background.
Bottom row: The conscious percept initially matches the stimulus, but over time the circle and square blend together to produce one uniformly-colored square.
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
NEW PAPER🚨👀 in Science Advances with a wonderful transatlantic team. (incl @sylvainbaillet.bsky.social @olejensen.bsky.social @katduecker.bsky.social) Using human MEG, we found lower-order and higher-order neural processes that underlie illusory transitions in conscious visual perception. 🧵👇
science.org
Hierarchical brain dynamics supporting visual perceptual transitions
Illusory transitions in conscious visual perception involve both early visual cortex and higher-order motor cortices.
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Marina Bolotnikova @mbolotnikova.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
I tried to do what we call, if I may be so bold, a "conceptual scoop"!! Pls read my story on the most overlooked form of extreme confinement of farmed animals—the routine caging of millions of dairy calves in tiny crates less than 1/10 the size of a parking spot. It's not about veal! (🧵)
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Dan Goodman @neural-reckoning.org · 27/11/2025
Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?
Two posts from Bluesky. The first one shows a figure from a paper published in Nature Scientific Reports full of totally incoherent AI fabricated gibberish words. The other a comment on a recently published paper by eLife discussing the paper and its peer reviews which were published along with the paper.
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 26/09/2025
Perceptual filling-in only needs this kind of feedback if retinotopic visual cortex is a homunculus that instantiates subjective experience (the "isomorphic" theory of filling-in). An alternative is that filling-in involves more symbolic feature/object representations at a higher level.
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
PS: all raw data, processed data, and code are publicly available: doi.org/10.17605/OSF...
doi.org
Stimulus-dependent delay of perceptual filling-in by microsaccades
Data and code for Stimulus-dependent delay of perceptual filling-in by microsaccades Hosted on the Open Science Framework
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
These results provide insight into microsaccades’ general mechanism of action in the visual system, and advance our understanding of the quite compelling illusion of filling-in. (3/3) doi.org/10.1167/jov....
doi.org
Stimulus-dependent delay of perceptual filling-in by microsaccades | JOV | ARVO Journals
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
We found that microsaccades are indeed more effective when boundaries are closer to the fovea. However, they introduce equal delays across different levels of isoluminant color contrast, meaning that microsaccadic delays do *not* explain why less similar colors take longer to fill-in. (2/3)
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 08/07/2025
NEW PAPER 👁️🚨 w/ @sylvainbaillet.bsky.social If you keep your eyes very still, the visual world oddly appears to "fill-in", or blend across boundaries. Filling-in over stronger boundaries requires even longer staring. Is this because involuntary microsaccades more effectively delay filling-in? (1/3)
a grey circle on a purple background
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Reposted by Max Levinson
Sylvain Baillet @sylvainbaillet.bsky.social · 07/07/2025
Sensorimotor control meets visual consciousness. Our new Journal of Vision paper led by @maxlevinson.bsky.social shows that microsaccades reset visual processing & delay perceptual illusions (here, filling-in). www.neurospeed-bailletlab.org/news/zl2erl3... 🧵
neurospeed-bailletlab.org
How Tiny Eye Movements Reveal the Fragility of Visual Perception — Baillet Lab [ neuroSPEED ]
Our latest study, led by grad student Max Levinson and published in the Journal of Vision , explores why our conscious perception often does not match the physical world accessible to our senses. Usi...
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The Onion @theonion.com · 14/03/2025
Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage
Chuck Schumer Helps Pull Democrats Back From Brink Of Courage
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Anil Seth @anilseth.bsky.social · 10/03/2025
1/ "A science of consciousness beyond pseudo-science and pseudo-consciousness" is out now! it was a joy to coauthor this commentary with Àlex Gómez-Marin @behaviOrganisms for @NatureNeuro, in which we try find some positive lessons in the clash over IIT www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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Lua Koenig @luakoenig.bsky.social · 16/01/2025
Delighted to report the publication of our new paper with @biyuhe.bsky.social in @plosbiology.org. In the study, we find that oscillatory and non-oscillatory neural signals likely influence conscious visual perception independently. doi.org/10.1371/jour...
doi.org
Spontaneous slow cortical potentials and brain oscillations independently influence conscious visual perception
Conscious perception is influenced by brain oscillations and slow cortical potentials within the brain, but it is not clear if they influence perception via shared mechanisms. This study shows that os...
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Josh de Leeuw @joshdeleeuw.bsky.social · 25/09/2023
I made this tool that I think is pretty useful if you are running online experiments and using the OSF. It's free. And open source. And you can use other free tools with it to run an online experiment for free. pipe.jspsych.org
pipe.jspsych.org
DataPipe
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Daniel Yon @danieljamesyon.bsky.social · 17/09/2023
Is IIT a “psuedoscientific” theory? The moment I’ve always hoped for, to plug this piece w/ Clare Press and Cecilia Heyes. The 7 questions psychologists and neuroscientists can ask ourselves if we want to build better theories and interrogate our own… www.cell.com/current-biol... #neuroskyence
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 17/09/2023
that’s fair 😛 and maybe case in point that it’s distracting to neutral parties
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 17/09/2023
totally agree except I think a focus on the pseudoscience claim is reasonable. attaching their arguments to such a sensational (and potentially unrelated) headline makes it a lot more difficult to take the points seriously
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 17/09/2023
Of course, but maybe odd to tell the NYT editorial board that IIT work is not science.
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Max Levinson @maxlevinson.bsky.social · 17/09/2023
I support the SOS. But 'pseudoscience' isn’t a call for nuance, it means IIT (& not competing theories) should disappear from scientific practice. If that’s what you mean, I’d argue you do have a responsibility to define pseudoscience beyond a speech-act. If not, then it’s not an appropriate label.
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