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Nick Steele

@njsteele.bsky.social
53 followers 62 following 17 posts

Neuroscience researcher at Duke University 🧠 Researching pyschopathology and brain network organization.

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Nick Steele @njsteele.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Excited to announce I will be moving on from my Duke post-bacc position to be a Duke PhD! I will be starting my PhD in the Psychology & Neuroscience department this fall in Dr. Kevin LaBar's lab. #Neuroskyence #AcademicSky #GradSchool
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Nick Steele @njsteele.bsky.social · 11/03/2026
Great piece by @evanthompson.bsky.social arguing that viewing consciousness as a "controlled hallucination" is self-defeating. Similar to how @seanmcarroll.bsky.social argues against Boltzmann brains. If experience is a controlled hallucination, then that theory is a part of the hallucination /1
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Tomás Ryan @tjryan.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
Do you work or study in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, or philosophy? What does the term 'representation' mean to you? We invite you to participate in a brief survey on key conceptual questions across fields. eu.surveymonkey.com/r/VX9GNXM
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Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
How can we best learn about the world? A new paper by SFI's Marina Dubova (@mdubova.bsky.social) and coauthors applies the scientific method to itself, finding that some common strategies that scientists consider gold standards for designing experiments could perform worse than random choice.
santafe.edu
Reassessing the scientific method
Is the scientific method really the best approach to learning about the world? A new paper in Collective Intelligence applies the scientific method to itself, finding that some common strategies that ...
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Lisa Messeri @lmesseri.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Stanford CS researchers just got a huge payday for promising AI agents that can simulate the real world. @mjcrockett.bsky.social and I wrote about these researcher's vision. Screen shotting quite a lengthy part of our paper, because we spent A LOT of time thinking about the paucity of this promise
"While most AI tries to fix humans 
@simile_ai
 is building AI that understands them.

They build digital twins that capture someone’s worldview, then simulate how customers, employees or entire populations will actually respond to change.

Born out of Stanford generative agent research. Now backed by $100M to turn that into a category.

AI is getting smarter and Simile is making it more human. We're proud to be in their corner."A proposed solution is to build generative agents that represent specific individuals (Box 1). One
such study [6] recruited a sample of ~1000 US participants nationally representative for age, gender,
race, region, education, and political ideology; programmed an LLM chatbot to interview each
participant for 2 h; and asked the participants to complete a battery of questionnaires and tasks.
They then used the interview transcripts to prompt ~1000 LLM agents to role-play each of the
human participants on the same questionnaires and tasks. Observing a high correspondence between
the responses of the generative agents and their human counterparts, the researchers concluded
that LLMs prompted in this way can capture the ‘idiosyncratic nature’ of real people across
a range of situations [57]. Some researchers propose making generative agents even more representative
by training them on their human counterparts’ ‘emails, messages and social media
posts’, aswell as ‘text generated by friends, family or coworkers’ [23]. (We note this raises critical
questions about informed consent; see Outstanding questions.) The logic here is that, because
generative agents are built to represent a diverse sample of specific individuals, researchers
could then run thousands of experiments on the generative agents and feel confident that the resultant
data are faithful to the original samples. Researchers could even populate virtual worlds with
generative agents, running large-scale simulations to test interventions and policies (Box 2).
Nevertheless, the generative agents paradigm faces hard limits to its potential representativeness.
By design, generative agents can only represent individuals who consent to sharing sensitive
data with scientists, which carries substantial privacy risks [6,58]. Given these risks, peoplewith stronger privacy concerns are less likely to consent to such studies. Members of marginalized
groups in the USA, including women, gender minorities, people of color, and disabled people,
have heightened privacy concerns and more negative attitudes about AI [59,60]ii–iv. These
groups have historically faced disproportionate surveillance [61,62] and theft of their biometric
and behavioral data for scientific research [63–65], including training machine learning models
[66]. Regimes of digital surveillance spread globally [67], creating frictions where global north ideologies
touch down in the global south [68]. These entrenched and repeating patterns raise cascading
problems for the generative agents approach: first, members of marginalized groups are
less likely to participate and, second, those who do will be less representative of their groups. Any
attempt to build AI Surrogates that are truly representative of diverse populations will likely face a
hard limit that marginalized people are (justifiably) less willing to entrust their data to scientists.Box 2. Generative agents and simulated worlds
Researchers note that ‘many of themost interesting research questions, such as the psychology ofworld leaders, the effects
of large-scale policy change, or the effects of large-scale events on the general public’ are ‘logistically infeasible’ to study in
the laboratory ‘with any realistic amount of resources’ [23]. In response, generative agents populating simulated worlds are
seen as promising research paths. For example, researchers could create generative agents based on the profiles of Palo
Alto residents and simulate how the community would respond to different pandemic interventionsv. Much of the technical
research on artificial agents acting in simulated worlds originates in fields beyond cognitive science, including computer science,
sociology, economics, political science, computational social science, as well as private industry [9,112–116].
Developers of these agent architectures have lofty ambitions. They believe that this technology can ‘test interventions and
theories and gain real-world insights’ [58], serving as ‘a high-fidelity platformfor policy outcome evaluation’ to enable ‘datadriven
policy selection’ [115]. Given these ambitions, validating that these models can generalize to the real world is imperative
[116], and some researchers caution that ‘current architectures must cover some distance before their use is reliable’
[58]. Yet, such validation faces a paradox: these models can only be validated against the ground truth of real-world data,
but their appeal lies in simulating scenarios where ground truth is not available. Some researchers [22] propose to meet this
challenge by identifying ‘the most proximal cases for which ground-truth data from human subjects is available’ and using
those cases to validate the simulation’s predictions ‘before turning the model to a domain in which no ground truth exists’.
However, there is currently ‘no consensus’ around how proximal is proximal enough [116].
Imp…
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Nick Steele @njsteele.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
/1 Here's yet another study on the thalamus in PTSD! We show that PTSD patients display different patterns of connectivity between the thalamus & cortex. Different nuclei displayed different patterns of altered RSFC.. #neuroskyence #neuroscience #science #fMRI www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Disrupted thalamocortical functional connectivity and canonical resting-state network integration in posttraumatic stress disorder
The thalamus exhibits widespread connectivity to the entire cortical mantle, yet distinct thalamic subregions possess unique connectivity profiles and…
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Robert Reich @rbreich.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —George Orwell (1984)
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 08/01/2026
“'The guy, I’m telling him like, "Please step off the school grounds," and this dude comes up and bumps into me and then tells me that I pushed him, and he knocked me down,' an official at Roosevelt High School said. 'They don’t care. They’re just animals. I’ve never seen people behave like this.'"
mprnews.org
Minneapolis schools cancel classes after Border Patrol clash disrupts dismissal at Roosevelt
Minneapolis schools closed for the week citing safety concerns after an encounter involving armed Border Patrol agents near Roosevelt High School.
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Alt National Park Service @altnps.bsky.social · 08/01/2026
Thank you to everyone who came out and helped spread the word. Thousands of Minnesotans gathered tonight for a vigil honoring Renee Good, who was murdered by ICE agents. Let’s get ICE out of MN!
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Alexander Huth @alexanderhuth.bsky.social · 05/01/2026
This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!
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Sean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 01/01/2026
The calendar changes— on the one hand, an entirely arbitrary chronological signifier. On the other, an absolutely necessary chance to catch our breath, renew our energies, and look ahead. Let’s go!
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Imaging Neuroscience @imagingneurosci.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Hecheng Jin, Ting Xu, et al: Is Pearson’s correlation coefficient enough for functional connectivity in fMRI? doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...
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Nick Steele @njsteele.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
How is the thalamus impacted by trauma? The thalamus is more than a relay - it is a key node in perceptual, cognitive, and affective processing circuits. We found that the limbic thalamus has lower volume in both PTSD and MDD, while the sensorimotor thalamus has lower volume in PTSD only /1
biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org
Volumetric Differences of Thalamic Nuclei are Associated with Post-Trauma Psychopathology
Previous investigations of whole thalamus and thalamic nuclei volumes in post-trauma psychopathology have been sparse, limited in scope, and yielded inconsistent results. To address this, volumetric e...
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Nick Steele @njsteele.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
Working with @enigmabrains.bsky.social datasets or conducting meta- or mega-analyses? Check out our software package, IBMMA, designed to facilitate analysis of neuroimaging big data. Excited the toolbox manuscript is now out! @ptenigma.bsky.social @jennistevens.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
sciencedirect.com
Image-Based Meta- and Mega-Analysis (IBMMA): A Unified Framework for Large-Scale, Multi-Site, Neuroimaging Data Analysis
The increasing scale and complexity of neuroimaging datasets aggregated from multiple study sites present substantial analytic challenges, as existing…
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