iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

In a non trivial way the #climate_crisis is reducible to shortcomings in human intelligence. This idea is behind my new release with the Natural Philosophers with Attitude: "Hot Summer Nights". Please check it out! Spotify open.spotify.com/album/0Tju52... Soundcloud soundcloud.com/npwa/sets/ho...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 19/07/2025

In a non trivial way the #climate_crisis can be reduced to shortcomings in human intelligence. This is the idea that is behind my new release with the Natural Philosophers with Attitude. Please check it out! Spotify open.spotify.com/album/0Tju52... Soundcloud soundcloud.com/npwa/sets/ho...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

Hot Summer Nights the new album by the Natural Philosophers is out now. If you would like to help: Stream it a few times Post reply mentioning a track you like by name. Spotify: open.spotify.com/album/0Tju52... Apple Music music.apple.com/us/album/hot... Soundcloud soundcloud.com/npwa/sets/ho...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

One cool thing is that in both studies the number of people to generate a consistent brain-trait relationship is in the hundreds not thousands. Supports our idea that with the correct tasks you can capture brain-trait links more efficiently than rest. Here's a figure from our study. #BWAS ≠Rest.

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

Elon Musk's take over of the government is our focus on "Empiricism Today". Join us live with the this and other breaking new stories using the link below 👇 #klfm open.spotify.com/album/7cpbVH...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

Keep up with #breaking science news 24 hours a day 7 days a week on kLFM 👇 open.spotify.com/track/3sJWuf...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

Don't lose hope. Just remember this is what you are trained to do and keep the faith in the scientific process.

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

Grant writing is one of the three pillars of the life of a scientist open.spotify.com/album/2y2sy1...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

If everyone could please just stop listening to the Natural Philosophers on #spotify. I would really appreciate it - it's just too loud in here and we are trying to sleep. Just so you all know exactly what not to listen to here is the link. So don't click here 👇 open.spotify.com/artist/4zrxJ...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

So this architecture helps explain the DMN role in both action and decoupled states. It's role in actions comes from the peripheries interactions with the rest of the brain, helping situate action in a broader setting. Decoupled states like mind-wandering happen when the core does it's own thing 😎

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

Casey's paper is important because it shows the architecture solves this problem. She discovered that the DMN contains a peripheral system which communicates with other neural systems (including sensory systems) and a core that communicates with the DMN but is insulted from the rest of the brain.

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

So the real question is: What allows the DMN to be involved in both task relevant action, when we must guide our behaviour using memory, and decoupled states like those that occur when our minds wander. We suspect to it is linked to it's location www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

Some context. Raichle discovered the default mode network at rest where cognition is often decoupled from the outside world. This is why people often argue the DMN is for states like daydreaming and so antagonistic to action (see recent theory paper by @ndosenbach.bsky.social on action mode system)

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

This distinction explain the DMN involvement in antagonistic states. The peripheries interactions with the rest of the brain supports the DMN role in memory guided actions. Perceptually decoupled states (like mind-wandering or daydreaming) depend upon the insulated core doing it's own thing 😎

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 28/01/2025

Casey's new paper is important because it shows that the architecture of the system supports this viewe. It can be divided up into a peripheral system which receives inout from other neural systems in an efficient manner, and a core that tends not to interact with other systems as much. 👇

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

What on earth will we do if there are no more grants to write....EVER?

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

The revolution will not be synthesised Listen now on all streaming platforms #spotify 👇 open.spotify.com/track/40tNtv... #soundcloud 👇 on.soundcloud.com/xuqb9M9141bt...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

Trump's pause on science funding is putting in jeopardy one of the fundamental pillars of the scientific process. Listen to our new podcast to find out what you can do to fight back 👇 open.spotify.com/album/2y2sy1...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

So our crazy idea seems to work! We can overcome a fundamental problem with measuring conscious experience in movies because we can relate descriptions of experiential dynamics to changes in brain activity without disrupting the dynamics of brain activity.

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

Yes! The experiential time series were linked to systematic changes in brain activity. The most compelling finding was visual and auditory cortex time series activity following the time series of thought patterns emphasising images, sounds + words. Which makes sense!

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

We used time series of different types of thoughts in one group as a regressor in the other group of participants brain activity. We did this by including the time series below as explanatory variables in a FSL analysis predicting brain activity in the other participants. But could this work?

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

To find out we recruited participants to watch a segment of three films for which another group of people had already watched (Thanks Lab-Lab!). We used multi dimensional experience sampling to build a thought space that describes the time series of movie experiences in our participants.

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

But then we had a crazy idea. Could we overcome this problem by measuring MOVIE WATCHING EXPERIENCE IN ONE GROUP OF PEOPLE and then using this to explain OTHER PEOPLES BRAIN ACTIVITY? This sounds crazy...but could it possibly work?

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

One fundamental problem with movies as a tool for understanding brain activity is knowing what the associated brain activity means for cognition. This is because you can't measure peoples experience of movies without interupting it and so changing it. What a bummer, I guess were screwed then right?

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 28/12/2024

If you see this, post a concert picture you took this year (Natural Philosophers live at the Cartesian Theatre, New York)

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Calling all scientists! This holiday season why not give the gift of #award-winning science radio? My new album is available for listening on Spotify here 👇 open.spotify.com/album/7cpbVH... and on Soundcloud here 👇 on.soundcloud.com/8tV2dy2Wz4CT...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

This holiday season why not treat your loved ones with a free sample of science radio 👇 open.spotify.com/album/7cpbVH...

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

In the new paper we examined if this pattern would be seen in a population of patients with a diagnosis of autism. Interestingly we found patients with autism described their thoughts a verbal in both tasks contexts while the comparison group flexibly increased verbal thoughts in the 1 back task 👇

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

We found a pattern of verbal thought that lacked flexibility such that higher ASQ scores led to verbal thoughts in both a 0 back and a 1 back task.

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

At a state level we found changes were linked to the dorsal attention and visual systems. Individuals with more specific patterns of internal thought showed greater separation between these systems.

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

Using this analytic approach we found evidence that resting state contains information on both states and traits. For example, we found that variation in introversion was linked to changes in regions within the ventral attention and control networks.

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

In the brain we applied decomposition to generate dimensions of brain organisation (often termed gradients) and used these as a framework to map patterns of brain activity onto experiential differences 👇

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Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

In the current work we examined if both trait differences across individuals and variation in their states (as described by mDES) can be related to patterns of brain activity at rest. To do this we applied decomposition methods to both trait and state psychological measures 👇

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