Brendan Hutchinson

Consciousness before birth? Imaging studies explore the possibility Fetal and infant brains offer clues to when human experience begins

Consciousness before birth? Imaging studies explore the possibility | Science | AAAS www.science.org/content/arti...

Big news: we are setting up a new non-profit organization to run bioRxiv and medRxiv. It's called openRxiv [no it's not a new preprint server; it's dedicated organization to oversee the servers] openrxiv.org 1/n

Thanks Matthias

I am curious to know - what was the process for vetting/deciding on who "gets" to sign (and who does not)? Is this information available (or is this process laid out transparently) anywhere? Apologies if it has and I have missed it (it's been a little while)

Do you know if there is a preprint or freely accessible version anywhere? I do not currently have access

I am v curious as to why this shows up in some studies and not others

keen to give this a read!

The title page of Buabang, Donegan, Rafei, & Gillan (2025) Trends in Cognitive Sciences article, "Leveraging cognitive neuroscience for making and breaking real-world habits" DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2024.10.00

The title page of the Gardner, Rebar, de Wit, & Lally (2024) Social and Personality Psychology Compass article, titled "What is habit and how can it be used to change real-word behavior? Narrowing the theory-reality gap." https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12975

If you're interested in #habits, check out these two papers by @eikekofi.bsky.social (tinyurl.com/mu96jzdd) & @drbengardner.bsky.social (tinyurl.com/3nd4bx5p). I reread them recently & highly recommend them. Each presents a model & uses it to suggest ways to form/break habits in real-world settings.

nice work! ~160ms is quite early indeed but may not necessarily be incompatible with later theories. Did you look at scalp maps? Also by looks of fig in the link, you found sig decoding of orientation of unseen stimuli- Is that right? Sadly no access to the paper

Evaluating animal consciousness An emerging field shows how animal feelings can be studied scientifically

@jeffsebo.bsky.social @birchlse.bsky.social and I put a lot of philosophy into our new Science Perspective on animal consciousness. Mill's analogical argument + inference to the best explanation + careful experiments = justification for consciousness in many animals. Where might it end?

Little reminder that I am adding all new publications from Neuroscience of #Consciousness in this thread!

Check it out!

🧠🧪

The Brain in the Operating Room: Understanding the Loss of Consciousness During General Anesthesia — Grey Matters at Vassar College Katerina Hristova Illustrations by Anna Bishop & Iris Li

The Brain in the Operating Room: Understanding the Loss of Consciousness During General Anesthesia
www.greymattersjournalvc.org/issue-9-arti...
#neuroscience

The neural link between stimulus duration and spatial location in the human visual hierarchy - Nature Communications Common organizational principles of spatial and temporal information processing are not fully understood. This study shows that the duration coding of brief visual events transforms along the human co...

Space acquires Time.

Very cool article on some outstanding data from Domenica Bueti’s lab.

“The neural link between stimulus duration and spatial location in the human visual hierarchy”

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/second? Why can we only think about one thing at a time?"
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

From The Unbearable Slowness of Being

Models optimized for real-world tasks reveal the task-dependent necessity of precise temporal coding in hearing - Nature Communications Ears encode sound with precisely timed spikes, but the perceptual role of this temporal coding remains uncertain. Here, the authors report that high-fidelity temporal coding is necessary for neural ne...

New paper from our lab, by Mark Saddler, using machine learning to test the role of temporal coding in hearing. Here is a quick summary. (1/n)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our review out in TiCS spearheaded by Mathilde Bonnefond on the latest ideas on the functional role of alpha oscillations and distractor inhibition - e.g. we highlight that alpha increases might reflect perceptual target load rather than distractor anticipation authors.elsevier.com/a/1kFXN_V1r-...

But should a theory be labelled as pseudoscientific if we have to wait e.g., 100 years to properly test it? In the case of string theory, my understanding is that a hadron collider the size of the solar system is necessary to properly test it. I can see why that would simply be unacceptable for some

'indicator' seems to be the key word there - when to call a theory pseudoscientific seems mostly a judgment call.

I feel similar of string theory as you, mainly that we have to give some theories time to properly be tested due to e.g., limits in our tech/engineering.

1. What is your definition of ‘directly measured’?
2. To say consciousness is fundamental is an assumption.

Many people argue that Registered Reports take a long time.

We submitted our first preprint to PCIRR on Feb 9.

It took less than a year, with some very high quality feedback from reviewers, & you can see all of it.

Registered Reports save you time & increase quality.

Hugely exciting focussed ultrasound neuromodulation data from JeYoung Jung today - substantial behavioral, neurochemical, and even volumetric effects of theta burst sonication of anterior temporal lobe. But how do 🧠 changes cause behavioral improvement? We still don’t fully understand…

Seems like a good idea to me

V interested to give this a read but currently no access - does any1 happen to have a copy they’d be willing to send across?

Hi Christos, could you please add me too? Thankyou!

Hi Rich! Any chance to be added to this? Thankyou!

decade+ long arguments make for the best stories/narratives (so long as their published/publicly available and we're not talking about private bickerings) that generate curiosity and inspiration to follow up generations of students!

fascinating (and concerning)

Saturnians do make excellent brain surgeons

if only it were - looks amazing!

Damn, wish we got these kinds of breathtaking sceneries in psych/neuroscience

some cool decoding results here!