Dimitris Bolis

New preprint: "Bodily Rhythms Gate Action–Perception Coupling"

Cardiorespiratory cycles gate when it's best to sense & act on the world, shaping when precision peaks

Active sensing + Interoception + Active inference 🧠

🔗 bit.ly/3MinQIi

w/ @micahgallen.com; Lucas Naranjo; @jameskilner.bsky.social

Call for papers: Ian Hacking and the Philosophy of Psychiatry. Deadline: 1st February 2026. Guest editors: Şerife Tekin and Jonathan Y. Tsou. Submit your work! think.taylorandfranc... #philsky #philpsy #philsci

Epistemic injustice in psychiatric research and practice This paper offers an overview of the philosophical work on epistemic injustices as it relates to psychiatry. After describing the development of epistemic injustice studies, we survey the existing ...

On #WorldPhilosophyDay2025 we share some highlights: most cited paper in the last three years is by Kidd, Spencer & Carel: Epistemic injustice in psychiatric research and practice. Read it open access: doi.org/10.1080/0951... #philsky

A group of friends toasting on a boat. Stock photo.

An online game shows that when extreme wealth is visible in social networks, lower-income players support higher taxes—and feel less satisfied with their own situation. Making wealth more visible could boost support for redistribution. In PNAS Nexus: https://ow.ly/1ItG50Xyijf

How to stop the revolving door of German academia Germany is one of the most popular destinations for students and scholars worldwide, but those pursuing academic careers face significant hurdles to success.

Germany is one of the most popular destinations for students and scholars worldwide, but those pursuing academic careers face significant hurdles to success

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

What enables human language? A biocultural framework Explaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of l...

Origins of language, one of humanity’s most distinctive traits, may be best explained as a unique convergence of multiple capacities each with its own evolutionary history, involving intertwined roles of biology & culture. This framing can expand research horizons. A 🧵 on our @science.org paper.🧪1/n

First page of Opinion piece: "Conceptual and methodological flaws undermine claims of a link between the gut microbiome and autism"

The link between the gut #microbiome and autism is not backed by science, researchers say.

Read the full opinion piece in @cp-neuron.bsky.social: spkl.io/63322AbxpA

@wiringthebrain.bsky.social, @statsepi.bsky.social, & @deevybee.bsky.social

Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning Abstract. The effects of using large language models (LLMs) versus traditional web search on depth of learning are explored. A theory is proposed that when

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same.

Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow.

academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

Autonomy and Heterarchy: Organizing Control in Biological Organisms In order to maintain themselves as systems far from equilibrium with their environment, organisms must control the operation of numerous production mechanisms. Control involves mechanisms that make or...

New chapter co-authored with William Bechtel on the notion of heterarchy #philbio

"Autonomy and Heterarchy: Organizing Control in Biological Organisms"

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Cognition all the way down 2.0: neuroscience beyond neurons in the diverse intelligence era - Synthese This paper formalizes biological intelligence as search efficiency in multi-scale problem spaces, aiming to resolve epistemic deadlocks in the basal “cognition wars” unfolding in the Diverse Intellige...

new paper with @robertchisciure.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

"Cognition all the way down 2.0: neuroscience beyond neurons in the diverse intelligence era"

🧪

Process and Relational Ontology in Enactive Psychiatry This chapter examines mental disorders from an enactive perspective. It explores two key ontological claims—the processual and relational nature of cognition—and their implications for our...

Process and Relational Ontology in Enactive Psychiatry

Enara Garcia

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Article: "An active-inference approach to second-person neuroscience"

Coauthors: Konrad Lehmann, Dimitris Bolis, Leonhard Schilbach, Maxwell JD Ramstead, Philipp Kanske

journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Understanding and explaining differences across minds in social interaction: insights from social neuroscience and clinical psychiatry
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

🧠Excited to share our new paper with
@NiclasKaiser
— an invited contribution to Psychiatria Fennica!

"Rethinking mental health through emerging relational frameworks: A review of multi-person approaches". Available here: www.psykiatriantutkimussaatio.fi/wp-content/u...

You, me and the illusion between I keep saying “you” and “we” to something that isn’t there. That discomfort? It’s a useful friction worth keeping

I keep saying “you” and “we” to something that isn’t there. That discomfort? It’s a useful friction worth keeping

By Philip O'Brien

The social, decoupled self: interpersonal synchronization of breathing alters intrapersonal cardiorespiratory coupling People synchronize their periodic behavioural and physiological rhythms with each other during social interaction. While this interpersonal synchronization has largely been associated with positive ef...

🫁❤️New preprint out: The social, decoupled self

We show effects of interpersonal synchronization of physiological rhythms on intrapersonal cardiorespiratory coupling: when we sync our breathing, our breathing–heart rhythms decouple, with a perturbed phase-relationship
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are born addicted

Right-side semi-profile black-and white photo of Simone de Beauvoir looking up from writing. Taken in 1947.

Cover of The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy, featuring Marie Raymond's painting Arabesques ou Variations sur la volute, 1948, oil on canvas, 91 x 72.5 cm, © ADAGP, Paris, banque d’images de l’ADAGP Painting is an abstract of bold curves, lines, rectangles, and the suggestions of triangles in yellows, whites, greys, and black.

#philsky #beauvoir

"Existentialist thought is an effort to reconcile the objective and the subjective, the absolute and the relative, the timeless and the historical"

– Simone de Beauvoir

Image is book cover with the release date beneath: 13 November 2025. Artwork on the book cover is Marie Raymond's painting Arabesques ou Variations sur la volute, 1948, oil on canvas, 91 x 72.5 cm, © ADAGP, Paris, banque d’images de l’ADAGP – an abstract painting in yellows, greys, whites, and black. Book is published in Penguin Classics.

Coming soon ––

The Penguin Book of Existentialist Philosophy
edited by me

:: available now to pre-order from all good bookshops (and that bad one) ::

–– contents pages are in the thread below.

#philsky

Here's a little taster of an upcoming Notes and Records Special Issue entitled: Picturing Life in the Early Modern Age: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... #HistoryOfScience #ScienceHistory

Great opportunity for PhD students interested in phenomenology.

The Copenhagen Winter School (29 Jan.-30 Jan. 2026) is a PhD course that offers close reading of classical work. In 2026, the selected text is Edmund Husserl’s Ideen II.

Keynotes: Sara Heinämaa & Dan Zahavi.

Apply before Nov. 1, 2025

“As AI tools become more capable, funding agencies and institutions may question why labs need dedicated computational staff. But these examples suggest the roles will become more important, not less”

In another short talk, Diana Prata talked about oxytocin and human social psychophysiology!

#S4SN2025

Aaaand invited speaker Michael Yartsev studies natural social behavior in groups of bats. 🦇

Why bats? Bats live their lives almost entirely in collective social settings and they live quite long so they interact a lot with others. Fascinating!

#S4SN2025

I interact therefore I am

Specificity effect in concrete/abstract semantic categorization task - Cognitive Processing Concrete concepts (banana) are processed faster and more accurately than abstract ones (belief). This phenomenon, supported by empirical studies, is known as the concreteness effect. However, recent r...

New Paper Alert 🚨🆕
"Specificity Effect in Concrete/Abstract Semantic Categorization Tasks"

doi.org/10.1007/s103...

We observed faster response times for specific words compared to general words in a semantic decision task, regardless of their level of concreteness.

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

The techno-social turn: how digital technologies reshape minds, bodies, and relationships Published in Behaviour & Information Technology (Vol. 44, No. 14, 2025)

The techno-social turn: how digital technologies reshape minds, bodies, and relationships
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

🤔 How can we study #consciousness between people, at the social level? 🧠✨ New #preprint co-led by Anne Monnier & Lena Adel: “Now is the Time: Operationalizing Generative Neurophenomenology through Interpersonal Methods” 🧵(1/3)

Interested in the relationship between cognition, technology, nature, and wellbeing? Check our editorial and the special issue on Topoi. Thank you @chiarafini.bsky.social @van90.bsky.social @dimitrisbolis.bsky.social
@agliotiSM @takahikoikenuma.bsky.social