Benjy Barnett

A post on X by Kyle Langford, with a composite photo showing him standing outside the gates of Auschwitz, and the caption: "My zero unemployment plan", with an emoji of factory chimneys.

I know there's a risk of amplifying the fascist horror show, but I think we need to be aware of just how far things are going, especially as this man is a Republican candidate for governor of California. All the old safeguards are being deliberately torn down, and the unspeakable normalised.

Albert Camus to René Char (1957)
Camus-Char: Correspondence 1946-1959

YouTube video by Miles Davis - Topic Générique (Bande originale du film "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud")

There is still so much we don’t know about the brain’s ability to deal with absence, and we hope this study goes some way towards revealing the different ways we are able to represent ‘nothing.’

These findings help extend previous distinctions between perception and cognition to the case of absences and, at least in adult humans, suggest that abstract concepts of absence are not rooted in more primitive representations of sensory absence.

Moreover, this was in spite of low-level visual similarities between perceptual and non-symbolic absences, which could otherwise drive spurious generalisation between the two domains.

We built on these results to study how numerical and perceptual absences related to each other – finding surprisingly strong evidence for distinct neural representations of different types of absence.

Symbolic and non-symbolic representations of numerical zero in the human brain Barnett and Fleming show how non-symbolic and symbolic representations of zero are represented at the start of a neural number line and generalize across notational format. These representations are l...

First of all, we replicated our previous findings that representations of absence are shared across both symbolic and non-symbolic numerical tasks.

To characterise the brain’s representation of various absences, we had participants perform three different tasks in the MEG scanner, each involving absence from a different domain: perceptual, non-symbolic numerosity, and symbolic number.

Likewise, how we are able to conceptualise absence – e.g., as the number zero – is not straightforward either. How did we create something out of nothing?

But how the brain deals with absences is not currently known. Sensory systems are typically geared to detect the presence of objects in our environment, so how we are able to perceive absences is not a straightforward question.

What do the music of Miles Davis, the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the equations of Isaac Newton have in common? They all rely – in different ways – on absences.

A ✨bittersweet✨ moment – after 5 years at UCL, my final first-author project with @smfleming.bsky.social is ready to read as a preprint! 🥲

Genetic foundations of interindividual neurophysiological variability Individual brain activity profiles are shaped by lifelong genetic influences.

Very proud to share this one🥹! We show that personalized signatures of brain activity are heritable and relate to the expression of specific genes. That means my brain-fingerprint is very similar to my twin brother's! #ResearchIsMeSearch🧠 🧬 ♊️

After five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Is vivid imagery reported faster than weak imagery?
YES. There is an inverse correlation between subjective vividness and RTs in imagery tasks (N=117).
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Always late to the party, but really excited to share this new preprint led by @benjyb.bsky.social where we find an intriguing link between vividness ratings and reaction times!🧠💭

Confidence in absence as confidence in counterfactual visibility: a CogSci proceedings paper with star MSc student Maya Schipper, is now out on PsyArXiv:

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵👇

Hey Will, thanks for the tip. We checked again and everything looks ok to us. The data/code are up on OSF though so feel free to take a look and email me if you find anything!

#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

RT x Vividness Hosted on the Open Science Framework

All data and code for the paper can be found here: osf.io/g7tjh/.

We would be very interested if other people found similar patterns in their data!

We hope that by drawing attention to this effect, future models of imagery will start to tease apart the distinct contributions of imagery formation and evaluation to subjective reports of imagery, which is essential for the discussion around unconscious imagery.

We speculate as to whether our results point towards a shared process of evaluating subjective visual experiences across perception and imagery.

We show that individual differences in this perceptual RT asymmetry - as well as trait imagery vividness - predicts imagery RT asymmetry.

A similar effect has been widely reported in perceptual detection - where reporting not seeing a stimulus takes more time than reporting that you saw it.

🚨New preprint🚨 out with the dream team @matanmazor.bsky.social @giuliacabbai.bsky.social and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social!

We report a novel and robust effect across five different datasets: vivid imagery is reported faster than weak imagery.

📝: osf.io/preprints/ps...

How jazz and dolphins can help explain consciousness | Aeon Essays Is consciousness like jazz, something hard to pin down? Or is it more like the biology of dolphins, odd but natural?

’Consciousness is the taste of a lemon, the blueness of the sky’ This approach to defining consciousness is intuitively compelling, but how exactly does it work? And what kind of insight into consciousness might it deliver?

Hellohello again! Tomorrow at 5:15pm I’m giving a short talk on our latest MEG study about our very well-loved oscillating perceptual predictions @meguki2025.bsky.social. Come by and talk brains!
There are amazing talks and very cool science happening all around! MEGUKI 2025👌

Betar tweeting "We urge all Jews to evacuate NYC," retweeting a Republican Jewish Coalition tweet reading "Evacuate NYC immediately. Thank you for your attention to this matter." https://x.com/Betar_USA/status/1937687892933116384

And the Being Normal olympics begin.

Online Now: Fixed and flexible perceptual rhythms

Really nice study led by Claire Lancaster and supported by other brilliant Sussex colleagues - in particular former PhD student Jess Daly. Greebles task is sensitive to subtle perceptual deficits in APOE e4 carriers in mid-life (which get worse with age and number of e4 alleles).