Hugo Spiers

UCL researchers join indigenous Pacific sailors to explore ancient skill of wave piloting UCL researchers are teaming up with a group of world-leading scientists to investigate how indigenous sailors find their way by sensing the swells of the ocean.

⛵ UCL researchers, including @hugospiers.bsky.social, are teaming up with a group of world-leading scientists to investigate how indigenous sailors find their way by sensing the swells of the ocean.
www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc...

Thank you!

Thanks Kevin. I've got a very good Captain in charge of the yacht. Can't wait to actually get there now

I'm in SF until tomorrow night! We were stranded, but managed to do a lot of re-booking! Any chance you'd be free for a coffee tomorrow?!

Took a massive loop in the sky when the Tsunami was announced, then scrambled to rebook flights. Could be worse places than SF to be stranded a few days!

Well, I've had my research disrupted by all sorts of things, power cuts, participants not turning up, software fails...
but disrupted by a Tsunami is a new one!

Our team are still en route via Hawai'i to run our research on the ocean in the Marshall Islands, but with a few days delay to get there

Increased complexity of social category markers leads to diverse rule-based categorizations and reduced intergroup bias | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences Social categories are key to human social life, often leading to intergroup bias and stereotypes. While traditional studies use binary social markers, real-world markers are more complex. This study e...

Hi friends - new paper! about the cognitive mechanisms underlying social categorization and polarization. "Increased complexity of social category markers leads to diverse rule-based categorizations and reduced intergroup bias" more below... royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Test-driven development and AI-assisted coding Better Code, Better Science: Chapter 4, Part 4

Test-driven development and AI-assisted coding - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series, just in time for my Neurohackademy talk on AI-assisted coding later this morning! russpoldrack.substack.com/p/test-drive...

Thanks! RMI is an amazing country

Thanks. Hopefully we will get some nice EEG data and we can take a look with you at that data! Task will be related to detecting swell waves that provide orientation

YouTube video by Imotion Media The UCL Voyage to Aur

🚨 I set off today on research journey to the Marshall Islands! 🚨

UCL Voyage to Aur

Here is the 1st instalment in a set of videos covering the project. I explain the background to the project and introduce a Marshallese stick chart held in a museum in London:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g3m...

Brain Surfaces of 70 primate species

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To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised!

🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Opinion | What Hulk Hogan Left Behind

The NYT has a heavy house style that prevents me from using more, shall we say, colorful, language to describe Hulk Hogan but I think I still got my central point across here www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/o...

The First Planned Migration of an Entire Country Is Underway The Pacific island nation of Tuvalu could be submerged in 25 years due to rising sea levels, so a plan is being implemented to relocate its population to Australia.

The first planned migration of an entire country due to climate change is happening! Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation, is at risk of being submerged under rising sea level, so it has signed an agreement with Australia to allow 280 Tuvaluans to settle in Australia as permanent residents each year.

"“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
www.ft.com/content/c531...

Bielefeld University is a great start to a successful career ... Go for it

Mouse brain tissue magnified 20 times under a microscope. Pain-processing neurons (red) cluster in the mouse amygdala—its emotion-processing center—and send axons toward the striatum to shape motivational behavior.

A new study pinpoints an emotion-to-motivation gateway that converts painful signals into negative feelings, offering a promising target for non-opioid pain relief.

Learn more in this week’s issue of #ScienceAdvances: scim.ag/46jefZE

Are the brain's representational formats predetermined by its intrinsic architecture, or are they efficiently tuned to the statistical structure of the visual world? In our new study, we test these possibilities.

So proud of this fantastic and inspiring work, led by @jazzmaniatico.bsky.social.

A Friday afternoon post to share our new paper (pre-print)! We modelled brain & behaviour & physiology from 27 unconstrained social learning interactions.
Learning emerged from non-linear brain-gaze coupling and asymmetric neural dependencies suggesting mutual prediction. Full thread below ⬇️

Mysteries of the past were appreciated in the past.

Genius

EEG Correlates of Active Removal from Working Memory The removal of no-longer-relevant information from visual working memory (WM) is important for the functioning of WM, given its severe capacity limitation. Previously, with an “ABC-retrocuing” WM task...

EEG Correlates of Active Removal from Working Memory
Jiangang Shan and Bradley R. Postle
Journal of Neuroscience 9 July 2025, 45 (28) e2414242025; doi.org/10.1523/JNEU...

What a stunning, flabbergasting new discovery. Big congrats to @stephanspiekman.bsky.social @she-paleo.bsky.social & their team. Sorry if I'm forgetting any bluesky handles for other authors.

Nat Geo article by @asherelbein.bsky.social

Published today in Nature!

Is it a bird? A monkey? No, it's a 'miraculous' new prehistoric reptile Mirasaura grauvogeli had a featherlike crest and a tail like a monkey. “It's been a long time since I've been so blown away by a new fossil discovery.”

Some 245 million years ago, in Germany, lived a reptile with fan-shaped fronds on its back.

They look like feathers, but they're not. So when birds evolved 100 million years later, they were mimicking this reptile!

My thoughts:

www.nationalgeographic.com/science/arti...

Dream Dust
By Langston Hughes

Gather out of star-dust
Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust,
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust
Not for sale.

From The Collected Works of Langston Hughes (2002) via @PoetryFound.
Photo credit—TBD—please share if you know.

Physalia megalista, a cnidiran with a gas filled float, raised sail, and long blue tentacles hanging below. Image credit: Dalila Destanović

Excited to share our study on sailing siphonophores, AKA bluebottles or man-o'-war! 🌊 we received hundreds of samples from scientists around the world, part of a huge effort to sequence genomes and test for multiple species 🧬 out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... 🦑🧪📌

Podcast relevant to our upcoming research expedition

Ancient Pacific Navigation:

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/a...

Human-specific gene expansions contribute to brain evolution A complete human genome and functional modeling in zebrafish pinpoint gene expansions that may underlie the evolutionary innovations of the human brain.

Human-specific gene expansions contribute to brain evolution www.cell.com/cell/abstrac...

📣 I'm looking for a postdoc to join my lab at NYU! Come work with me on a principled, theory-driven approach to studying language, learning, and reasoning, in humans and AI agents.
Apply here: apply.interfolio.com/170656
And come chat with me at #CogSci2025 if interested!

A view into the tomb, showing various pottery vessels

A view into the tomb, in the background archaeologists at work

New discovery: Archaeologists have uncovered a rare, intact Etruscan chamber tomb – a discovery hailed as one of the most significant finds in recent decades for understanding the ancient pre-Roman civilization. 

news.web.baylor.edu/news/story/2...

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