Rahul Venugopal, PhD

📝 New paper: Towards Multi-Brain Decoding in #Autism

🤨 How do we scale #hyperscanning when multi-brain datasets are small?

💡Our team introduces a self-supervised learning on large single-brain EEG data to improve multi-brain decoding.

#SocialNeuroAI #Neurotech link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Joint workshop. Animal Minds: New theories and new observations. RU Bochum and London School of Economics.

I'll be talking on Tuesday about how animals experience time as part of our Bochum-LSE Animal Minds workshop - and free online attendance is possible! 🦜🐝🕷️🐒 Details here: animal-cognition.philosophy-cognition.com

YouTube video by Johns Hopkins University Apes Share Human Ability to Imagine

Imagination in bonobos!

I am thrilled to share a new paper w/ Amalia Bastos, out now in @science.org

We provide the first experimental evidence that a nonhuman animal can follow along a pretend scenario & track imaginary objects. Work w/ Kanzi, the bonobo, at Ape Initiative

youtu.be/NUSHcQQz2Ko

Our new paper (with @biotay.bsky.social) is out and on the cover story of @currentbiology.bsky.social !!!! Veronika, a Carinthian mountain cow flexibly uses a “multi-purpose tool” to scratch herself. A video and more information will follow in the comments.
www.cell.com/current-biol...

🔔 APPLICATIONS ARE OPEN

🧠 Already fomo'ing the Winterschool ? At the Workshop, you can collectively explore the interplay between mental imagery and consciousness research !

May 30 - June 7
Ephesus Retreat, Turkey
850€ (bursaries)
20 participants

⏳ APPLY UNTIL February 15
mesec.co/event/worksh...

Now you recall it, now you don’t: Working memory performance fluctuates with a theta rhythm In this issue of Neuron, Han et al. leverage a change-identification working memory task coupled with electrophysiological recordings in the macaque frontal eye field to show that information retrieva...

Now you recall it, now you don’t: Working memory performance fluctuates with a theta rhythm
www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...
#neuroscience

BOLD signal changes can oppose oxygen metabolism across the human cortex, Nature Neuroscience

fMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.”

In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes.

rdcu.be/eUPO8
funds @erc.europa.eu
#neuroskyence 🧵:

this seems problematic for claims of increased brain activation

On biological and artificial consciousness: A case for biological computationalism The rapid advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have galvanised public and scientific debates over whether artificial systems m…

🎊📜 NEW PAPER 📜🎊

Can we seriously build synthetic consciousness?
And if so, where do we start?

I’m super excited to present recent publication in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews where @jaanaru.bsky.social and I confront this challenge head on.

1/n

This is friggin’ cool.

We're very happy to announce another consciousness workshop in the famed snowy mountain cabin of the Austrian Alps! ❄️🦇

This year's theme is computational neurophenomenology (broadly defined)

Applications are now open!

www.uni-bamberg.de/en/bamxi/res...

The 25 most powerful ideas of the 21st century (so far), picked by the world’s top thinkers | BBC Science Focus Magazine We're a quarter of the way into the new century. To mark this milestone, we asked the UK's top minds to highlight some of the game-changing scientific breakthroughs shaping our world since the year 20...

The 25 most powerful ideas of the 21st century:

1. Dream engineering

"For years, trying to convince scientists to take dreams seriously was a nightmare. Now the tide has turned ..."

www.sciencefocus.com/future-techn...

Join us this Thursday for an exciting talk by @sconinxphil.bsky.social!

Event info: www.uni-bamberg.de/en/bamxi/res...

To join via Zoom, please register here: www.uni-bamberg.de/en/bamxi/kon... Meeting details will be distributed via email.

#ConSci

Advancing consciousness science Defining new directions in consciousness research and exploring implications for medicine, technology, and ethics

1/🧵 Out today in @frontiersin.bsky.social : “Consciousness science: where are we, where are we going, and what if we get there?” By @axc.bsky.social @liadmudrik.bsky.social, & me (a CIFAR & @erc.europa.eu production 🧠). www.frontiersin.org/journals/sci...

Neuroscience of Dreaming Summer School

Neuroscience of Dreaming

Summer School - May 4-8, 2026 - Lucca, Italy

Applications open: nodsummerschool.imtlucca.it

Let’s Talk About (Artificial) Consciousness: A Day of Study Honoring Dan Dennett - Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President Location:  Alumnae Lounge, Aidekman Arts Center, Medford/Somerville campus Date: Tuesday, October 14, 2025   "Let’s Talk About (Artificial) Consciousness: A Day of Study Honoring Dan Dennett" is a sym...

It's an honour to be speaking, in a few minutes, at the memorial symposium for the greatly missed, and the simply great, Daniel Dennett provost.tufts.edu/events/denne...

Why I left academia and neuroscience Don't worry, this isn't yet another story of rage-quitting.

Michael X Cohen on why he left academia/neuroscience.
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/why-i-left...

Congratulations @introspection.bsky.social 🎉

Honored to be awarded the FRQ–IVADO Research Chair in "Social Neuro-AI & Inter-Personalized Psychiatry"!

Grateful to my team & colleagues at @cra-chusj.bsky.social & @mila-quebec.bsky.social, and my family for their support 🙏

Excited to keep bridging social neuroscience, AI & precision psychiatry🚀

We want the Dream Database to be a living database, so that it can grow and improve over time.

Don't hesitate to get in touch if you want to use it or contribute to it!

The database link:
bridges.monash.edu/articles/dat...

Arousal as a universal embedding for spatiotemporal brain dynamics - Nature Reframing of arousal as a latent dynamical system can reconstruct multidimensional measurements of large-scale spatiotemporal brain dynamics on the timescale of seconds in mice.

This one looks intriguing. Arousal "embedding" whole-brain dynamics. 🤯

#neuroskyence #compneurosky

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Happy to share this new paper (open access) on the logic of extrapolations in consciousness science, written with @liadmudrik.bsky.social

Incredible study by Raut et al.: by tracking a single measure (pupil size), you can model slow, large-scale dynamics in neuronal calcium, metabolism, and brain blood oxygen through a shared latent space! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Do individuals with disorders of consciousness dream and mind wander? Implications for improving diagnosis and understanding patient wellbeing Abstract. Fluctuations in the presence, experiential quality and contents of consciousness occur naturally during sleep and wakefulness and are core featur

🧠🧪 New paper in #NCONSC 🧠🧪

What if people who seem unconscious (e.g., Disorders of Consciousness, DoC) could still dream or experience mind wandering?

We explore this possibility in a new review:
academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...

With Jasmine Walter and Jennifer Windt!

#consciousness #dreaming

Image from the article, in cartoon style, showing Geiers plucking children out of a line to receive vaccines.

Excellent visual explainer article on the flaws of David Geier's anti-vax pseudoscience.

Will have my psych research methods class read this -- hammers home the real-world meaning of poorly designed controls, lax ethics, bias, replication.

#metasci

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Next week onwards, I'm teaching a five-day introductory course on Bayesian Data Analysis in Gent. Newly recorded video lectures to accompany the course are now online: vasishth.github.io/LecturesIntr...

Interoceptive Ability is Unrelated to Mental Health Symptoms: Evidence From a Large Scale Multi-Domain Psychophysical Investigation Interoception-the sensing and perception of the internal viscera-is widely cast as a transdiagnostic mechanism linking brain-body interaction to mental illness. Prevailing models propose that altered ...

Are interoception and mental health linked? Many assume so, with interoception even described as a psychiatric “p-factor.” But in our latest preprint, we were surprised to find little evidence for such a connection. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧵 Thread with our reflections on the matter 👇

Experimentally Inducing Dreams of Remote Emotional Memory Abstract. People frequently dream of recent experiences, which may reflect the consolidation of memories in the sleeping brain. Many studies demonstrate th

🚨New Paper🚨

I spend a lot of time trying to control what people dream about.

Usually, we are looking at dreams of recent memory.

In this new paper, for the first time, we caused people to dream about a specific REMOTE memory from their distant past.

#cogsci
#psychscisky
🧠🟦

Now out in @natneuro.nature.com

What happens to the brain’s body map when a body-part is removed?

Scanning patients before and up to 5 yrs after arm amputation, we discovered the brain’s body map is strikingly preserved despite amputation

www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02037-7

🧵1/18

MIT Consciousness Club The MIT Consciousness Club aims to foster interdisciplinary research on consciousness at MIT and in the broader Boston area by organizing a monthly event featuring an expert talk on consciousness foll...

Here's the schedule for the MIT Consciousness Club this year: sites.google.com/view/mit-con.... I'm looking forward to it! (Rooms will be announced soon; and we're currently working on a zoom option for those who would like to join online)