Jonny Smallwood

New in TiCS w @dgrand.bsky.social @gordpennycook.bsky.social

It’s been ~10yrs since misinfo research exploded but our paradigms are stuck in the post-2016 “fake news” model

Time for new approaches:
o True/False → Content that misleads
o Belief → Behavior
o Eval interventions in ambiguous settings

Sausages and cheese, German supermarket

the scenario we all feared

Congrats @josephsalvo.bsky.social and @rementurus.bsky.social !

When I started my PhD (and until my 1st fac appt) I believed advances in large-scale neuro would come from more powerful modeling. There’s still a place for that oc, but we’re still in imaging infancy, and the best value per $ in terms of new insight comes from well designed common sense experiments

Join our department! We're hiring an Assistant Professor of Teaching (Tenure-track), located at UBC's Vancouver campus, with an anticipated start date of July 1, 2026. Apply by Oct 1, 2025. Learn more & apply: psych.ubc.ca/jobs. Please share!

I love it when a grant comes together.

The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making Author summary Breathing is more than just a vital process for survival — it influences how we perceive and interact with the world around us. Recent research suggests that the rhythm of breathing, fr...

🧠 New paper on breathing and the brain, out now
@plos.org Computational Biology! 🫁
"The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making"
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
We show how respiratory 'tidal computations' alter our decisons!

Almost missed that this is out! Former postdoc Liz Necka led this long overdue FMRI study formally comparing two types of pain modulation: Placebo analgesia & predictive cues. TLDR: these are NOT the same! Placebo analgesia reduced cue effects, & brain mechanisms were nearly all dissociable. 1/4

Thanks Ben! The #cancer and treatment has been hard but the music and science has been a great outlet. Hope you are doing okay.

Hi world - its been a hard year with #cancer meaning I missed out lots of fun things. It would mean a lot if you checked out my new album of tracks. Out on all platforms including #Soundcloud (free). Let me know which tracks you like and a special prize if you work out the two levels to the project

Congrats @leahbanellis.bsky.social @micahgallen.com et al! This looks great.

Stomach–brain coupling indexes a dimensional signature of mental health - Nature Mental Health Using a relatively large and diverse sample of mostly young adults, this study by Banellis, Rebollo and colleagues examines associations between regional stomach–brain coupling and mental health and i...

I’m elated to share our latest publication - out now in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s44... - tour de force by @leahbanellis.bsky.social @brainandstomach.bsky.social and the rest of the VMP team!

A neural manifold view of the brain - Nature Neuroscience Recent advances in neuroscience have revealed how neural population activity underlying behavior can be well described by topological objects called neural manifolds. Understanding how nature, nurture...

Check out our new review/perspective (w/ @juangallego.bsky.social & Devika Narain) on neural manifolds in the brain! It was a lot of fun to think through these ideas over the past couple of years, and I'm excited it's finally out in the world!

🔗: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
📄: rdcu.be/ex8hW

Thank you! It would be amazing to know which tracks you like the best.

Why AI chatbots lie to us A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine needed to collect and format some data from a website, and he asked the latest version of Anthropic’s generative AI system, Claude, for help. Claude cheerfully agr...

Enjoyed this article. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It does, it does!

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 ⬇️

Seeing the Mind, Educating the Brain

If you are in Paris on October 1-3 : we are organizing a fantastic cognitive neuroscience conference at Collège de France, on topics ranging from language to math, education and consciousness, with many of my favorite scientists !
Full program here:
www.unicog.org/seeing-the-m...

Call for papers @jneurolang.bsky.social: Towards a Deeper Understanding of the Relationship Between the Neurobiology of Language and Consciousness. 🧠🗨️

direct.mit.edu/DocumentLibr...

☎️ DM me for more details.

This looks interesting👇

How our expectations change what we feel and see This study explores how our expectations influence what we feel and see. We asked participants to predict how painful or visually intense an upcoming stimulus would be based on cues that they believed...

Predictive processing models posit top-down influences of internal models on brain processing at multiple levels...but how deeply does predictive info penetrate into perception? What are the limits? New paper with @rotembot.bsky.social and @fmristats.bsky.social
link.growkudos.com/1mmf28pbmkg

This looks cool!! cc @hardigirl.bsky.social @ravenwallace.bsky.social

Does your smartwatch say you’re stressed? It may often be wrong Consumer grade smartwatches may not be as accurate as promised when measuring tiredness or stress. That conclusion is drawn by researchers Björn Siepe and Eiko Fried based on a comparison between smar...

1/2
Press release @unileiden.bsky.social about our upcoming JoPACS paper led by @bsiepe.bsky.social, showing that the overlap of similar constructs assessed via wearable vs EMA data is surprisingly low (n~850, 3 months).

www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/news/2025...

In a non trivial way the #climate_crisis is reducible to shortcomings in human intelligence. This idea is behind my new release with the Natural Philosophers with Attitude: "Hot Summer Nights". Please check it out!
Spotify
open.spotify.com/album/0Tju52...
Soundcloud
soundcloud.com/npwa/sets/ho...

RIP Ozzy. You blazed your own trail.

Thanks! Let me know which tracks on the album you like, and if I can provide any more input on the paper!
Take Care.

Excited to share my first publication! TLDR; mind-wandering is contagious & classmate behavior can cause an increase in task-unrelated thoughts! Thank you to my collaborator, @michaeljkane.bsky.social for guidance throughout this project.

You can read it here - online.ucpress.edu/collabra/art...

𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗼𝘀𝗰𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 (mostly cortex)
Can someone recommend a recent review that is *assessible* to beginning PhD students. More/somewhat mathematical is fine. thanks
#neuroskyence

So excited to share this new preprint, spearheaded by the brilliant @benjyb.bsky.social! We report that people are consistently slower to report that their imagery is weak than to report that it is vivid ✨🤔

Natural-philosophers With Attitude - Hot Summer Nights! Listen to Hot Summer Nights! on your streaming service

Also on Tidal!
tidal.com/browse/album...