Olgerta Asko

A very, very brief history of time From tracking the heavens to formulating relativity and entropy, understanding time has been a major human endeavour, says a University of Melbourne expert

“Time is intimately tied up with the structure of space and the way things work. It’s not a blank canvas upon which you impose your existence, it’s part of your machinery and existence – the passage of time.”

#time #science #curiosity

pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/a-v...

How brains construct reality with Karl Friston We tend to think of the mind as something that passively perceives an objective world. But perception is active, inferential, and deeply shaped by uncertainty. In this interview with the Institute of ...

We often think of the mind as something that passively perceives an objective world. | https://bit.ly/49UAMxr

In this interview, neuroscientist Karl Friston argues that the brain is not a mirror of reality but a prediction machine, constantly constructing the world it experiences.

#philsci

AI cannot automate science – a philosopher explains the uniquely human aspects of doing research While AI can streamline certain parts of the scientific process, a philosopher argues that it cannot replace human expertise and collaboration.

AI can speed up research, but it can’t automate science. Pattern-finding isn’t discovery. Humans still decide what counts as evidence, which questions matter, and whether results survive replication and debate into consensus.

#AI #Science #Neuroscience #research #philosophy #AIphilosophy

Forsker: Vær glad for livets overraskelser Hver av dem gjør hjernen din litt mer finjustert.

So happy to see my research at @forskning.bsky.social

#brain #brainresearch @uio.no

www.forskning.no/hjernen-part...

From Generalisation to Deliberation I write about the human ability to move from generalisation to deliberation

If human deliberation is grounded in episodic memory and lived, embodied experience, what would it take for AI to get anything like that grounding?
Thank you @arjensenius.bsky.social for a nice article on my trial lecture.
#AI #BRAIN #embodiedAI #AIresearch

www.arj.no/2026/01/09/g...

Is AI pretending to be intelligent, or is it really? @blaiseaguera.bsky.social #Technology #Books

Researcher and CTO at Google, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, argues that AI's intelligence lies in its ability to make predictions.

Read the full article: bigthink.com/books/blaise...

Why You Should Welcome Life's Surprises with Gratitude - Research News Each time you have an experience that defies your expectations, your brain becomes slightly more fine-tuned.

Perhaps you should start the new year with welcoming life's surprises?🤔
Your brain becomes slightly more fine-tuned every time you have an experience that defies your expectations!🧠
Read about @olgasko.bsky.social's research here:
www.uio.no/english/rese...

The 10 Most Mind-Blowing Discoveries About the Brain in 2025 From glowing neurons to newborn memories, here are the most fascinating brain discoveries of 2025

www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-m...

From a workshop on collaboration skills, two things stood out as essential foundations of good teamwork: TRUST & COMMUNICATION:
👉Reliability, transparency & a space where it’s safe to ask, challenge & learn.
👉Clarity on goals, roles, expectations & feedback.

Strong science is built together!

Human single-neuron responses to multi-feature auditory deviants: Evidence from amygdala, hippocampus, insula, and auditory cortex The ability to detect unexpected sounds within regular acoustic patterns is fundamental to adaptive behavior. This capacity is reflected in the mismatch negativity (MMN) event-related potential and ha...

New preprint from my colleagues @viniciusrc.bsky.social & @ablenkmann.bsky.social: they recorded single neurons in human amygdala, hippocampus, insula & auditory cortex during a multi-feature auditory oddball paradigm (frequency, timing, intensity, location).
www.authorea.com/users/100748...
#brain

Seeing my own child take part in an eye-tracking study today reminded me how hard research is: babies move, get distracted, and don’t follow instructions…yet every single data is precious.🧠👶
A little reminder: research needs participants, stubborn researchers, and funding to exist at all.💙

“…to understand the brain, we might need to challenge our intuitions about how it works - “in the same way that quantum mechanics is challenging to comport with our understanding of physical phenomena in the world.”
www.quantamagazine.org/mental-pheno...

Animals seamlessly combine what they see and hear. This study presents a simple, biologically inspired model that predicts how visual and auditory cues are integrated across humans, monkeys, and rats.

🔗 buff.ly/HfMDRkH

Sources: Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05133-8), National Human Genome Research Institute (https://www.genome.gov/ human-genome-project), The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jun/18/dna-fingerprinting-30-years-on), National Institutes of Health (https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/testing/genetictesting), Science (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/337/6096/816).

🧪RIP James Watson, one four scientists credited with deciphering the structure of DNA.

It was Rosalind Franklin’s X ray diffraction image that revealed the double helix structure.

1/ Want to try your hand at science communication but don’t know where to start?

We put together seven tried and tested tips for communicating preprinted research with suggestions and resources that can help you on social media and beyond! #SciComm

🔗 buff.ly/1jesQg5

Brain Dynamics of Mental Manipulation Humans effortlessly juggle their internal thoughts, but the neuronal dynamics that support mental manipulation are largely unknown. Leveraging the high spatiotemporal fidelity of intracranial recordin...

What happens in the brain when we manipulate our thoughts?

We asked 30 epilepsy patients to mentally invert short melodies.

Intracerebral #iEEG recordings suggest brain synchrony and sensory inhibition are key for mental manipulation:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

#neuroskyence #musicscience

Figure from Alnes et al., 2025

​Our new paper on auditory processing in NREM sleep is online! We study how iERP and HFA responses in the temporal lobe are modulated by slow waves of sleep:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Congratulations to Sigurd Alnes for his brilliant work and to the entire team!

Our brains evolved to survive, not to find truth | Samuel McKee We like to believe that reason is our pathway to truth. Yet from Popper’s demand for falsifiability to Darwin’s doubt about the mind’s origins, a more unsettling picture is emerging. In an age that pr...

📖A fascinating read on how our mental architecture is shaped more for social cohesion and survival than for discovering objective truth. Evolution has given us a brain that’s brilliant… but maybe not built to find the truth of the word.🌟🧠
#evolution #brain

iai.tv/articles/our...

From MRI to Ozempic: breakthroughs that show why fundamental research must be protected In these financially straitened times, funders must recognize that great discoveries often arise from work that was looking for something completely different.

We praise innovation, yet starve the science that makes it possible. The history of discovery shows a simple truth: transformative breakthroughs arise from questions without immediate utility. Support curiosity, not just impact!!!🔬🧠
www.nature.com/articles/d41...
#research #curiosity #science

🚨 Join me for a hands-on #iElectrodes tutorial at #PracticalMEEG!
📍 Online • 🗓 Thursday, Oct 30 • 14:00–17:00 CET
Learn how to localize intracranial electrodes — and explore many other great toolboxes:
cuttingeeg.org/practicalmee...

#iEEG #ECoG #SEEG

🧠🚨The first brain-wide map of neural activity during complex behaviour has been created!

Read the study here: lnkd.in/dh8hwxjw

#brain #neuroscience #nature #brainmapping #behavior

«As statistical machines, the models make predictions by generalizing on the basis of learnt associations, leading them to produce answers that are plausible, but sometimes wrong.»

Pioneering journal eLife faces major test after loss of impact factor The open-access title’s bold publishing model has brought long-bubbling conflicts to the fore.

📉 Big shift in publishing: eLife has lost its Impact Factor, raising debate over its bold open-review model, and the continuing dominance of traditional metrics.

🔗 Full story in Nature: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

#OpenScience #AcademicPublishing @elife.bsky.social

Neural mechanisms of predictive processing: a collaborative community experiment through the OpenScope program This review synthesizes advances in predictive processing within the sensory cortex. Predictive processing theorizes that the brain continuously predicts sensory inputs, refining neuronal responses by...

A large-scale collaborative consensus piece on predictive processing is now online arxiv.org/abs/2504.09614 impressively orchestrated by @jeromelecoq.bsky.social

🧠🎶 New research shows your brain doesn’t just hear sounds, it reshapes itself in real time.
Scientists at Aarhus University & Oxford developed FREQ-NESS, a new method to map brain networks by their frequencies.

#Neuroscience #Brainwaves #MusicAndTheBrain

How humans became upright: key changes to our pelvis found Nature - Genetic and anatomical data reveal how the human pelvis acquired its unique shape, enabling our ancestors to walk on two legs.

Researchers have mapped the key structural changes in the pelvis that enabled early humans to first walk on two legs and accommodate giving birth to a big-brained baby

go.nature.com/4n5h71m

Predictive encoding of auditory sequences in the human prefrontal cortex Humans extract regularities from the environment to form expectations that guide perception and optimize behavior. Although the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is central to this process, the relative contrib...

🤔How does the human brain predict unexpected sounds?
Our new study shows that the prefrontal cortex doesn’t work as a single unit. Instead, the orbitofrontal and lateral prefrontal cortex make distinct, time-sensitive contributions. #iEEG #BrainLesion #OFC #LPFC
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Science in one picture 🧠🔬😁
#research #academicword #science