Dr. Angelica Lim

And generally, I'm curious about how appetitive behaviour affects our mood.

Cellular mechanisms of circadian pacemaking: beyond transcriptional loops - PubMed Circadian clocks drive the daily rhythms in our physiology and behaviour that adapt us to the 24-h solar and social worlds. Because they impinge upon every facet of metabolism, their acute or chronic ...

Relevant: "several psychiatric conditions are associated with disordered sleep/wake cycles, i.e. poorly organised behavioural rhythms." pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23604476/

Food as circadian time cue for appetitive behavior - PubMed Feeding schedules entrain circadian clocks in multiple brain regions and most peripheral organs and tissues, thereby synchronizing daily rhythms of foraging behavior and physiology with times of day w...

This week I'm learning about circadian clocks. Interestingly, our bodies have separate clocks entrained by light and food. The light-dark (LD) cycle synchronizing the SCN in the hypothalamus, and food-entrainable oscillators (FEO) throughout the body.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32047614/

What day are you here? Would love to meet up and talk shop. Can also show you around!

Python Practice Lab A guide to learning basic programming by writing fun, working programs that gradually become more complex

Doing final checks on my Intro to Programming book and I'm really psyched about it. It takes an approach to learning programming that reflects my journey in learning French and Japanese. If you can learn a second language, you can learn Python! Out in Spring! press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Listening to Foreign Languages: Pump Up the Volume! | Journal of Cognition

Illusions are so fascinating. Apparently we perceive words as taller if we know them (as opposed to pseudo-words) and perceive words as *louder* if we know them, too. journalofcognition.org/articles/10....

Interested in brain-body interactions but unsure where to start?

🎮 Choose your character

👩🏻‍🔬👨🏽‍🔬 Current scientists: a new review by @michaelgaebler.com A. Villringer & V. Nikulin

🧒🏼👧🏾 Future scientists (and people of all ages): our scicomm article with @agatapatyczek.bsky.social & @el-rei.bsky.social

What if many psychiatric disorders share the same hidden glitch in how the brain infers reality? In a new volume, Al Powers and I gather experts to examine how disrupted sensory inference across #vision, #touch, #proprioception and #interoception might unify our understanding.

"the frame problem broadly refers to the difficulty of teaching a machine to make smart decisions based on relevant information without having it explicitly consider every irrelevant detail." Is De Sousa (et al)'s suggestion that emotions solve the frame problem not considered useful for AI?

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning?

Read on to find out more! 🧵

YouTube video by em2134x Kinesin protein walking on microtubule

Also, can we appreciate these animations of how cargos are transported across microtubules on an axon? 🤯 There are even different types of transports that perform obstacle avoidance youtu.be/y-uuk4Pr2i8

Axonal transport deficits in neuropsychiatric disorders - PubMed Axonal transport is a major cellular process that mediates bidirectional signaling between the soma and synapse, enabling both intracellular and intercellular communications. Cellular materials, such ...

For example, last week was on vesicular trafficking and axonal transport. And now, this paper has now become mostly legible \o/ pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36252719/
Next week is on mitochondria. How is it useful to my research? Might not be, but it feels nice to start to see the bigger picture.

As an engineer, it's fascinating to take a translational neuroscience course from @sfuneuro.bsky.social. This term, the goal is start to fill in the blanks - how do we go from molecules to behaviour? www.sfu.ca/neuro-instit... Super compelling!

Interesting tidbit I learned: 90% of SCZ patients don't have a parent with the diagnosis.

// Oof, probably a contributing factor to late diagnosis: parents don't know the symptoms and can't identify when psychosis happens until it's severe

This week, I'm reading Strong Imagination by @danielnettle.bsky.social, recommended to me by a biology colleague working on schizophrenia. It's fascinating to read research spanning biological evidence to social science.

The title of the paper, "Beliefs about Perception Shape Perceptual Inference: An Ideal Observer Model of Detection", with the author names, and Fig. 1: a schematic of an inverse optics account of vision.

Our "I would have seen it if it were there" paper — a collaboration with @ranimo.bsky.social and @clarepress.bsky.social — is now out in Psych. Review.

There’s a lot in this paper, but here are what I see as the 3 main takeaways:

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Week 1 of a molecular neuroscience course - I don't know what I don't know. Also, it seems I don't know a lot ☺️

Jesus, just a warning if you get into this book -- I cried about 7 times reading it. Also noted down 7 cool papers to follow up on (no correlation)! But damn, it hits you in the feels.

One question that Rust brought up in her book was "what is the adaptive purpose of SZ?" I have a book by Dan Mettle discussing this on my reading list (I think the theory is creativity) but I also wonder about inferring intent in the search for mates. Seems like a pretty strong motivation.

Participants predicted the action of their partner more quickly when they were passionately in love
psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-...

Also, something that I am surprised to read about only now (or maybe I forgot), is that mirror neuron activity is only relevant when observing an intentional action (e.g. raising hand to eat), not an action by itself (e.g. raising hand near mouth).

Neuroimaging of Love in the Twenty-first Century (Chapter 4) - The New Psychology of Love The New Psychology of Love - December 2018

For example, she writes about studies investigating the insula and activations of love (anterior insula) vs desire (posterior insula)

www.cambridge.org/core/books/n...

Next up on my sabbatical journey is this book by Stephanie Cacioppo. It's simultaneously intellectually invigorating and heart wrenching.

The human brain reveals resting state activity patterns that are predictive of biases in attitudes toward robots Biases toward treating robots as intentional agents or mechanical artifacts show a distinct neural activation pattern at rest.

Fascinating study by Agnieszka Wykowska's group that shows that resting state EEG can predict whether an individual treats a robot as intentional agents or mechanistic artifacts
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Thanks!!

Paper from OpenAI says hallucinations are less a problem with LLMs themselves & more an issue with training on tests that only reward right answers. That encourages guessing rather than saying “I don’t know”

If true, there is a straightforward path for more reliable AI through better training.

And does encoding require an action taken (and corresponding reward), or does this also occur in an unsupervised task?

This is very cool. Does this also take into account variable length chunks?

This looks super interesting, thanks for sharing!!

De Felice et al 2025: relational neuroscience, insights from hyperscanning

Flux 2025 symposium - is neural synchrony a developmental mechanism?

Looking fwd to our neural synchrony symposium today - & especially learning more from @pvrticka.bsky.social on synchrony in #fNIRS. For a preview check out an excellent 2025 review led by @saradefelice.bsky.social - join us 3pm in Hyde 1. 🧠 ⚡️ 🧠 #flux2025

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...