Cody Cushing

After five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Here rdcu.be/es8A1 we respond to the recent (unfair) editorial in Nature about recent criticisms of IIT theory of consciousness. We keep fighting for transparent and serious science. @hakwan.bsky.social @felipedebrigard.bsky.social @deanbuono.bsky.social

The brilliant @rastokke.bsky.social showing how shoddy evidence can spread like wildfire and how this has serious consequences #rEDTO25

Is vision modular or not?
The debate continues.
doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...

How can we resolve ambiguous visual input? To answer this question, Mooney images meets THINGS and large scale behavior! Amazing effort by an amazing crew in Granada, and happy to play a small part in it!

different coloured mice on a white background

Turns out, two of pain’s most famous messengers — Substance P and CGRPα — might not be so essential after all. Mice missing both still felt pain just fine, challenging decades of assumptions about how pain signals travel.
buff.ly/ypISrtx

who says that science doesn't generate profit?

Very happy to announce that our paper “Sensory Horizons and the Functions of Conscious Vision” is now out as a target article in BBS!! @smfleming.bsky.social and I present a new theory of the evolution and functions of visual consciousness. Article here: doi.org/10.1017/S014.... A (long) thread 🧵

new preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

aphantasics reported to feel less 'absorbed' as they read stories, but they dwelled just as much on words that typically evoke imagery. so perhaps they just didn't realize they have (non-conscious) imagery too

Ali Moharramipour's 1st paper as senior author

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check out our METACOGNITIVE SCIENCE MEETING!! in collaboration with @cogcompneuro.bsky.social !! come one come all to Amsterdam in August!

Home This satellite meeting showcases the latest research on metacognition, in the form of both keynotes and short oral presentations. About this meeting The Metacognitive Science Meeting grew out of an ...

We are extremely excited to announce the 4th edition of the Metacognitive Science Meeting (formerly known as the Perceptual Metacognition Satellite) - to be held on August 11th 2025, right before @cogcompneuro.bsky.social in Amsterdam!

For info and how to submit: sites.google.com/view/metacog...

"that would be asking for a right to wrong, rather than a right to be wrong". well said

i used to have blog on consciousness. i just uploaded my final post there, in which i responded to Alex Gomez-Marin & Anil Seth's recent commentary on the scientific status of IIT.

inconsciousnesswetrust.blogspot.com/2025/03/fina...

so long, folks.

the world is going nuts. pls take care.

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Remember the controversy about IIT last year - I have great sympathy to the critical side? Well if you want to think a bit about what pseudosciences are and whether we can distinguish science and paeudoscience here is a new short book ffeee download. t.co/6YvZ1kwLti

Also there's an irony here given all the complaints about posting a preprint last time that this debuts behind a paywall. Anyone in need of a pdf please reach out

Why Tononi’s Defense of IIT Fails to Convince Me I am one of the co-signers of the letter labeling IIT as “pseudoscience” for numerous reasons. These include a definition of…

Why Tononi et al's defense of IIT fails to convince me. medium.com/@kording/86f...

Now longer and in nature neuroscience. Why I (and 60+ of my closest friends) think IIT is pseudoscience. Has no empirical evidence. Has no hope of future empirical evidence. Open and closed case in my view.

Wave physics as an analog recurrent neural network Analog machine learning computations are performed passively by propagating light and sound waves through programmed materials.

Analog computing with waves. It's a thing. It's powerful and way more energy efficient than digital computing. The brain doesn’t just discard those useful waves.
Wave physics as an analog recurrent neural network
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
#neuroscience

The Saxe Lab @ MIT is hiring! We seek one lab manager to start in summer 2025. Research in our lab focuses on social cognition (learn more on saxelab.mit.edu).

Please apply at: tinyurl.com/saxe2025 (Job ID 31993).

Review of applications starts on March 24, 2025.

Sharing appreciated. Thank you!

Hypotheses No Longer Cut It For decades, hypothesis-driven research has been the cornerstone of inquiry — from health and neuroscience to political science, economics…

Why hypothesis testing is not the way forward to understand brains: medium.com/@kording/hyp...

Psilocybin alters visual contextual computations Psilocybin alters perception and brain dynamics. Contextual computations are ubiquitous in the brain. Here, we investigate the effects of psilocybin using psychophysics, ultra-high field functional MR...

Psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, alters perception and induces hallucinations. In this preprint, we show through visual illusions, fMRI and modeling that psilocybin affects contextual computations, a potentially general mechanism of psychedelics.

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

Very happy to see it

Does the culture you grow up in shape the way you see the world? In a new Psych Review paper, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I tackle this centuries-old question using the Müller-Lyer illusion as a case study. Come think through one of history's mysteries with us🧵(1/13):

🎉Postdoc Alert! I am recruiting a postdoc to start Summer 2025 in the Mind & Morality Lab at Brown. If you're interested, please send a CV, cover letter, and names of at least two references to julia_marshall1@brown.edu by 2/28. If you have questions, don't hesitate to reach out!

I am hiring a full time study coordinator for our EBI-BD study which uses EEG, cognitive testing, EMA, and wearables to study emotion-based impulsivity in bipolar disorder. Excellent position for someone who is interested in grad school!

careers.umich.edu/job_detail/2...

Thanks to everyone's feedback, we have updated our calculator to optimize sample size N & scan time T for fMRI studies: leonoqr.github.io/ORSP_Calcula...

The first new feature is that users can explore how different N & T leads to different accuracy, e.g., N=1000 & T=30min => 81% max accuracy. 🧵

informal announcement: we'll be doing a *cluster* hire of faculty in theoretical/computational neuroscience in the coming year(s). a senior/mid-career person could be selected to bring in 2-3 more ppl of their choosing (subject to committee approval), or we could otherwise hire together a group 1/

Worth also pointing out that there are many "tests so easy no AI system can pass them".

Moravec's paradox remains.

E.g., arxiv.org/abs/2404.12390

Luminance invariant encoding in mouse primary visual cortex O’Shea et al. investigates how the transition between cone- and rod-mediated vision affects neural representations in central visual areas of the mouse. Whereas the thalamus inherits luminance-depende...

New article out from the lab led by graduate student Ronan O'Shea on the V1 representation of day and night vision. www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Opposite asymmetry in visual perception of humans and macaques Human adults exhibit visual performance asymmetries as a function of polar angle. Tünçok et al. investigate whether macaque monkeys show asymmetries and how they differ from humans. Both species exhib...

Human have higher sensitivity in the lower compared to upper visual field. It turns out that macaques show the opposite pattern: www.cell.com/current-biol.... I'd hypothesize that this is evidence that neither of these effects is innate; instead, they both develop with experience. #VisionScience