Matan Mazor

In fact, I should like to propose a generalization; one which I fondly hope will some day come to be known as 'Fodor's First Law of the Nonexistence of Cognitive Science'. It goes like this: the more global (e.g., the more isotropic) a cognitive process is, the less anybody understands it. Very global processes, like analogical reasoning, aren't understood at all. More about such matters in the last part of this discussion.

the correct spirit for writing. everyone should propose their own Law.

What a beautiful figure

Getting journal rejections like

😭

existential dread indeed :(

All eyes on UCL for its 200th birthday. Across 3 nights our Wilkins Building and main Quad will transform into an immersive sound and light experience as UCL illuminated takes us through the history of London’s oldest university. 11–13 Feb 2026 https://www.ucl.ac.uk/event-ticketing/app/ev/25074/

Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences:

"Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition"

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

This is truly amazing: some LLMs can detect when concepts are injected into their internal activations.

transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introsp...

Animal testing to be phased out faster as UK unveils roadmap for alternative methods New plan backs researchers to seize on new and developing opportunities to phase out animal tests with specific commitments for the coming years.

Very happy to see the UK government making a commitment to phasing out animal testing
www.gov.uk/government/n...

Because everything is shit, I give you ... Puggles. #Platypus #AustralianWildlife

#BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! 🎺

This Friday, November 7th, the Brain Meeting speaker will be Simon Van Gaal giving a talk entitled "Linking global state fluctuations and recurrent processing to conscious perception in humans"

In person or online. For more information:
www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/event

Ellie be careful you seem to be on fire!

me with some garden hoses connected in a X -> Z <- Y fashion. If I shut the valve at Z, water from X spills out at Y

I built a DAG diagram with garden hoses for teaching.
Pictured: a collider bias diagram, inspired by a blocked pipe situation I experienced (which I credit with giving me the intuition though it also ruined my belongings in the flooded cellar).

Super happy to see this review out! We ask why people are so reluctant to abandon goals and how this commitment could be understood computationally. Work with Jill O'Reilly & @yaelniv.bsky.social

Sure, I mean cases where N is so large that everything is significant, and SEs when plotted are thinner than the thickness of a single line. The implication of plotting SDs can be: all differences are significant, so we give you information about the shape of the distribution.

I've sometimes seen this when N is very large and so all differences are significant and SEs are not actually very informative

We're excited to announce that Cognitive Science at Dartmouth is recruiting PhD students to work collaboratively with me, Steven Frankland, and Fred Callaway. Come study the principles and mechanisms that enable us to understand, plan, and act in the world! Info: sites.dartmouth.edu/cogscigrad/

Whenever you feel annoyed by someone on the internet, think instead of someone you appreciate and send them a note to tell them so.

“There’s almost no limit to what you can get people to do if you let them think it is their idea”

Jim Downey - former SNL writer

🚨New Preprint: We develop a novel task that probes counterfactual thinking without using counterfactual language, and that teases apart genuine counterfactual thinking from related forms of thinking. Using this task, we find that the ability for counterfactual thinking emerges around 5 years of age.

The Causality in Cognition Lab at Stanford University is recruiting PhD students this cycle!

We are a supportive team who happened to wear bluesky appropriate colors for the lab photo (this wasn't planned). 💙

Lab info: cicl.stanford.edu
Application details: psychology.stanford.edu/admissions/p...

Neural correlates of perceptual consciousness from within: a narrative review of human intracranial research Despite many years of research, the quest to identify neural correlates of perceptual consciousness (NCC) remains unresolved. One major obstacle lies in methodological limitations: most studies rely o...

Everything you always wanted to know about intracranial correlates of #consciousness (but were afraid to ask):
arxiv.org/abs/2510.08736

With @francoisstock.bsky.social, @liadmudrik.bsky.social, @meaperei.bsky.social and many great clinicians too busy for bsky!

#iEEG

"at once the culmination of something and its caricature"

Beautiful

New preprint!

"Non-commitment in mental imagery is distinct from perceptual inattention, and supports hierarchical scene construction"

(by Li, Hammond, & me)

link: doi.org/10.31234/osf...

-- the title's a bit of a mouthful, but the nice thing is that it's a pretty decent summary

All credit to @danwphilosophy.bsky.social

Fascinating paper argues that (roughly) consciousness theories are untestable and unverifiable, and so instead they are selected to fit our moral preferences and preconceptions.

VERY strong recommend in this very short piece!

The final line is magnificent; so is @danwphilosophy.bsky.social’s theory on which the piece rests. Together, they exactly describe my naïve experience of wandering into #AIEthics over the decades.

#consciousness

The human need for rationalizations has shaped consciousness science since its inception. Descartes saw his view that animals were unconscious automatons “not so much cruel to beasts but respectful to human beings… whom it absolves from any suspicion of crime whenever they kill or eat animals” (Descartes, 1999, cited in Kaldas, 2015). More recently, a new wave of biological naturalism, arguing that consciousness is inherently a property of living beings (Aru et al., 2023; Findlay et al., 2024; Seth, 2025) coincided with concerns about the potentially devastating moral implications of conscious AI (Long et al., 2024). As with Fleming and Michel’s fish, or Descartes’ beasts, there may be good epistemic reasons to favour a theory in which AI cannot be conscious. Yet a full understanding of consciousness science requires taking seriously the force of rationalizations in theory formation and selection.