Ben Young

MIT Consciousness Club The MIT Consciousness Club aims to foster interdisciplinary research on consciousness at MIT and in the broader Boston area by organizing a monthly event featuring an expert talk on consciousness foll...

Join us tomorrow (9/19) at noon by Zoom for the first seminar of the MIT Consciousness Club
sites.google.com/view/mit-con...
#neuroscience

The role of mental imagery in worry: Insights from aphantasia. Worry is characterised by thinking about prospective negative future outcomes, and is a key cognitive feature of anxiety. The influential Cognitive Av…

The role of mental imagery in worry: Insights from aphantasia www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

MIT Consciousness Club The MIT Consciousness Club aims to foster interdisciplinary research on consciousness at MIT and in the broader Boston area by organizing a monthly event featuring an expert talk on consciousness foll...

Here's the schedule for the MIT Consciousness Club this year: sites.google.com/view/mit-con.... I'm looking forward to it! (Rooms will be announced soon; and we're currently working on a zoom option for those who would like to join online)

The Scent of Memory: Cultural Identity Through Odors in Brazil www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6...

Philosophers on Bluesky who work on the chemical senses include @barrycsmith.bsky.social, @smellosopher.bsky.social, @benyoung.bsky.social, @asifamajid.bsky.social, @giuliamartina.bsky.social, @bexmillar.bsky.social, and me. See also my starter pack of philosophers of perception: go.bsky.app/B2HQDad

Representations of smells: The next frontier for language models? Whereas human cognition develops through perceptually driven interactions with the environment, language models (LMs) are “disembodied learners” which…

Cool new paper:

Representations of smells: The next frontier for language models? www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Ben @benyoung.bsky.social and I are editing a special issue on the philosophy of smell and taste. Whether you have worked on these intriguing senses before or want to get into them for the first time, this is your call! Bonus point: fully open access 👍

philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

Call for Papers:
Philosophy and Chemosenses special issue of Philosophy and the Mind Sciences (fully open access with no fees) edited by @giuliamartina.bsky.social and me. Deadline for submissions September 1.

Submit early and often for best results

philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph...

Harvard appears to think all Jews support Israel. That is discriminatory | Barry Trachtenberg, Victor Silverman, Atalia Omer, Raz Segal, Rebecca T Alpert We are Jewish scholars who filed an amicus brief with the US supreme court on Harvard’s discriminatory assumption that being Jewish means supporting Israel

"Jews are capable of forming their own views about Israel, Palestine and everything else. We don’t need institutions to tell us what we must believe to be authentically Jewish."

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Pleased to say "Space, Time, and Memory", an academic book by Oxford University Press edited by the inimitable Lynn Nadel & Sara Aronowitz is now out.
I contributed a chapter, "Memory and Planning in Brains and Machines".
You can download the entire book for free:
library.oapen.org/bitstream/ha...

Working from the summer office

Scents and imagination - CRASSH CRASSH symposium

For those around Cambridge check out this wonderful smell symposium:

Scents and imagination www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/45567...

And it was for an eye appointment including a prescription for reading glasses. Truly raging against the dying of … something … I cannot remember the rest.

Spring break reading

Spring break smells

A poster/flyer describing a Philosophy talk by Amia Srinivasan at the University of Nevada, Reno, on April 14th.

The Philosophy department at the University of Nevada is hosting a cool lecture on April 14th.

Amia Srinivasan will be speaking on "Genealogies of Oppression: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Liberation".

The event is free and open to the public. If you're in or nearby Reno, NV, feel free to attend!

Cognition in multi-species sociality Different species can sometimes collaborate to forage more efficiently. Sampaio et al. describe several examples of such cooperation in the animal world and provide insight into the ecological conditi...

Great to see this new primer on the cognitive capacities that support multi-species sociality www.cell.com/current-biol...

Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science is a new, multidisciplinary guide to understanding the mind: a freely-available, growing collection of peer-reviewed articles introducing key topics to a bro...

The MIT Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science is a growing resource, expertly edited and designed, with high quality contributors (OK OK I am one of them) oecs.mit.edu

The best introductory books on smell and flavor Benjamin Young shares the 5 best books on smell and flavor. Have you read What the Nose Knows?

For those interested in books about smell, taste, and flavor I made a short (eclectic) list of recommendations
shepherd.com/best-books/s...
#philosophy #perception #Smell #Taste

One more day to get your paper in.

Reached peak middle age standing in line on a Friday waiting for Costco to open to avoid the weekend crowds.

Visual attention and representational content Abstract. Attention makes a phenomenal difference to visual experience, but the nature of this difference is controversial. There are three possibilities.

Visual attention and representational content academic.oup.com/pq/advance-a...

The metabolic costs of cognition Cognition and behavior are emergent properties of brain systems that seek to maximize complex and adaptive behaviors while minimizing energy utilizati…

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

The metabolic costs of cognition

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

Tastes and retronasal odours evoke a shared flavour-specific neural code in the human insula During food consumption, tastes combine with retronasal odours to form flavour, which leads to a link so robust that retronasal odours can elicit taste sensations without concurrent taste stimulation....

Tastes and retronasal odours evoke a shared flavour-specific neural code in the human insula www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#PhilSky #PhilPerception #taste #flavor #smell

Starting the week with a rejection always sucks.
Reviewer #3 strikes again.

It’s All About the Layers: Lycan on Olfactory Representation Up until the early 2000s, philosophical discussions of olfaction were rare. However, the recent effort to explore, and assess, the dominant visual model of theorizing about perception has produced a s...

It’s All About the Layers: Lycan on Olfactory Representation link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

The Santa Fe Institute @sfiscience.bsky.social is looking for new faculty members! Surely one of the best gigs in the world.

santafe.edu/about/jobs/r...

For SoCal friends,

Here is a list of resources for shelter, animal boarding, free items, and distribution hubs. These places can also use donations (e.g., food, water, masks, and blankets). Please consider donating if you can.

For more info, visit Instagram: mutualaidla

Olfactory Philosophy Workshop Call For Papers: Olfactory Philosophy, April 30 - May 3, 2025 The Department of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Reno will be hosting a workshop on Olfactory Philosophy April 30 - May 3, 2025 a...

CFP: Olfactory Philosophy Workshop at UNR Lake Tahoe
philevents.org/event/show/1...
Please spread the CFP widely to PhD students and ECRs - the deadline is January 31