Rik Henson

Very useful tips…

Such a loss for Mother Nature, but a message of hope…

PhD Course in Tracing brain and behavioural changes across the life span: Influence of intrinsic and extrinsic factors The PhD course is offered by the Danish Research Centre for Magnetic Resonance in collaboration with the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen. Aim and content This course i...

Very much enjoyed a day helping with the @drcmr.bsky.social training programme in development and aging www.drcmr.dk/news-events/... - great questions from attentive students!

Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing - Communications Biology Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.

The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next.

New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky

nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time One of the most devastating diseases finally has a treatment that can slow its progression and transform lives, tearful doctors tell BBC.

Wow! This is amazing news. Having friends who are confronted with Huntington's, this brings a ray of hope.

bbc.com/news/article...

"If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation,we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend they are role models.” – Lester B. Pearson

That reminded me of a favorite quote from Lester Pearson, a former Canadian Prime Minister and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Nation capable of spotting spurious link between paracetamol and autism still baffled by obvious link between guns and mass shootings The United States has once again demonstrated its unique talent for scientific deduction by confidently declaring there may be a link between pregnant women taking paracetamol and children developi…

NEWS! Nation capable of spotting spurious link between paracetamol and autism still baffled by obvious link between guns and mass shootings

Dutch late night TV has its take

"CamCAN 15 years on" - a new preprint reviewing all findings about the cognitive neuroscience of ageing from sharing CamCAN data, led by @rhens.bsky.social : osf.io/preprints/ps...

Written by a doctor at St Thomas' Hospital, London after the Tommy Robinson march on 13/9.

Here we go again - a room full of attendees from all over the world at #COGNESTIC 2025, excited to learn about #neuroimaging analysis. Kshipra Gurunandan starts it off with a Primer to #Python. @mrccbu.bsky.social

This was a true mess with a ton of AI-generated word salad slop being submitted as preprints. The field owes these moderators a huge thanks for all the work and energy! 🙏👏

Oh.

Carl Sagan's Profound 'Pale Blue Dot' Speech Set to a Beautifully Calming Classical Soundtrack Become Human took the iconic "Pale Blue Dot" speech by Carl Sagan, removed some of the noise, and set it to a calming classical soundtrack.

Carl Sagan’s Profound ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Speech Set to a Beautifully Calming Classical Soundtrack laughingsquid.com/carl-sagan-p...

New fMRI study shows the hippocampus signals mismatches only when our expectations are based on episodic memories — not general knowledge. Challenges theories of the hippocampus as a domain-general comparator. We also explore how brain networks respond to surprise: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Complementary MR measures of white matter and their relation to cardiovascular health and cognition - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Complementary MR measures of white matter and their relation to cardiovascular health and cognition

New CamCAN study led by @praykov.bsky.social used 11 different white matter (WM) measures to show that WM health is multidimensional: 4 latent MRI-derived factors explained 89% of WM variance, were predicted by vascular health, and predicted cognition: doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Children offered chickenpox vaccine on NHS All young children in England and Wales will be offered a free chickenpox vaccine by the NHS from January 2026.

Brilliant news for health and happiness of children and their parents in UK! Vaccines are a marvel of human ingenuity, reason, and science motivated by compassion which have transformed our civilisation. We should all do our bit to encourage uptake. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Vaccine warning for England as one in five children start school unprotected Experts say country needs ‘wake up call’ with levels far below those needed for herd immunity

www.theguardian.com/society/2025... - don’t allow kids who aren’t vaccinated to attend school?

Sign the Petition Demand RFK Jr. Resign: Petition for a Healthy America

Join some Nobel Laureates and sign this petition to remove RFK Jr. from office. He is a danger to the people of the United States and a national security threat.

www.change.org/p/demand-rfk...

End faith-schools-only free travel scheme in Wales Wales Humanists has urged the Welsh Government to stop the discriminatory funding of travel to faith schools, when no equivalent funding is provided to those who go to non-faith schools. It has done s...

Tax-funded travel to faith schools is not a necessity – it’s a subsidy for a parental preference. If local authorities continue to provide this benefit, then they must also support families who reject a faith school in favour of a school without a religious character.

humanists.uk/2025/08/28/t...

New CamCAN paper led by @noham-wolpe.bsky.social shows that older adults’ tendency to see facial expressions as more positive may not be the adaptive “rose-coloured glasses” we thought, but could signal early cognitive decline and neurodegeneration: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40854689/

Sign the Petition Demand RFK Jr. Resign: Petition for a Healthy America

The MAHA assault on vaccines will kill people & usher in a scientific Dark Age. RFK Jr has got to go. Please join me, my fellow @accountabilityji.bsky.social advisory board members, Nobel laureates, National Academy members, & colleagues calling for his resignation.

www.change.org/p/demand-rfk...

Cash-strapped Edinburgh University paid boss over £800k in pay and expenses The University of Edinburgh paid out £881,789 to its vice chancellor Sir Peter Mathieson for pay and expenses, including flights to South Africa, Hong Kong and the US.

Edinburgh University paid out £881789 to its vice chancellor Sir Peter Mathieson for pay & expenses"

The University must offer him a huge pay check or he might leave😲

And then lectures will collapse, research will vanish & the University will crumble😉

www.edinburghlive.co.uk/news/edinbur...

Preprint servers are such helpful tools — and they make science so much more accessible to people without university affiliations.

If generative AI kills them, it’d be a loss for everyone… including the people making LLMs who I assume used preprints to train their models. 🧪

The brain’s map of the body is surprisingly stable — even after a limb is lost Study challenges the textbook idea that the brain region that processes body sensations reorganizes itself after limb amputation.

A brain-imaging study of people with amputated arms has upended a long-standing belief

go.nature.com/3Jp9NPG

A friendly reminder that the NIH Public Access Policy IS NOT “you must publish open access” but rather “you must ensure your copy of your paper is deposited into PubMed Central.”

Yes, it is very confusing. Yes, you should be able to do that deposit yourself without paying anything to a journal.

Come work with us! @princetonneuro.bsky.social and the Department of Psychology at Princeton University are searching for a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the area of human cognitive neuroscience, to be hired jointly in Psychology and Neuroscience: puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

My new university's logo is a PSI! How frickin cool is that!

Help me grow a new lab at in IU Bloomington! We're seeking brilliant young scientists interested in memory representations, neuromodulation & aging.

Coordinator: bit.ly/3Hu3UzT
Postdoc: bit.ly/4oBZF6j

Accepting GS apps in the Fall!

Energy?

"Energy"?

Are you fucking kidding me?

International study shows that higher levels of education do not reduce rates of cognitive and brain decline in later years, contrary to views that education protects against such decline: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
@rhens.bsky.social