Is imagining a sound any easier than imagining a picture? What senses do we think and dream in? And where exactly do our thoughts seem to be coming from? Visit me at today's 2pm ABPS poster session to find out #abps2022

How does imagining an image compare to imagining a sound? Our poster for Australasian Brain & Psychological Sciences, in case you missed it, with Amanda Robinson and Thomas A Carlson #mentalimagery #abps2022

📣🍄 What mechanisms underlie #psychedelic visual imagery? This new cool study suggests that reduced sensory activity may amplify endogenous neural activity, much like in dreams 🦖 Read this preprint 👇 Devon Stoliker Katrin Preller Alan Anticevic Adeel Razi medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

How does our brain come up with new ideas and insights? We propose that insights are unexpected rewards or shortcuts found during mental navigation and correspond to the rapid emergence of new concept fields in the hippocampus. Out now in Trends in Neurosciences authors.elsevier.com/a/1gAVLbotpyLQM

Why spend resources to represent information that is already available in the external world? "Surprisingly" we don't: Our new paper in Cereb. Cortex (OA) shows better decoding of stimulus features during working memory than perception. doi.org/10.1093/cercor…

Sydney comp cog neuro lab (plus Dr. Tijl Grootswagers) is ready for #epc2023, after some fresh cinnamon rolls! Australasian Society for Experimental Psychology Come see my poster tonight :D

General consesnsus: Great first day! Got to see rubber ducks... spot them? Nevermind those, @arielhjkim1001 , Sophia Shatek presented great posters. Not to forgot Alexander Sulfaro (Alex), who presented a very cool talk. If you missed it, use your mental imagery to attend it. #EPC2023

Comparing mental imagery experiences across visual, auditory, and other sensory modalities biorxiv.org/cgi/content/sh… #bioRxiv

Which is better: visual or auditory mental imagery? Our new #preprint surveyed a boatload of #mentalimagery properties across modalities, including its ease, duration, spontaneity, spatial location, and more: doi.org/10.1101/2023.0… w/ Amanda Robinson Thomas A Carlson #aphantasia

Ever wondered why mental images seem so ethereal—not quite visible, but not quite invisible either? This talk details what this “quasi-sensory” experience might actually involve, how it’s possible, and why it might happen uniquely during #mentalimagery

Also, I've never gotten the objection to panpsychism thing. I'm personally agnostic to the whole question, but I've never run into a good argument for why panpsychism can be thrown out a priori other than "it makes me feel weird to think about it."

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"simply not meaningful" An argument regarding the utility (or lack thereof) of individual differences research using vividness-esque ratings. Evidently just as relevant now as it was almost 40 years ago. Excerpt from Richardson (1988), in "Vividness and unvividness"

We may actually have an answer for this! In short, cortical serotonin increases towards bedtime. Increased serotonin in visual cortex dampens signals from external visual inputs, reducing competition against internal mental images. From doi.org/10.1093/nc/nia…