Thank you for an intellectually stimulating day @chrisjackwhyte and Ryan Smith (@rssmith.bsky.social) aka the active inference duo. Building the Centre for Consciousness & Contemplative Studies community and learning new techniques

What can computational modelling can offer to our understanding of intolerance of uncertainty? A short thread on our new preprint: psyarxiv.com/eug64 A short review co-led by myself and the powerhouse @XiaoBownE, with Prof Rebecca Lawson 1/10

💥So excited to finally share this project that Jascha Achterberg and I have co-led!💥 What happens to RNNs if you give them some brain-inspired constraints of 3D structure and neural communication? Turns out, a lot! We call these networks spatially-embedded RNNs (seRNNs).

New neuro-constrained Recurrent Neural Networks! 🧠🤖 We show that brain-like constrains in task-solving RNNs make typical structural & functional neuro motifs appear, e.g. modularity, small-worldness, functional clusters, mixed selectivity & efficiency biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Viva done! ✅ 🎉 Massive thank you to Dani S. Bassett & Richard Bethlehem for examining me. I loved the discussions & look forward to future work in generative models & embedded neural networks. Thank you to my brilliant supervisor Duncan Astle, colleagues & department MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit!

Where computational/AI models meet brain development: historical work, recent advances, across species & scales - with many new & exciting horizons! See our recent review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences w/ Duncan Astle & Mark Johnson. 🧵👇

So happy to share! 🎉   Recently, we’ve seen 🔥 work using generative models to elucidate candidate principles of neural connectivity.   Our v2: Inspired by redundancy reduction, our new model can generate both the topology & weights of the connectome: biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Introducing BrainGPT.org, a large language model (LLM) to assist neuroscience research. BrainGPT is trained on the vast neuroscience literature and can be used to optimize study design, detect anomalous results, and evaluate models against broad data patterns. (1/3)

🧠 Thank you to The i Paper for their review of THE BALANCED BRAIN 🧠 ‘Rigorous,  engagingly personal . . . provides an exciting snapshot of what we know so far about this vital organ’s importance for maintaining our mental health’ inews.co.uk/culture/books/…

Finally on my way down under! ✈️ 🇦🇺 Extremely excited to be visiting the Mac Shine group, working closely with @chrisjackwhyte on biophysical generative models of spiking networks, with planned visits to Alex Fornito Andrew Zalesky @parkvillegeek. Hmu if you’d like to meet! 👋

🚨 Preprint (and first PhD project!) is out: Many worry about the link between social media use and the current decline in youth mental health. However, are we studying the right populations? We ran a review and meta-analysis to provide some answers 🧵medrxiv.org/content/10.110…

Sad to hear of Endel Tulving’s passing at the age of 96. Grateful for his everlasting inspiration and generosity.

Does suppressing negative thoughts harm us? According to our paper in Science Advances with Zulkayda Mamat , suppressing fearful thoughts can improve mental health, done correctly, with bigger benefits seen in those with worse intrusive thought symptoms science.org/doi/full/10.11…

After lots of blood, sweat and tears, my first paper demonstrating emotional memory disruption following directed forgetting has been published. Dream team of Tom Beckers Laboratory for Brain-Gut Axis Studies & support from European Research Council (ERC) FWO KU Leuven CLEP See below for a quick summary 👇

Thanks to Prof. Brendan Kelly and Michael Anderson for speaking to me about both the unexpected value and possible limitations of thought suppression for improving mental health. A pleasure to write about new research that challenges conventional wisdom! independent.ie/life/health-we…

Incredibly excited to have my primary thesis work published in Nature Communications last week! This paper represents many years of hard work with a lot of talented scientists. Here's what we found 👇 nature.com/articles/s4146…

Want a quick and easy-to-read summary of our recently published paper on directed forgetting? Check out my first blog! ⁦Tom Beckers⁩ ⁦KU Leuven CLEP⁩ ⁦Communications Psychology⁩ …havepsychcommunity.springernature.com/posts/exert-co…

Two years ago, Danyal & I wondered: Could the various features we observe in brains across species be caused by shared functional, structural & energetic constraints? 🧠⚡️ With our now published spatially embedded RNNs we show this is true! 🧵below! nature.com/articles/s4225…

It was indeed a very ✨memory✨ Christmas last night at our final Neurotalks of the year! Huge thank you to our wonderful speakers Molly S.E. Rowlands and Samantha Mitchell 😍👏 CamBRAIN wishes you all a relaxing and happy christmas break 🤗

Happy to share our new paper on the inhibition of memory retrieval in dissociative amnesia, with Dace Apšvalka, Hirokazu Kikuchi, Nobuhito Abe &, Jun Kawaguchi, Mike Kopelman & Michael Anderson! doi.org/10.1017/S00332…