Posts by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
(DIR) Post #AQaApEfWmg9e8yTdOy by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2022-12-13T10:44:02Z
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Posted a good bye and signed off of Twitter.For me, it came down to the ethics of who we surround ourselves as we interact. I benefit from these conversations and I believe my community does too. Individuals should not have to suffer to take part in them. We need inclusive & safe spaces to discuss science, free from hate. On the bird site, hate mongering is coming from the top. That's it - nope out.Honestly, I appreciate the opportunity to reset and rethink what we want this to be. And I'm excited to build up an inclusive community here with all of you!
(DIR) Post #AS6kCn3FPGU81rRXo8 by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-01-28T16:38:31Z
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Have you also noticed that your Mastodon thread leans toward announcements, celebrations and discussions as opposed to advertisements, complaints and arguments? I find that bit energizing.
(DIR) Post #ASh2GbDxFB3aVoipmq by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-02-01T19:15:40Z
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Great to read Disentangling Some Conceptual Knots@PessoaBrain's response to the commentaries about The Entangled Brain (his new book, summarized).I'm particularly taken with his ideas at the end around how to reorganize textbooks, away from systems (perception, reward) and toward schemes that better connect concepts. https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article-abstract/35/3/391/114488/Disentangling-Some-Conceptual-Knots?redirectedFrom=fulltext(My own commentary with Shaul Druckmann is here:https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article-abstract/35/3/368/114112/Unraveling-the-Entangled-Brain-How-Do-We-Go-About?redirectedFrom=fulltext)
(DIR) Post #ASh2Gcb28r70lgWmOm by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-02-01T20:04:39Z
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@knutson_brain @PessoaBrain Quoting Luiz in full:So, how should we organize neuroscience textbooks?A fruitful approach is the one adopted in Striedter’s (2016) Neurobiology: A Functional Approach. The book focuses on problems that brains help animals solve, with an emphasis on neural circuits and systems, highlighting important evolutionary considerations. For example, in the chapter “Remembering Relationships,” sections cover what makes some memories stronger than others, how animals learn what is dangerous, and what happens when memories conflict with each other (such as the conflict of habit memories and episodic ones).I believe targeting problems that brains help animals solve holds great promise. Consider a potential chapter on “Selecting information from the world.” The benefit of this strategy is that a construct like selection can be applied across multiple traditional domains, including perception, cognition, and emotion. Doing so allows us to conceptualize the underlying processes as inherently cutting across domains. Complex, naturalistic behaviors also offer fruitful ways to organize material, such as in the case of threat assessment (Pessoa et al., 2022).If this type of approach is adopted, the overall organization of book chapters could be substantially more diverse than that found across many current neuroscience text- books. This is not a problem, however, as there is no unique decomposition of brain and mind. As in textbooks, I propose that this framework offers a better way for neuroscientists to organize how they think about the functions of the brain and how the nervous system supports complex behaviors and mental states. For too long, our discipline has used constructs that emphasize independence and separation. It is now time to adopt a language that emphasizes interaction and integration so that we can advance understanding of the entangled brain.https://direct.mit.edu/jocn/article-abstract/35/3/391/114488/Disentangling-Some-Conceptual-Knots?redirectedFrom=fulltext
(DIR) Post #ASmSeKtx9SIzRA94mO by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-02-17T19:48:41Z
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@grammargirl Words matter. ⬆️
(DIR) Post #ASmTnf1Hoze8ORaN8a by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-02-17T19:47:48Z
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Hey @grammargirl, what's your take on a/an historical?"An historical ..." sounds bizarre to me whenever I see it, but 1/3rd of people use it?https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/In-a-Word/2020/0409/A-n-historical-take-on-the-evolving-use-of-a-an
(DIR) Post #ASmTsnyTxHwnc7j8YS by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-02-17T20:02:32Z
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@grammargirl Super. Thank you!
(DIR) Post #ATPh6lNrwDKoQfHWPg by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-03-08T13:46:15Z
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@icevislab Welcome Icelandic Vision Lab! So happy to have you join us here. I hope you like it. I certainly do.What happened with Thorleifsson was disgusting. Wonderful to see some little bit of good come of it (you, here).Everyone: follow @icevislab for some great insights into how brains see!
(DIR) Post #AVOlnmfcdQiDdJlnk0 by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-05-07T01:59:39Z
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Tis the era of ‘be very careful of what tech you adopt …’And that’s exhausting. It’s also a very nice thing about here, for sure.https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/5/23712440/gmail-ads-more-annoying-middle-inboxhttps://www.npr.org/2023/05/06/1174468793/amazons-affordable-healthcare-service-has-a-hidden-cost-your-privacy
(DIR) Post #AVX7hYjPmbg9UHww5Y by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-05-10T22:34:54Z
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Not judging but rather really curious:Honestly; the calculus is complicated and we all weigh things differently. But … Is there a line that Musk could cross that would trigger our colleagues and friends to quit twitter? Musk has done A LOT over there. If the line isn’t hosting and promoting the guy that even Fox fired, I do wonder: what might it be?
(DIR) Post #AXWxiRGMmJ9eoHUZw8 by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-07-09T21:06:37Z
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@DrYohanJohn Great question! Brain dysfunction at large. Psychiatry more narrowly. Depression as a prototype - what exactly is mood?
(DIR) Post #AZlwM2mWSNvLasxauO by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-09-14T22:49:41Z
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Hey @grammargirl: I remember you talking about semantic satiation recently; it just won and Ig Nobel Prize!https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/award-for-study-into-the-the-the-the-strange-feeling-of-finding-words-unfamiliar/
(DIR) Post #AZplvbs7gIqJjdTyUa by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-09-16T10:44:59Z
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Wow! 124 brain researchers call out what journalists call the "leading theory of consciousness" (integrated information theory, IIT) as pseudoscience.https://psyarxiv.com/zsr78/💯: We need testable theories about the brain to move forward. Every theory starts as a proto-theory (and that's fine). But when theories are not even wronghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrongwe must acknowledge that. Especially when the stakes are as high as they are here, with big ethical implications (eg for organoids and coma patients, as the authors describe).
(DIR) Post #AZyX8AItl6UPQvIDmi by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-09-21T00:34:45Z
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Nature’s take on the IIT as consciousness debate:https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02971-1
(DIR) Post #AawNI9ocEF3NYR9w6y by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2023-10-19T14:19:25Z
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Thrilling developments toward understanding moodOf all of the brain's functions, mood is among the most mysterious. Mood is an ever-present feeling that we continuously experience, characterized by states like: happiness, sadness, anxiousness and calmness. It typically fluctuates slowly, subject to a multitude of disparate forces that we cannot always pinpoint; somedays we just wake up in a better (or worse) mood and we are not sure why. Mood is often differentiated from acute emotions that are more often targeted at something; for instance, we are afraid of tigers and we are disgusted by feces but more often than not, mood isn't directed at a specific thing. The general idea that's been floating around for awhile now is that mood is something akin to a running average about our overall well-being that exists to help motivate us to make good choices.A groundbreaking paper in 2014 led by Robb Rutledge (now at Yale) demonstrated that this idea about mood isn't quite right insofar as mood tracks not with overall goodness (rewards) but rather unexpected goodness (reward prediction errors). In the context of a gambling task in which individuals had to choose between certain rewards and gambles, happiness tracked with unexpected wins (averaged over about 10 trials):https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1407535111That finding has been extended to the notion that mood reflects a sort of momentum that informs us about when things (like our environment) are changing in ways that make rewards more or less available. And the purpose of mood is to make learning efficient. Under stable conditions, reward-based (reinforcement) learning is a great way to learn, for example, what trees have fruit if you are a monkey searching. However, it's an inefficient way to learn if it's spring or fall and the overall amount of fruit is changing (in that case, you don't want to learn every tree individually). Instead, it makes sense to update your expectations about those changing conditions; this is what mood is thought to be for:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4703769What's most exciting to me is the formalization of this tremendously important but very slippery thing we call mood into mathematical models that can be tested. This article does a beautiful job describing how that type of approach can be used to formalize: happiness as an emotion versus a mood; the difference between happiness and pleasure; and the difference between depression versus anxiety.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2021.01.007
(DIR) Post #AmvoC2OgWp1cVmiLC4 by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2024-10-12T12:13:54Z
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I'm looking for papers that map individual differences in behavior onto neural data. Like this one by Valeria Fascianelli, Stefano Fusi ++. Any type of creature; any type of mapping. Know any?https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50503-w
(DIR) Post #An57Bfa5Vk449ctvpw by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2024-10-17T01:09:43Z
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@futurebird A bit kitsch, but …https://leavenworth.org/the-bavarian-village-of-leavenworth/
(DIR) Post #Au3ywgujODhU8sVPTk by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2025-05-13T11:43:04Z
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Day 28 (breakthrough): The brain's memory "engram" - a tremendous cumultative brain research accomplishment that unfolded across a century, including multiple Nobel prizes. Also a terrific test case for the question: How does progress in (neuro)science happen?#ElusiveCures30ALSO: AWARD BRENDA MILNER THE NOBEL PRIZE (for work with H.M. and the discovery that the hippocampus the structure that stores memories) - SHE'S 106!https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=25635
(DIR) Post #AvUIIPebsMBVwshgLw by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2025-06-22T10:04:30Z
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I'm writing up a few things on the big debate around "What is an emotion?" and I'm crowd sourcing wisdom. I see two big axes. Am I missing any?1) Arguments that we should reserve "emotion" words for cases in which we have evidence for subjective experience (ie humans). ala Joe LeDoux. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35079126/2) Arguments about the criteria that differentiate emotions from other feelings (like hunger and tiredness). These relate to the Q: Does an airpuff to the eye evoke an emotion? (and all the discussion around this): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adt3971One argument that it does not: "emotion" should be reserved for situations that trigger cognitive appraisal. Emotions are not just triggered by stimuli, but also depend on context. An air puff to the eye will always be irritating.In sum, in these debates, there's the 1) "evidence for subjective experience" dim. and (even when that evidence exists) the 2) "criteria to be an emotion" dim., which includes criteria like those in the science paper (valence, persistence, generalization) and cog appraisal.Have I missed anything?That is to say: I don't believe there are debates about the reality of the phenomena, just when to call them "emotion" versus some other type of "feeling" (or "affective state"). Often, defining the "phenomena of interest" is diff. from theories about it (eg the thermometer versus thermodynamics). These are a bit more intertwined in emotion research. In my description, does anything jump out at you as missing from debates about the phenomena (not the theories)?Thanks!
(DIR) Post #AvUIIS8od1XDf8qpiC by NicoleCRust@neuromatch.social
2025-06-22T19:21:27Z
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@jessetm Good Q. The big debate centers around whether we could call anything studied in animals an emotion (given that we can’t ask them if/how they feel). Proposals include calling it things like “affective state” instead. But that’s a diff approach than, say, memory, where behavior is often used as evidence to support the label (not just verbal reports).