Ben Kanter @beneuroscience@qoto.org

Hello, #Mastodon! Greetings from my hospital bed.

This image depicts blood vessels in a pigeon’s head. It was captured by the veterinarian Scott Echols as part of an ongoing endeavour known as the Grey Parrot Anatomy Project, which aims to develop ways to aid diagnosis and treatment for a host of animals, from birds to humans. By understanding what is normal, doctors and scientists are better positioned to identify and ultimately treat the abnormal. #sciart #ScienceMastodon #medicalhistory

#introduction: I am a cognitive neuroscientist at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. I like structure and beauty and somehow that draws me to #oscillations in the brain, mainly recorded with #electrophysiology.

when I have time, I like to make animations of concepts related to that: http://mnemai.org/demos

maybe starting on a new platform will allow for more playfulness again, which I enjoyed at lot in the beginning on twitter. 🙂

#CognitiveNeuroscience

Upgrade your #causalinference arsenal.

A revision of our book "Causal Inference: What If" is now available

👇
https://hsph.harvard.edu/miguel-hernan/causal-inference-book/

Thanks to everyone who suggested improvements, reported typos, and proposed new citations and material.

Enjoy the #WhatIfBook.

Also, it's free.

I know it’s on Twitter but this is an amazing achievement. Technical. Social. Scientific. Will you also write a thread here @InternationalBrainLab @MatteoCarandini ??

https://twitter.com/intlbrainlab/status/1591491465557184513?s=46&t=uqioSvmIhr0hckFeTwohuw

Let’s try this again. Where you at #fediverse? Boosts welcome so we can get the best sample size.

A key thing I've learned about Mastodon: When you find people you know and want to keep up with, don't just follow them — add them to a list!

Merely following is not enough, b/c their posts may not show up in your feed at a time you're logged on. Unlike FB or Twitter, Mastodon has no algorithm to resurface your friends' posts from hours or days ago.

So create a list called "Friends" and check it when you're on. This will ensure that you see what they posted while you were away.

And is this toxoplasma in the room with us right now?

Theory of the Multiregional Neocortex: Large-Scale Neural Dynamics and Distributed Cognition
https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-neuro-110920-035434

#neuroscience

POLL: If you've been on #Mastodon for over a week and used it each day, how likely are you to go back to using Twitter on a regular basis?

Boost for a larger sample size please.

About two-thirds of all bee species make their nests in the ground. The females dig a hole, create a chamber, carry pollen and nectar in, make a little loaf, and lay an egg on it. Then they seal up the chamber. Over and over again.
Usually all we see, if anything, is a hole in the ground. Most of the ones I know about like bare, sunny spots. All ground-nesting bees need a place where the earth will not be disturbed.
#bees #pollinators

Thank you for subscribing to #ComplexityThoughts !

Since Revue is going to be dismissed, I moved the whole idea to #Substack and no worries: I have moved your subscription there too. You should have received an email about the change (if not, please let me know).
You need no other actions: we start today with issue #1 !

Not yet subscribed? Check this: https://manlius.substack.com/

What a great paper by Sophie Waldron and @ChrisAllen. "‘Exploratory’ should not be seen as a negative label, and the label of ‘pre-registration’ does not necessarily mean elimination of flexibility." Not all preregistrations are equal - and this figure is a great illustration of how they differ. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01418-x

“Transcending reductionism in neuroscience: The brain is a relational organ that is not just the sum of its parts”

Book review of @PessoaBrain’s The Entangled Brain in Science!

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade8689

I finally got the chance to read this article on the experience of an old-hand on the #fediverse seeing people move here from Twitter in a sort of mass #migration:

https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/

It was very interesting. I must admit, after reading this, I'm wondering if maybe this migration is actually unfair and unwanted.

Certainly doesn't seem obvious that it's a positive thing that existing users want...

With #NeuroscienceMigration happening, two resources I've found:
(1) twitodon.com: register with them to link your twitter and mastodon accounts. Then it will find (and output an importable .csv of) the mastodon addresses of all of your twitter follows that have registered with them. The more of us that register, the better it works.
(2) https://fedifinder.glitch.me/: put your mastodon address in your twitter bio. Then fedifinder will find all your twitter follows (or followers, or lists) who have put their mastodon address in their twitter bio, and output a .csv of them as above.
(To import the csv: edit profile -> import and export -> import, and be sure that 'merge' is clicked.)

I tried to take a photo of a grasshopper on my windshield, but now it looks like it's gigantic and destroying the town.

Wow, olfactory navigation is so cool. Let's say you want to find the source of an odor—then depending on the spatial scale (say, cm versus m), you may need completely different search strategies based on the physics of how odors disperse

Figure below from this super interesting review by Gautam Reddy @NeuroVenki
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-conmatphys-031720-032754

Nice, open science practices are now explicitly included in the evaluation criteria for grant applications to the Research Council of Norway https://www.forskningsradet.no/en/call-for-proposals/2023/researcher-project-young-talents/

#Introduction

I'm a computer scientist / cognitive scientist at the Santa Fe Institute, these days working on conceptual abstraction and analogy-making in AI. Fan of Bongard problems, letter-string analogies, and the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus, among other domains.

How did I miss this book by @melaniemitchell? I've read a lot of AI history but missed insights like this:

"Hofstadter’s terror was ... that what he valued most in humanity would end up being nothing more than a “bag of tricks,” that a superficial set of brute-force algorithms could explain the human spirit."

Described as her attempt to understand what computers can do now and what we can expect from them in the next decades.

It's so well written. Even gripping.

https://melaniemitchell.me/aibook/