Child(ish) psychiatrist: (New) Culture Editor BJPsych Bull., NICE TAC member. Enjoys debating & cocktails, planning to join science/culture dots & more.
Joined September 2014
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David retweeted
The Hebrew community note lol
יש בכנסת 19 תומכי טרור ואני הולך להיאבק בהם בכל הכח!
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
חברי הכנסת היחידים שהורשעו בתמיכה בארגון טרור בכנסת הנוכחית הם ממפלגתו של הכותב (הוא בעצמו)
חברי הכנסת מהרשימה המשותפת ורע"מ לא תומכים בטרור על אף טענתו החוזרת.
ynet.co.il/articles/mobil…
David retweeted
It must be very hard to publish null results
osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/zr… via @ryancbriggs et al
@M_Moutoussis this looks like something Queen’s Square might be interested in.
In Neural Networks are Already Clean, @nickcammarata argued that neurons were far more legible than previously thought – and that this was great news for interpretability and safety.
Now, we’re releasing the first technical companion to Nick’s essay. It shares our findings from studying thousands of neurons using our novel automated interpretability pipeline, and outlines why we now think of neurons by their computational function, instead of whether or not they are polysemantic. Here’s what we found: 🧵
And I just found what could be the other half of the jigsaw
Your brain is composed of a wide range of cell types connected into intricate circuits. The properties of these cell types underpin our ability to perceive, reason about, and interact with the world.
Cell types coordinate their electrical signals to drive behavior. When something goes wrong with one of these cell types, we develop diseases like Parkinson’s or blindness.
Many other mental health problems may stem from problems with a single cell type, but we currently lack an easy way to link neural activity to cell type identity.
Cell types have been cataloged extensively in fixed brain tissue, but they are difficult to identify in recordings from living brains. So how do we overcome this gap?
Josh Siegle has a plan that he outlines in a new piece in the Launch Sequence: ifp.org/brain-cell-types
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David retweeted
A run of studies suggests that almost anything an animal senses or knows can be decoded from almost any brain area, which makes it hard to say what any one area is for. Ruff, Cohen and colleagues looked instead at how an area arranges the information it carries. Two monkeys watched moving dots and reported the direction by looking at a point on a ring, where the reward depended both on the accuracy of the judgment and on where on the ring they looked, so every choice had to combine what they saw with what it was worth. The researchers recorded populations of neurons in area MT, which processes visual motion, and in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
Both areas carried motion and reward, and arranged them differently. In MT the two occupied largely separate dimensions of the population’s activity, so one could vary without disturbing the other, while in prefrontal cortex they shared dimensions. A recurrent network trained to reproduce that difference predicted that stimulating each area would alter choices in distinct ways, and electrical microstimulation bore the prediction out. Stimulating MT pulled the monkey’s answer toward a point between the motion it had seen and the direction the stimulated neurons preferred. Stimulating prefrontal cortex gave answers that were one or the other, sometimes the motion and sometimes the stimulated preference, with little in between. The effect of MT stimulation did not depend strongly on where the larger reward sat, while prefrontal stimulation had a bigger effect when the stimulated neurons’ preference lined up with it.
The study used two male monkeys, which is a common sample size for this kind of recording and still a small base for a claim about how cortex divides its labor. The network model was built to generate hypotheses, and the authors say its match to the data is qualitative. They also raise the sharpest complication themselves, that MT has a more pronounced spatial organization of direction tuning than prefrontal cortex, and since microstimulation effects depend on how neurons with different preferences are laid out in the tissue, how much of the difference comes from formatting rather than from that layout is unresolved. In a version of the task without reward scaling, MT sometimes gave one or-the-other answers too.
David retweeted
@MariekeVugt kicking off day 3 of #ECogS2026 !
Mindwandering can open cognitive state spaces, perhaps akin to drift in neutral networks. But beware getting stuck in rumination attractors!
David retweeted
The Iranian regime apologia coming from some incoming members of Congress is becoming impossible to ignore. Congressman-elect Adam Hamawy of New Jersey refuses to even acknowledge that the Islamic Republic of Iran is an adversary, instead suggesting it should be treated as a friend and ally while drawing a false moral equivalence between Tehran's aggression and American policy.
One can oppose a war with Iran without resorting to intellectually lazy arguments that erase the Ayatollah's decades-long destabilization of the Middle East: the domination of multiple Arab capitals, the empowerment of violent proxies, and the direct and indirect deaths of countless Arabs, Muslims, and Americans.
More troubling, Hamawy reflects a growing strain on the populist Democratic left that believes: Hamas is recast as a "resistance" movement rather than a terrorist organization; Hezbollah is sanitized; political Islamism is excused through cultural relativism; jihadist movements are treated primarily as victims of circumstance; Iran's aggression is blamed on American "imperialism"; and even the Houthis are rationalized through the lens of Third-Worldist grievance politics.
This is a disturbing degradation in political judgment from a cohort claiming to represent Arab-, Muslim-, and Palestinian-American communities. It should not be normalized, excused, or shielded from criticism through reflexive and bad-faith accusations of "Islamophobia."
David retweeted
Hello my dear friends! The visibility of pro-Ukrainian accounts is extremely low these days, but Russian war crimes continue. So in this shameless attention grab, I ask you to go through my latest posts and boost them.
David retweeted
Yes. Our collaborators have been conducting a mega analysis on the relationship between nm and schizophrenia, and treatment response.
David retweeted
Monoaminergic signatures of treatment-response heterogeneity in schizophrenia: a neuromelanin MRI study | Psychological Medicine | Cambridge Core - cup.org/4sYJL8v
David retweeted
Watching movies recruits a broader network for audiovisual speech than traditional paradigms, including the cerebellum, left temporal pole, and supplementary motor area. This suggests that naturalistic, richly contextual stimuli reveal multisensory processing regions that are typically missed by constrained experimental designs.
biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
David retweeted
The control limit hypothesis proposes that schizophrenia stems from glutamatergic miswiring that slows cortical attractor transitions, prompting the brain to raise dopamine as a compensatory mechanism to restore speed. This reframes high dopamine as a response to underlying circuit dysfunction rather than the primary cause, explaining why antipsychotics alleviate psychosis without improving, or potentially worsening, cognitive performance.
osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jb…
David retweeted
Spatiotemporal context fidelity distinguishes true from false memories, suggesting that the precision of when and where an event occurred serves as a hidden marker of veracity. This offers a potential mechanism for differentiating genuine memory traces from semantic associations, challenging the assumption that false memories are always phenomenologically indistinguishable from true ones.
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
David retweeted
I watched in shock, pain and shame the images of the the flooding of tents and the impact on the people of Gaza. What @afalkhatib describes doesn’t make the individual human suffering any less, it shines a floodlight on the ruthless practices of Hamas. Like Ahmed, I believe that for the sake of Palestinians and Israelis alike Hamas must go.
REVEALED: The scandal surrounding Gaza's failed winterization efforts lays bare a grim reality: Hamas obstructed attempts to protect Palestinian civilians before the devastating winter storms that flooded tens of thousands of tents.
Palestinian Authority employees inside Gaza have reported that professionals from the Ministries of Public Works and Relief Affairs were intimidated, summoned, and coerced by Hamas into signing pledges not to undertake humanitarian projects without the group's approval. According to their accounts, those who defied Hamas risked so-called "field justice," including beatings and worse.
Several officials, including Najla Hammad, Ihab Al-Bahtiti, Khaled Abu Safiya, Wiam Aboul-Nasr, Dr. Adnan Hamouda, and Ahmed Abu Zaiter, have publicly stated that efforts to build more durable fiberglass housing and improve conditions for displaced civilians were blocked.
Another example was a proposal that was put forward to demolish several heavily damaged towers which were at risk of collapse from rainwater after extensive bombardment. According to those involved, Hamas blocked the removal of the “Bank of Palestine Tower” in Gaza City's Rimal neighborhood, reportedly arguing that it would "collapse from the rain anyway." The terrorist group did not show any concern for the civilian lives that would be lost when the tower eventually collapses on its own, because it wants dead Palestinians and news of tragedy to keep Gaza in the news cycle and to gain global sympathy, hoping for more incoming resources and donations for the Strip’s humanitarian and reconstruction needs that it could siphon.
Additionally, Hamas has also been accused of obstructing construction projects intended to create safer communities for displaced Gazans in southern Gaza, prioritizing political control over humanitarian relief.
This is a reminder that Gaza's suffering is not only a consequence of war. It is also the result of a fascist and ruthless governing power that repeatedly places its own interests above the welfare of the people it claims to represent. The same terror group that helped bring catastrophe upon Gaza continues to obstruct efforts to mitigate its consequences.
As floodwaters sweep through displacement camps and families endure another winter in misery, the question is unavoidable: how many Palestinian lives could have been spared had Hamas allowed humanitarian, housing, and reconstruction efforts to proceed unimpeded?
David retweeted
1/הבוקר, רגע לפני שהבן שלי יצא לבית הספר, הייתה לנו שיחה קטנה שהשאירה אותי עם חיוך ענק בלב. ❤️
הוא סיפר לי: ״אמא, יש לנו בכיתה ילדה אחת ערבייה נוצרייה, ושאר הכיתה חצי יהודים וחצי ערבים מוסלמים.״
ואז הוא הסתכל עליי ואמר:
אמא, את יודעת מה ההבדל בינינו?
שאלתי אותו: ״מה?״
4 actions needed :
• Distinguish bedside kindness from managerial enabling & support both
• Protect staff time and manageable caseloads
• Retain dedicated frontline champions
• Back policies with continuous research & data
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Intelligent kindness is a resource with an economy.
If we demand compassion from staff without giving them the time and tools to deliver it, unsatisfactory business as usual just gets dressed in its language.
Read the full study: doi.org/10.1192/bjb.2026.102…
