Last week I asked twitter a question that comes up frequently in our lab: what visceral rhythm exerts the most impact on cognition [1]? Now, this is a question which is deliberately vague in nature. The goal is to force a ‘gut check’ on which visceral systems that we, as neuroscientists, might reasonably expect to bias cognition. What do I mean by cognition? Literally any aspect of information processing. Perception, memory, learning, emotion, pain, you name it. Some of you jokingly pointed out that if any of these rhythms cease entirely (e.g., in death), cognition will surely be impacted. So ..read more

via Introducing Systole: a Python Package for Processing, Analyzing, and Synchronizing Cardiac Data ..read more

The Embodied Computation Group It brings me great pleasure to officially announce that I have been awarded joint starting fellowships from the Lundbeck Foundation and Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS)! These fellowships will enable me to launch my own research lab, the Embodied Computation Group (ECG), which will be based at both Aarhus University and Cambridge Psychiatry. This is an incredibly exciting development – obviously for my own sanity as an early career researcher, but also more importantly for the budding field of embodied neuroscience and computational psychiatry! As an ..read more

Today we’re extremely excited to bring you our latest project – the raincloud plots preprint! Working on this project has been an absolute pleasure – I’ve learned so much about open science and data visualization. Better yet I can now tick ‘write a paper through twitter DMs’ off my bucket list! For those of you who missed it, a few months ago I wrote a blog post showing off some plots I’d hacked together in ggplot. To my surprise, these ‘raincloud plots’ generated a great deal of excitement, and people from a variety of disciplines started asking if there was a paper they could cite. Things re ..read more

[This was a twitter navel-gazing thread someone ‘unrolled’. I was really surprised that it read basically like a blog post, so I thought why not post it here directly! I’ve made a few edits for readability. So consider this an experiment in micro-blogging ….] In the past few years, I’ve started and stopped a paper on metacognition, self-inference, and expected precision about a dozen times. I just feel conflicted about the nature of these papers and want to make a very circumspect argument without too much hype. As many of you frequently note, we have way too many ‘Bayes glaze’ review papers i ..read more

Interoception – the perception of signals arising from the visceral body – is a hot topic in cognitive neuroscience and psychology. And rightly so; a growing body of evidence suggests that brain-body interaction is closely linked to mood1, memory2, and mental health3. In terms of basic science, many theorists argue that the integration of bodily and exteroceptive (i.e., visual) signals underlies the genesis of a subjective, embodied point of view4–6.  However, noninvasively measuring (and even better, manipulating) interoception is inherently difficult. Unlike visual or tactile awareness ..read more

Today is a big day – I’m moving to Cambridge! After nearly five years of living in London, it’s finally time for me to move on to green pastures. It’s hard to believe really. I first came to London nearly fifteen years ago on a high school trip. It was love at first sight. I knew that somehow, someday, I would live here. As a Bermudian immigrant living in Florida, to me London was the centre of the world. The bustling big city, but unlike many in the US, one rich in a thousand years of history and culture. And although I didn’t know it then, my eventual career in neuroscience would draw me tow ..read more

UPDATE: RAINCLOUD PLOTS NOW PUBLISHED IN WELLCOME OPEN RESEARCH! SEE LINKS BELOW Manuscript: https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/4-63/v1 Github: https://github.com/RainCloudPlots/RainCloudPlots Like many of you, I love ggplot2. The ability to make beautiful, informative plots quickly is a major boon to my research workflow. One plot I’ve been particularly fond of recently is the ‘violin + boxplot + jittered dataset’ combo, which nicely provides an overview of the raw data, the probability distribution, and  ‘statistical inference at a glance’ via medians and confidence intervals. Ho ..read more

Nothing like a long-awaited vacation. My wife and I take our yearly two-week vacation in September. Although it is a bit late, we enjoy the timing as most summer spots are still warm but have few tourists and low prices. This year we are in Francesca’s hometown of Marostica, Italy, for not one but TWO weddings. It will be a true test of my self-discipline to not gain several kilos on this trip! That being said, phew am I ready for some vacation. The later date means that as the summer stretches on, my work ethic flags a bit and I become prone to take more and more staycation days. I really bel ..read more

The past two years have been a crazy ride. We’ve seen a seeming upheaval of the political world that has shook most of us to our core. Along the way, our social networks have also changed. Sometimes it feels as if we are all reeling along. When I started this blog, I had the perhaps naive view that I was initiating a nexus of some kind of hivemind. Indeed, my research has benefited massively from this blog, and from all of your amazing input and interaction. For a while, all was good. My following grew, I blogged frequently, and it was all quite rewarding. But, when the network started to go m ..read more