Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Benjy Barnett

@benjyb.bsky.social

490 followers 530 following 47 posts

Post doc in the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck University. Consciousness + everything that might mean.

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Mar 10

Very honoured to have written a little something for @aeon.co about zero, absence, and consciousness. It was a real pleasure to write, and very curious to know what people think!

0️⃣🧠

#PsychSciSky #neuroskyence #consci

Aeon Magazine @aeon.co · Mar 10

It took centuries for people to embrace the number zero. Now it’s helping neuroscientists understand how the brain perceives absences @benjyb.bsky.social

Why zero could unlock how the brain perceives absence | Aeon Essays

It took centuries for people to embrace the zero. Now it’s helping neuroscientists understand how the brain perceives absences

buff.ly

4 17 46

Reposted by Benjy Barnett

Philip Ball @philipcball.bsky.social · 13d

And as for writing, don't get me started. Most often, the process of writing is not a laborious business of transcription, but a process of thinking itself. I'm not about to outsource my thinking to a machine.

1 26 140

Reposted by Benjy Barnett

George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · Jul 28

I know there's a risk of amplifying the fascist horror show, but I think we need to be aware of just how far things are going, especially as this man is a Republican candidate for governor of California. All the old safeguards are being deliberately torn down, and the unspeakable normalised.

A post on X by Kyle Langford, with a composite photo showing him standing outside the gates of Auschwitz, and the caption: "My zero unemployment plan", with an emoji of factory chimneys.

260 940 2.5K

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 25

There is still so much we don’t know about the brain’s ability to deal with absence, and we hope this study goes some way towards revealing the different ways we are able to represent ‘nothing.’

Générique (Bande originale du film "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud")

YouTube video by Miles Davis - Topic

www.youtube.com

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 25

These findings help extend previous distinctions between perception and cognition to the case of absences and, at least in adult humans, suggest that abstract concepts of absence are not rooted in more primitive representations of sensory absence.

1 3

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 25

Moreover, this was in spite of low-level visual similarities between perceptual and non-symbolic absences, which could otherwise drive spurious generalisation between the two domains.

1 2

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 25

We built on these results to study how numerical and perceptual absences related to each other – finding surprisingly strong evidence for distinct neural representations of different types of absence.

1 1 6

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 25

First of all, we replicated our previous findings that representations of absence are shared across both symbolic and non-symbolic numerical tasks.

Symbolic and non-symbolic representations of numerical zero in the human brain

Barnett and Fleming show how non-symbolic and symbolic representations of zero are represented at the start of a neural number line and generalize across notational format. These representations are l...

www.cell.com

1 1 3

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 25

To characterise the brain’s representation of various absences, we had participants perform three different tasks in the MEG scanner, each involving absence from a different domain: perceptual, non-symbolic numerosity, and symbolic number.

1 2

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 25

Likewise, how we are able to conceptualise absence – e.g., as the number zero – is not straightforward either. How did we create something out of nothing?

1 2

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 25

But how the brain deals with absences is not currently known. Sensory systems are typically geared to detect the presence of objects in our environment, so how we are able to perceive absences is not a straightforward question.

1 2

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 25

What do the music of Miles Davis, the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the equations of Isaac Newton have in common? They all rely – in different ways – on absences.

1 1 5

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 25

A ✨bittersweet✨ moment – after 5 years at UCL, my final first-author project with @smfleming.bsky.social is ready to read as a preprint! 🥲

PsyArXivBot @psyarxivbot.bsky.social · Jul 24

Distinct neural representations of perceptual and numerical absence in the human brain: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/zyrdk_v1

2 7 29

Reposted by Benjy Barnett

Jason da Silva Castanheira @jasondasilvac.bsky.social · Jul 24

Very proud to share this one🥹! We show that personalized signatures of brain activity are heritable and relate to the expression of specific genes. That means my brain-fingerprint is very similar to my twin brother's! #ResearchIsMeSearch🧠 🧬 ♊️

Genetic foundations of interindividual neurophysiological variability

Individual brain activity profiles are shaped by lifelong genetic influences.

www.science.org

1 15 37

Reposted by Benjy Barnett

Nadine Dijkstra @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social · Jul 23

After five years of confused staring at Greek letters, it is my absolute pleasure to finally share our (with @smfleming.bsky.social) computational model of mental imagery and reality monitoring: Perceptual Reality Monitoring as Higher-Order inference on Sensory Precision ✨
osf.io/preprints/ps...

OSF

osf.io

4 35 130

Reposted by Benjy Barnett

Jianghao Liu @jianghaoliu.bsky.social · Jul 23

Is vivid imagery reported faster than weak imagery?
YES. There is an inverse correlation between subjective vividness and RTs in imagery tasks (N=117).
doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

2 7 29

Reposted by Benjy Barnett

Giulia Cabbai @giuliacabbai.bsky.social · Jul 23

Always late to the party, but really excited to share this new preprint led by @benjyb.bsky.social where we find an intriguing link between vividness ratings and reaction times!🧠💭

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 21

🚨New preprint🚨 out with the dream team @matanmazor.bsky.social @giuliacabbai.bsky.social and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social!

We report a novel and robust effect across five different datasets: vivid imagery is reported faster than weak imagery.

📝: osf.io/preprints/ps...

1 9

Reposted by Benjy Barnett

Matan Mazor @matanmazor.bsky.social · Jul 23

Confidence in absence as confidence in counterfactual visibility: a CogSci proceedings paper with star MSc student Maya Schipper, is now out on PsyArXiv:

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🧵👇

3 18 55

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 22

Hey Will, thanks for the tip. We checked again and everything looks ok to us. The data/code are up on OSF though so feel free to take a look and email me if you find anything!

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 21

#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 21

All data and code for the paper can be found here: osf.io/g7tjh/.

We would be very interested if other people found similar patterns in their data!

RT x Vividness

Hosted on the Open Science Framework

osf.io

1 3

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 21

We hope that by drawing attention to this effect, future models of imagery will start to tease apart the distinct contributions of imagery formation and evaluation to subjective reports of imagery, which is essential for the discussion around unconscious imagery.

1 1 3

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 21

We speculate as to whether our results point towards a shared process of evaluating subjective visual experiences across perception and imagery.

1 3

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 21

We show that individual differences in this perceptual RT asymmetry - as well as trait imagery vividness - predicts imagery RT asymmetry.

1 4

Benjy Barnett @benjyb.bsky.social · Jul 21

A similar effect has been widely reported in perceptual detection - where reporting not seeing a stimulus takes more time than reporting that you saw it.

1 2