And there’s one more figure in the paper—the one from the box. I’m proud of all our figures, so I just can’t resist sharing this one too. It integrates the key concepts behind our embodied account of self-relevance using the MDP framework with the internal environment (Singh et al., 2009).

This work was co-led by two brilliant co-first authors —💫 Hong Ji Kim (@hongjikim.bsky.social) and Jeong In Lee. Their creativity and deep thinking made this piece possible. Grateful to work with such inspiring scholars!

We also reinterpret self-referential processing through the lens of second-order cybernetics. The DMN participates in recursive brain–body loops—sensing, predicting, and regulating itself. The DMN (and the brain), in this view, is not a detached observer but a part of a reflexive, nontrivial system.

We first suggest that self-relevance is rooted in interoceptive inference and value estimation—how the brain predicts the long-term impact of events on the body’s internal state. We call this internal model of the internal bodily state an affective map, in parallel with a cognitive map.

The default mode network (DMN) is often described as the brain’s “self” network. But what kind of self are we talking about? Most studies focus on the conceptual or narrative self — we revisit it from an embodied perspective.

Our new paper is out in Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences; a perspective paper on the DMN, titled "Embodying the default mode network: self-related processing from an embodied perspective"
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Super proud of this collaboration with rockstar Ryan Raut - born out of playing in the sandbox in our last year of grad school! Multi-scale brain activity can be predicted from a simple measure of arousal like pupil diameter. Out with linear causality, in with dynamic systems to explain neurobiology

🚨 New Preprint 🚨

Targeting intracranial electrical stimulation (ES) to network regions defined within individuals causes network-level effects

By Cyr et al.

***
Q: Can we use individualized network maps from precision fMRI to modulate a targeted network via intracranial ES?

A: Yes!

🧵:

I’m elated to share our latest publication - out now in @natmentalhealth.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s44... - tour de force by @leahbanellis.bsky.social @brainandstomach.bsky.social and the rest of the VMP team!

The final version (after proof) is now finally out. It provides a detailed spatio-temporal profile of brain mediation of the cue-stimulus integration in the pain context. We interpreted the results in terms of cortical hierarchy. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Hi, I’m very pleased to share the preprint of my first project with my PI @choongwanwoo.bsky.social and amazing collaborators Seok-Jun Hong and E.A.R. Losin.

Here we examined the behavioral and neural dynamics of pain as a continuous integration process (1/8)
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Many researchers in cognitive neuroscience and deep learning seem to assume that inference in the brain is hierarchical. 

Our new Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper questions this assumption and proposes the shallow brain hypothesis.

#neuroskyence #brain

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For years we have tended to discount activation signals in the white matter as artifact. It's becoming clear now that this was a mistake - white matter shows stimulus-driven activation similar (though much smaller) to gray matter. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37824529/

This is very important new study from @danlikesbrains.bsky.social and colleagues. While many have hypothesized a key link between breath-brain coupling and noradrenaline, Dan illuminates this link with pupillometry.

Katalin Karikó on the status economy of academia. She’s the hero we don’t deserve.

Source: josephnoelwalker.com/147-katalin-...

This is a neat work! —a must/highly-recommend read before picking a method for exploring pair-wise interactions from multivariate time series.

www.nature.com/articles/s43...

#compneurosky #complex #neuroskyence #stats 🧪

Special issue of journal Affective Science on its "future."

Lead editorial by my amazing co-author of Emotion & Motivation (OUP) Lani Shiota

Lots of "futuristic" articles but also some great overviews of state-of-the-art knowledge on more trad topics #PsySciSky

link.springer.com/journal/4276...