Edwin Dalmaijer
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dalmaijer.bsky.social
Edwin Dalmaijer
@dalmaijer.bsky.social
Cognitive neuroscientist with many interests, including why our stomachs churn when we feel disgust. I also write books on programming; teach Python, statistics, and machine learning; and develop open-source software.

https://www.dalmaijer.org
Are you curious about electrogastrography, but keep getting chicken-related results when googling "EGG"? We have the preprint for you!

In this tutorial, we describe how to acquire and analyse gastric data from human participants. Plus FREE software! Read it here: arxiv.org/abs/2509.17260
December 18, 2025 at 2:49 PM
This sent me down a spiral, leading to the discovery that the lolcats I wasted my poor parents’ precious dial-up minutes for are from 19 years ago. How is such recent internet history already two decades old?
December 16, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Quick post on @jonaspotthoff.bsky.social new paper! We found people looked more at novel foods at an experimental buffet, including insects that they find gross! People suppress disgust avoidance when making foraging decisions.

Blog: www.dalmaijer.org/2025/12/fora...
Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.fo...
December 12, 2025 at 11:17 AM
Would you eat insects, or is that disgusting? @jonaspotthoff.bsky.social used mobile eye-tracking as people browsed a buffet. They looked longer at insect and unfamiliar snacks, but only rated insects as disgusting. This suggests disgust isn't always avoided when foraging decisions have to be made!
December 11, 2025 at 1:44 PM
The perceived embodiment of proper disgust is entirely different than that of “political disgust”, which actually closely overlaps with anger. Excellently timed preprint, with @disgust-nerds.bsky.social starting tomorrow. Hope someone brings this up in the “Is moral disgust really disgust?” debate!
December 3, 2025 at 1:20 PM
Reviewer asked something similar for a recent paper on disgust (doi.org/10.1371/jour... ), and we wrote what’s in the image. TL;DR: behaviour can be as good as self-report, and is substantially more robust against demand effects. (CC @tahnee-engelen.bsky.social and @nicolecrust.bsky.social)
November 28, 2025 at 8:25 PM
Obligatory reference to “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names”: www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/f...
November 10, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Delighted to see another validation of MouseView.js, this time to test its usability for biases to alcohol-related stimuli. It was reliable, and captured overt attentional bias in those with high problematic drinking scores. For more info, read the paper by Thulin et al.: doi.org/10.1016/j.ps...
October 17, 2025 at 7:28 AM
Such a lovely talk, and I’m glad our admin upgraded the venue as there was standing room only! I particularly enjoyed Aidan’s perspective on hippocampal and non-hippocampal encoding as independent processes, and flexibility of memories within that space. (I also enjoyed the brief Mario Kart break.)
September 24, 2025 at 2:49 PM
I've seen people use "clanker" in the wild, and others commenting how wild it is to live through the invention of the first anti-AI slur.

Few seem to realise "clanker" is from a fairly niche Star Wars game and show, where battle droids ("roger, roger!") are called this by clone troopers.
August 4, 2025 at 3:30 PM
New gender just dropped!
July 29, 2025 at 12:34 PM
To check if our data was just weird, we ran a control analysis to test the effect of participants' ratings of food healthiness on their stomach response. Those awarding higher healthiness ratings increased showed higher normogastric power for healthy and lower for unhealthy foods. Sensible! (5/7)
July 4, 2025 at 10:34 AM
We expected reduced normogastric power (proto-nausea) for unhealthy foods, but found the opposite! Those higher on orthorexia had similar stomach responses to healthy and unhealthy foods. Do self-denied foods become more appetitive? Or is orthorexia cognitive control to overrule the stomach? (4/7)
July 4, 2025 at 10:34 AM
We also found that people higher on orthorexia literally turned up their noses at unhealthy and disgusting foods! The coefficient vector maps align with facial expressions of disgust. At this point, orthorexia is associated with a preference for healthy foods and disgust for anything else. (3/7)
July 4, 2025 at 10:34 AM
We used three categories of foods: "healthy" (minimally processed), "unhealthy" (highly processed), and "disgusting" (uncommon in local culture). Participants' ratings confirmed we chose our stimuli well, and people higher on orthorexia reported higher desire to eat healthy foods. (2/7)
July 4, 2025 at 10:34 AM
Ha! I either missed this at the time, or so thoroughly blocked it from memory that it no longer rings familiar! What I do recall is the meeting where you, Kia (@brognition.bsky.social), and several uni officials called us all in to tell us the building would be closing. I still have the photos!
June 26, 2025 at 6:34 PM
If you're thinking "hey, that looks a bit like a sausage fest, and what's with all the references to masculinity in the photo captions?" I have good news! The hospital hired its first women in the two decades after this photo was taken, e.g. Dr Pearl Jane Sproule, chief of ENT 1924-1940.
May 12, 2025 at 10:26 AM
I ended up looking up the book, and found the photo with the cited caption but without further context. I assume the newborn babies are indeed borrowed from the maternity ward. The book has pages and pages of photos with brief captions, some of which raise further questions (e.g. attached).
May 12, 2025 at 10:20 AM
Older journal articles are typically uploaded as pages from the print copy, which means you often get the start and/or end of unrelated papers as a little bonus. This is the little bonus I got from @jama.com this morning. There is zero further context.
May 12, 2025 at 9:08 AM
A real strength of this study is that we asked participants for their individual ratings for each stimulus and emotion. It allowed us to account for 1) individual differences in stimulus perception, and 2) stimuli often evoking a combination of core emotions.
May 6, 2025 at 11:35 AM
NEW! Using #pupillometry during emotional stimuli, we found if/when individual stimulus ratings are associated with pupil size. In short, disgust was the strongest pupil dilator, whereas anger constricts it (a bit).

Paper by fantastic first-author @kmccul.bsky.social et al.: doi.org/10.1016/j.bi...
May 6, 2025 at 11:03 AM
One of my favourite parts of supervising undergraduate student projects is seeing some of them present at the Southwest undergrad conference. It feels like a proper conference, but is organised by and for final-year students. Lovely to see so many keen beans talking about their work! #SWUC2025
April 26, 2025 at 9:16 AM
Was joined by a cheeky little robin for lunch today. Does this count as #UKbirding, or was I the subject of its human-ing?
April 11, 2025 at 11:30 AM
OK, but:
March 4, 2025 at 11:19 AM
If, for whatever reason, you're looking for a novel with a fresh take on AI tech dystopia: Adrian Tchaikovsky's Service Model is excellent.

It's a clever take on robot cognition (but is it really cognition?), human nature, and societal collapse through perfectly normal function.
February 8, 2025 at 9:51 AM