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Richard Roche

@rrocheneuro.bsky.social

830 followers 800 following 180 posts

Professor at Maynooth University Psychology Dept. Neuroscience, brain, memory, art, science, folklore, mythology, writing, music, football.

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Richard Roche @rrocheneuro.bsky.social · Nov 15

This place seems to be taking off so better do a pinned tweet - we've had a few books in recent years, so if you're into the history of Irish neuroscience, or art and the brain, or Irish mythology, there should be something for you here:

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MU Psychology @mupsychology.bsky.social · 1h

Huge thanks to everyone who joined us from the general public, staff, students, and our fantastic Psychological Society!

#MUPsychologyat25

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MU Psychology @mupsychology.bsky.social · 1h

The lecture was part of our #MUPsychologyAt25 series celebrating 25 years of Psychology teaching and research at Maynooth University.
@maynoothuniversity.ie

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MU Psychology @mupsychology.bsky.social · 1h

Great turnout last night for our public lecture by Dr Brian Pennie (brianpennie.com), popular neuroscientist and Maynooth Psychology graduate, who shared his inspiring journey of recovery from addiction and how the brain supports not just resilience, but growth and thriving.

#MUPsychologyat25

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Richard Roche @rrocheneuro.bsky.social · 3h

Some more photos from last night's event @mupsychology.bsky.social @maynoothuniversity.ie
@d-desmond.bsky.social

Richard Roche @rrocheneuro.bsky.social · 17h

A wonderful evening to celebrate @mupsychology.bsky.social at 25 years with our alumnus Brian Pennie returning to give us an inspiring talk on how education gave him the life of his dreams

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John Schwartz @jswatz.bsky.social · 1d

“Never before have we issued a joint public warning like this. But the profound, immediate and unprecedented threat that Kennedy’s policies and positions pose to the nation’s health cannot be ignored.” www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Opinion | Six surgeons general: It’s our duty to warn the nation about RFK Jr.

We took an oath to declare dangers when we found them. We’re doing that again today.

www.washingtonpost.com

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eolaí the artist @eolai.bsky.social · 2d

Have a #painting. "West Cork Trees" came out of cycling past these lads several times out west of Clonakilty where I would catch a glimpse of them through a gap in a hedgerow and despite how far they were away they would always arrest me. I hope they're doing ok. #SpeirGhorm #ArtYear #BlueSkyMonday

Landscape format in acrylic on canvas. On far side of a pale grey-green field with tufts of short vertical strokes of green and blue, is a small dark-green broken hedgerow about one running horizontally, about one quarter the way up from the bottom, and from it grow 2 trees both with twisting branches of green and red without foliage and then some clumps of blue-green foliage just at their extremities. Beyond trees is another field, rendered as a narrow strip of blazing orange and at far side is line of trees and bushes in paler blue-green than the near hedgerow. Sky is pale blue in the top half with some strips of clouds high up, but the bottom half of the sky directly behind the trees down to the horizon is one large dark mass of billowing clouds topped with lighter fluffy edges of almost white. Signed bottom right: Liam Daly

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KOJAMF🤘🖤🤘 @kojamf.bsky.social · 4d

Dr. Jane Goodall filmed an interview with Netflix in March 2025 that she understood would only be released after her death.

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R.E.M. @remhq.bsky.social · 4d

Released 33 years ago—Oct. 5-6, 1992. Share your favorite track in the comments!

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eolaí the artist @eolai.bsky.social · 5d

A newer #painting for you. "Roscommon Bog", finished only a few weeks ago, came out of a lifetime of enjoying the bogs in the middle of Ireland. Many of my earliest days of cycling involved 200 km loops out into the bog of Allen. This painting came out of a later day. #ArtYear #Scape #SpeirGhorm

Landscape format in acrylics on canvas. The horizon is very high, about one sixth from the top of the painting and everything below it is the bog. The bog is rendered in horizontal bands of varying widths and hues of purples and oranges, giving a warm rusty effect overall punctuated by dark bands. Loosely the bog gets lighter the further away it is, but the immediate foreground is lighter than the next band, and between them is a bright horizontal puddle, in shades of very pale blues and yellows as it reflect the sky. About two-thirds of the way up is a very narrow horizontal strip running the full width of the painting, of pale grass growing. Beyond the bog along the horizon sits a gently undulating landscape of a distant patchwork of very pale green fields with pale blue-green hedgerows, trees and bushes. The sky is a very pale smokey blues and teal. Signed in blue in the bottom right corner, Liam Daly

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Gerrit Thompson @gerrit.bsky.social · 5d

Notice how actual artists want nothing to do with “A.I.” while it keeps getting pushed by people with bad taste?

Cinephilia & Beyond @cinephiliabeyond.org · 6d

Werner Herzog has slammed the use of AI in new cinematic releases, saying that films that make use of the technology “look completely dead.”

“There are stories, but they have no soul. They are empty and soulless.”

Amen to that!

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Richard Roche @rrocheneuro.bsky.social · 5d

On the other hand, Jack Gleeson is excellent in it; good lad Joffrey!

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.bsky.social · 5d

Yesterday the Royal Society held a series of panels & keynotes in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Turing Test. The unanimous critical takes on AGI, big tech's power concentration & the call for urgent action left me w hope things might be turning

Watch here m.youtube.com/live/GmnBTCK...

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Richard Roche @rrocheneuro.bsky.social · 5d

Maybe everyone - especially the media - should stop calling them ICE and go with I.C.E. instead, because you just know those idiots think ICE sounds cool

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Clodagh Tait @clodaghtait.bsky.social · 6d

News to Captain Boycott
www.rte.ie/entertainmen....

Cyrus: 'I was the first person to ever be cancelled'

Miley Cyrus has reflected on the intense backlash she received during her transformation from a child actress to a pop star and believes she was the "first person to ever be cancelled".

www.rte.ie

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ianVisits @ianvisits.co.uk · 6d

In memoriam...

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Richard Roche @rrocheneuro.bsky.social · 5d

@ciaraegan.bsky.social FYI too

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Barry Boland @barryboland.bsky.social · 6d

For National Potato Day (Oct 3rd)!
www.cell.com/news-do/pr-p...

The potato evolved from the tomato 9 million years ago

Recent Cell research covered by The Guardian, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more.

www.cell.com

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Richard Roche @rrocheneuro.bsky.social · 6d

Very sad to hear this, had a lovely chat with him about art and the brain for his Almanac podcast, and he became a real champion for our CúChulainn books. A fascinating, interested and kind soul, RIP a chara

RTÉ News @news.rte.ie · 6d

The writer, broadcaster and documentary maker Manchán Magan has died at the age of 55, his family has confirmed

Broadcaster and scríbhneoir Manchán Magan dies aged 55

The writer, broadcaster and documentary maker Manchán Magan has died at the age of 55, his family has confirmed.

www.rte.ie

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Richard Roche @rrocheneuro.bsky.social · 6d

Not quite that bad, but there's a few very iffy ones

Richard Roche @rrocheneuro.bsky.social · 6d

Meanwhile, House of Guinness is on the other end of the accent scale; some very ropey ones, including from a couple of the Irish actors

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eolaí the artist @eolai.bsky.social · 9d

A #painting from a happy time. "Derryreel 4" is a north County Donegal work of the hills that were directly behind the cottage where I briefly lived with my little American dog. This is the far side, where we would walk through the bog on an old railway line. #ArtYear #MountainMonday #SpeirGhorm

Landscape format in heavily textured acrylics on mat board. Under a sky of white and grey is two hills, brown with on the hill on the right a couple of stand out straight edged green fields and on the golden brown hill on the left a small wooded plantation rendered as dark green with blue blobs, also in an area with straight edges. The foreground is a yellow-green field with a stone wall around it, and along the bottom an orange field with dark blue showing through the broken brush strokes. Due to the heavy texture there is a lot of broken colour throughout the painting.

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Tiziana Metitieri @timetit.bsky.social · 9d

The obituary of Eleanor Maguire by Georgina Ferry in The Lancet

“She kept emphasising that what the
hippocampus was involved in was the creation of something she called scenes”, says O’Keefe. “And we now see that she was right"

Eleanor Maguire
Innovative neuroscientist who advanced
knowledge of spatial awareness and memory.
Born in Dublin, Ireland, on March 27, 1970,
she died of pneumonia in London, UK, on
Jan 4, 2025, after contracting cancer of the
spine, aged 54 years.
In a rare idle moment, neuropsychologist Eleanor Maguire saw a television play in 1995 about the training of London taxi drivers and their knowledge of the city’s streets that enabled them to pick the best routes. Maguire was intrigued to know if this feat of memory changed their brains. Using
magnetic resonance imaging, she scanned the brains of drivers and found that one region of the brain, the posterior hippocampus, grew substantially larger in the taxi drivers. Subsequent work confirmed that this increase in size was due to experience. To Maguire’s surprise, she was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine (given annually by the Annals of Improbable Research for work that “makes people laugh, and then makes them think”) for her 2000 paper: Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. It was novel for a study to show a change in the brain caused by the work people do.
Maguire was born in Dublin, Ireland, one of two children of Paddy Maguire, who worked in a factory, and his wife Anne who was a receptionist. She studied obsessively from
an early age, focusing on the sciences. As an undergraduate in psychology at University College Dublin (UCD) she was inspired by the classic book The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map (1978) by John O’Keefe and Lynn Nadel to explore the role of the hippocampus in human spatial navigation. “There was considerable resistance to taking up some of the ideas put forward in the cognitive map theory”, says O’Keefe,
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London (UCL), London, UK, who shared the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine in 2014 for his discovery of cells in the hippocampus that respond to a particular location.

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Conor @ernekid.bsky.social · 15d

This pair look like the villains in a movie where the hero is a dog.

Gavan Reilly @gavreilly.com · 15d

Steen claims the political consensus has never been so out of kilter with the grassroots desire for an alternative voice

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MU Psychology @mupsychology.bsky.social · 13d

We are very excited to kick off this year's Seminar Series on Mon 29th Sept! Our first speaker is Dr Hannah Casey (@MUpsychdept /ALL Institute), who will present on "Supported Decision-Making with Adults with Intellectual Disabilities, Their Family Carers and Professional Carers”.

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