Excited to announce the publication of our new article, "Respiratory Rhythms of the Predictive Mind", in @APA_Journals Psychological Review! A quick thread summarizing our key points: psycnet.apa.org/record/2022-92… For those without access, an updated post-print is available for free here: psyarxiv.com/38bpw

A simple trick for learning a new literature I was taught in my undergrad is the "snowball" technique. Here's how it works: start with one review or empirical finding in the topic you want to work on. Carefully read the works cited and pick 4-5 key references. Then read those. How do you pick the key references? Usually it's a good idea to look for some of the oldest references - these are also often the first mentioned. Any good literature search is also a bit of a historical reconstruction. What where they key events and ideas?

Can we please have more publication methods that offer transparent review, reasonable open access costs, and a good web interface (i.e., nice full-text papers with interactive plots and code chunks)? Notice I didn't say "journal"? Why can't it be an application, something new? A network of scientific functions. I'd happily pay extra per paper or membership fees for value added features like GDPR compliant data storage, professional code review, or figure consultation.

I often criticize the Danish approach to mental healthcare and psychiatry - and it does have many flaws. However today I learned that persons with mental illness can qualify for "flexjobs" where they only need to work part time and recieve full salary. That's great. I'm sure it's not easy to qualify for - I think you need to have a history of not holding down a job - but at least it's one way the social safety net picks up some of the slack from the burdened mental healthcare system.

I've had the J&J vaccine this summer and a Moderna booster a few weeks ago. I'd like to visit my family in Florida this Nov/Dec. Should I feel safe travelling there? Brain says yes, gut says maybe, heart says it's Florida you dolt it's amazing you survived there the first time.

Since I tweeted about my struggles with depression and anxiety this last year, I've received a ton of support including making new friends and reconnecting with others. I've started climbing regularly and focusing on what brings me joy. I'm feeling a lot more like my old self. 🙏 Still a ways to go, and persons with ADHD are kind of infamous for going all in on big flashy solutions and then later abandoning them at the first sign of progress. I know my mental health is a marathon not a sprint especially with winter fast approaching.

A key question I think many [cognitive] neuroscientist are grappling with these days is how can our models and measures inform the quest for "precision" medicine/psychiatry. Certainly this is a major aim of computational psychiatry. A thread: Everyone is seemingly in on the biomarker and machine learning bandwagon. Certainly it seems likely that in principal, having a load of brain, biological, cognitive, and symptom data might reveal novel stratifications in psychiatric and neuropathic diseases.

Examining the robustness of the relationship between metacognitive efficiency and metacognitive bias sciencedirect.com/science/articl… from @DobyRahnev and colleagues, using the confidence database! @DobyRahnev I'm almost certain we also see this effect cross modally in our 330 N study, will check and be sure to include it in our supplementary analysis as a further replication!

Hot damn. In all the time I have worked with large scale data, I've never seen a correlation between subjective and behavioral variables this tight. Post-task accuracy ratings for recognition memory are highly related to decision sensitivity (d')! It is particularly interesting in comparison to our other task modalities (vision, triva), where post-task accuracy ratings primarily correlate with within-task confidence and/or metacognitive sensitivity.

Early network analysis of metacognitive self-beliefs. Visual confidence seems to be quite central. Across modalities, a high meta-bias relates to less belief updating. Network encodes 1) ∆-self belief, i.e. shift in explicit self-evaluated efficacy within each domain after extended testing without feedback, 2) avg self-belief, and 3) average trialwise confidence (meta-bias).

Our 64 core threadripper-based neuroimage processing cluster is absolutely ripping through fMRI prep. We're running up to 16 participants in parallel, loading all 128 threads. About 2 hours per participant! I was worried we'd get bottlenecked by RAM but so far it seems absolutely no problem, using between 50-150 GB of our 256 GB total. Most processes only use short spikes of RAM from what I can tell.

I am often asked why I left meditation/mindfulness research after my PhD. The simple answer is that I wanted to persue basic research in computational neuroscience and perception science. The longer answer... ... is that a decade ago, I found myself extremely disillusioned with a field that seemed to compound the worst of the replication crisis with "true believe syndrome", and questionable relationships with major funding/advocacy groups such as the Mind & Life.

Here is my bold prediction for neuroimaging: fMRI is the past, OPM is the future. The relatively low cost, customizability, high SNR, and excellent spatiotemporal resolution will see OPMs and other MEG sensors emerge as the dominant functional imaging tech in the next decade. fMRI will never go away, but I see it becoming an increasingly niche tech focused on ultra high field imaging of small nuclei and layer-specific anatomy. The rise of computational neuroscience will continue to expand the dynamical approach.

This is why we want to comprehensively study the medium and long term effects of Covid-19 on interoception and neural processing of bodily signals -> possible attack vector on cranial nerves could cause lasting interoceptive disruption and psychiatric risk.

https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1354671311377883141

Now if only we could get the funders and long-covid teams in Denmark to understand the importance of investigating the neural and interoceptive side of this pandemic. 🤷‍♂️

Some advice on scientific collaboration (e.g., my approach). A thread: 1) The best collaborations are modular. Each collaborator brings something unique, and work responsibilities are clearly divided accordingly.

Talk yesterday was super motivating. We’ve got some exciting new interoception measures just around the corner: 1. Heart rate discrimination task (HRDT) - Bayesian psychometrics of cardiac belief accuracy and precision. With this task and a cheap pulse oximeter, you can get robust measures of cardiac interoception + metacognition in around 15 minutes.

So, Friday night real talk for a minute. We don't hear enough about what being a PI is actually enough when doing our PhDs and postdocs. First disclaimer is, I absolutely love being a new PI. I find it immensely rewarding, and I'm very well supported with close to no admin or teaching. So it could be a lot harder than what I am about to describe.

Stunned. "A 25 March paper in JAMA Cardiology documented heart damage in nearly 20% of patients out of 416 hospitalized for COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. In another Wuhan study, 44% of 138 hospitalized patients had arrhythmias." sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/h… I've been closely following developments on the the respiratory and neurological impact of covid-19, but this is the first I'd heard of how widespread cardiac events are. Interoception pandemic. 😟

I see a lot of ongoing debate, and some snark, about people pivoting into #COVIDー19 related research, particularly in #psychology. As the PI of a lab working on one of these projects, here is a thread on my thoughts: First off, I totally get the snark. Academics are like baby ducklings. Someone gets a Nobel Prize or a Nature paper on something, a year later there are 300 new projects on that topic. VSS last year was Deep Learn All the Things. No doubt that we love a good bandwagon.

Currently writing our Regional ethics application in which we ask for permission to share anonymized brain data openly, a first in Denmark to my knowledge. So grateful for this consortium on open brain data consent forms!! open-brain-consent.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ If successful, our application will become a template for others at @CFIN_AU who would like to share their data. Feels really great to be pushing this forward but also pretty scary.

Lately we have been optimizing our life everywhere possible. I am now doing 16:8 intermittent fasting. I break fast with Huel at 12pm, and dinner every night is a Danish recipe box with local ingredients. This combo has revolutionized my eating and reduced overhead so much! Obviously not for everyone, but for us it is tremendous. No shopping whatsoever, 10x more veggies in the diet, a highly standardized nutrition intake, and much less impulsive shopping/cooking/eating out.