Hugo Fleming
@HugoFleming_
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Neuroscientist researching the brain basis of mental health @mrccbu @Cambridge_Uni | Associate @Peterhouse_Cam | Mental Health and metabolism
London, England
Joined June 2019
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Pinned Tweet
New preprint out, with
@olijrobinson
and
@jonroiser
! 📢 ‘Measuring cognitive effort without difficulty’ . We highlight a major confound in previous cog effort tasks and present a new task that solves this.🧵
#cognitiveeffort
#effort
#cogneuro
@ucl_icn
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Belated post to announce that I’ve recently moved to Cambridge to take up a postdoc with the brilliant
@camillalnord
@mrccbu
- super excited for what the next couple of years have in store!
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Hugely happy and proud to have passed my PhD and finally be able to call myself Dr Fleming! Massive thanks to
@brain_apps
and
@ProfData
for a really interesting viva discussion, and of course
@jonroiser
and
@olijrobinson
for being such fantastic supervisors! 🎉 🎉 🎉
🎉many congratulations 🎉to
@HugoFleming_
for passing his viva with flying colours on Friday afternoon, supervised jointly by
@olijrobinson
and me. Thanks so much to examiners
@brain_apps
and
@ProfData
. (please excuse unintended manel vibes)
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Fun news! You can catch the UCL University Challenge team in action, this Monday 19th July, 8:30pm on BBC2. Can promise an exciting match.
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Exciting times putting together the equipment for my next study! We’re going to be exploring how we regulate our sugar levels and what that might have to do with depression - using these fancy computer-controlled juice -dispensing machines. 🍷 Stay tuned!
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Interested in the science underlying mental health? Next month I'm giving not one but TWO public talks for
@pintofscience
, on 13th (London) and 15th May (Cambridge). Why does depression often overlap with metabolic disease? Grab a pint, pull up a chair and find out. Tickets👇
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Next up is Shirley Wang, talking about prediction of suicidal thoughts and behaviour
#cpconf2023
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Just in case any academics are still on this site... I wrote a thing a while ago about what (I think) science is, and more particularly how one can do meaningful and rewarding work. I hope it's interesting!
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Come and work with us this summer! We are currently advertising for a (paid) summer intern via the
@mrccbu
's internship scheme. Project will be looking at the overlap between reward learning, metabolism & mental health (see below). Link to apply is here:
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@Alexandra_Pike
@behrenstimb
@mcmc_stan
I heard a good psychology joke the other day, but I'm not sure I can reproduce it
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Want to know more about mental health? Our research suggests we need to look beyond the brain, and think about processes happening in the rest of the body too. Watch
@camillalnord
explain more (ably assisted by
@jamesldowns
and myself).
@Ri_Science
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Update: Now published in CABN! First first-author paper 🎉
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Another day, another exciting development in our metabolism and mental health study! This funky bit of kit which arrived today is a continuous glucose monitor ⏱ We’re hoping to use it to give us a really fine grained measure of participants’ glucose sensitivity. See below for
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Had a fantastic time last night introducing the Pint of Science crowd in London to our work on depression and energy regulation. Looking forward to round two in Cambridge tomorrow!
First night of our
@pintofscience
@ucl
Beautiful Mind events was a great success - science pooch Nora agrees 🐶
Fun and insightful talks from
@Ben_M_Greenwood
about interoceptive signals and from
@HugoFleming_
on how metabolism and mental health are connected 🫀🧠
#pint24
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🎉 Super excited to be launching a new project, 'Notes on Science'! 🎉
Today, scientists increasingly need to know how to communicate their research directly to the public. Together with the wonderful
@AmiraSkeggs
,
@_cmhood
,
@__GeorgiaTurner
and
@lukasgunschera
, we've created...
Introducing Notes on Science,
a new science communication platform where we share big ideas in science and unique insights into the lives of scientists.
Want to get involved? We are currently accepting new contributions, please get in touch!
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@jamesrbuk
Unfortunately the roomba instead learned to drive everywhere in reverse, since it has no proximity sensors on the back and could bump into all the furniture it liked with no penalty.
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This is tomorrow - looking forward to sharing some new thoughts on the depression/energy regulation overlap I've been working on recently!
✨Happy New Year! ✨ ease your brain back into neuroscience mode over a pint with 2024's first Neurotalks tomorrow evening with
@HugoFleming_
,
@Marta__Camacho
and
@DavidPosner13
telling us all about the mind-body connection - talk details below ⤵️
7pm @ The Cambridge Tap 🍻
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#cpconf2023
Yael Niv on latent cause inference - ie learning about underlying structure so as to generalise to new situations
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Really striking figure in Stephen Wood’s talk at
#BAP2019
. Mental health is THE major disease burden for young people.
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A glorious piece of understatement from
@lfoulkesy
! (prepping for lab discussion tomorrow on mental health awareness - the good and the bad)
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Really enjoyed writing and giving this talk! Great to kick off the New Year with some big picture, exciting ideas that are just on the horizon 😀 (watch this space for news of some of our first studies reaching completion this year!)
Thank you all for coming last night and to our wonderful speakers for imparting your wisdom on blue poop, non-atypical atypical depression and how the brain survives without any immune cells inside 🤯
See you all next time, 13 Feb, for a (hint hint) 💕seasonal💕 edition
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Great talk so far from
@d_spiegel
at
#StanCon2019
on the importance of communicating risk properly. Key points so far: communicate absolute not relative risk and try to show visually rather than numerically the proportions eg. of people affected.
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An important lesson I’ve learned in the last year or so is that it can be just as rewarding to finish a project as it is to start on a new, exciting one. Celebrating completing things massively increases momentum and motivation.
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Excellent essay by Danielle Navarro on the perils and pitfalls of Bayes factors
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Saw this extraordinary play tonight - would strongly recommend. Top draw writing (as one might expect from Lucy Prebble - and next to no wrong steps on the neuroscience issues too!) and superb acting. Hugely enjoyed
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@camillalnord
this is the idea I mentioned at lunch - adding variables to a regression model to ‘control for’ them can actually produce new spurious associations. It’s really terrifying
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This is a really important message! To add to this: Science is hard and, despite talk about scooped, the reality is most people are far too busy with their own work to try to copy yours; on the other hand, sharing is a generous act that people generally appreciate.
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NMDA encephalitis would beg to differ. Brain basis of mental health must be out there - after all, all other causal factors must be mediated through the brain if they affect behaviour - but it’s just vastly more difficult (and unpredictable) work than many appreciate…
Search for potential biomarkers of psych disorder= repeated triumph of naive hope over bitter experience.
60 yr cycle of hyped overpromising/failed replication.
Psych disorders far too fuzzy/heterogeneous/complicated in causation to yield reductionist "brain medicine" answers.
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@TheSimonEvans
@pdmcleod
@pixelatedboat
@TheSimonEvans
have you ever heard the day today sketch along these lines? One of the funniest things they did I think (which is saying something given how outrageously funny the whole program was)
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Travelling to the Comp Psychiatry conference at Trinity Dublin and setting the scene with some
@TheRestHistory
- their 4-parter on Ireland really is excellent
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I wonder how this phenomenon may apply to (/complicate) ideas of Bayesian brain? Maybe explains some cases of apparent overreliance on priors? Existing models just assume all gaussians afaik
Huzzah! Posterior distributions in red. The shape of the tails, which isn't so obvious to the eye, can do weird but logical things.
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The Chester Beatty museum in Dublin really is the most exquisitely tasteful collection. Highly recommend. Beautiful works of Islamic art in particular, but also European and East Asian prints and decorative arts.
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Thanks to
@__GeorgiaTurner
for producing the video, and also shout out to
@annalise_bw
for her sterling work behind the scenes (and for really driving this study along over the past year!)
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we fitted a range of hierarchical models (thanks
@mcmc_stan
!), compared and investigated their different fits, then extracted reward and effort sensitivity parameters for each participant. THEN we associated these parameters with 6 cognitive traits using an SEM regression.
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Just finished this interesting (and motivating!) book by
@GregoryMcKeown
, largely summed up by the mantra “fewer things done better”. Would particularly recommend for other postdocs. The management/leadership section at the end is especially excellent.
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A propos, I've long thought there was some theoretical work to be done on the growth of control systems. We see it at all levels: greater control (beaurocracy) allows an organism (society) to perform more complex actions, access more resources and grow. But...
Why small mindedness is having big consequences
@Brain1878
I live under its shadow. I suspect most of you do too. It is the great mountain of small things. The higher it gets, the bigger the shadow it casts: a malignant darkness that pervades our lives.
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Such an interesting paper. Insulin receptors on astrocytes cause ATP release, which in the NAc triggers dopamine release. And an ATP-receptor agonist rescues depression-like behaviour on forced swim test (obvs in mice)
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@KevinH_PhD
@AaronHengist
@medrxivpreprint
V interesting (and timely) work! Is your feeling that the same would hold true when running an oral glucose tolerance test as well?
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@Alexandra_Pike
@matthewcobb
killed off most of Scott's antarctic exhibition. I found this out from
@yudapearl
's 'The Book of Why' – the explanation can basically be summed up as that they didn't understand the mechanism by which citrus worked, so they abandoned it.
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Medawar on scientists: "Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poet-scientists and philosopher-scientists and even a few mystics...
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@jamesrbuk
Possibly apocryphal, but heard a story on here about a guy who fixed a raspberry pi to his roomba and wrote an RL algorithm that punished actions that led to the roomba bumping into things (obviously hoping the roomba could learn the layout of the house).
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Interesting little factoid (I feel
@jonroiser
will enjoy especially) – 'pure' science originally referred not to whether the science was applied or not, but whether its principles could be deduced a priori (in contrast to the empirical sciences.
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More evidence that insulin receptors in the brain play an important role in dopaminergic signalling
An anti-obesity GLP-1 drug restores associative learning (under dopaminergic midbrain control), as shown in a randomized trial with a single dose
@NatMetabolism
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Briefly, the task involves categorising the digits in a sequence of the numbers 1-9 as even or odd. The effort of this task varies with the frequency of switching between even/odd but crucially this doesn't affect the difficulty (which we verified by looking at the success rates)
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@jonroiser
@WiringTheBrain
@amitaishenhav
Equally, worth bearing in mind the feynmann interpretation of inference - inference/reducing entropy necessarily consumes energy!
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@GabrielByc
@emulenews
by any chance do you know what Platt was referring to by ‘Fermi’s notebook method’, in his paper strong inference above? The ref is to chs 7&8 of ‘the excitement of science’
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You know what really grinds my gears? The misuse of the phrase 'bad apple'. The full saying is actually: 'one bad apple spoils the barrel'; so in the context of police violence, say, claiming that 'it was just one bad apple' is a pretty awful defence.
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@WiringTheBrain
The thalamus literature is good on this, usually in relation to schizophrenia. There are some classic earlier reviews by Murray Sherman and Ray Guillery (below from Sherman 2007), then there are a few papers by a chap called Vukadinovic from around 2011/2012 that...
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On that note, the task is freely available on the
@GorillaPsyc
open materials repository with a CC-by licence - so you're welcome to share and use the task as long as it's non commercial and you credit appropriately etc etc. Likewise, the preregistration,
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After a (very quick!) sprint through results demonstrating the measurement of individual differences to establish possible mechanisms (shout outs to
@camillalnord
@AnahitMkr
@Harry_Costello
@karelkieslich
and
@vincentvalton
) we end with below thoughts for the future
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V cool result this!
1/ 🚨 ⚡ New paper
💊 Reduction of aversive learning rates by angiotensin II antagonist losartan: a randomised clinical trial
🧑🏽 Judith Appel, Corinna Klinge,
@LorikaShk
@michaelbrowni19
@KatjaWiech
and Andrea Reinecke
Now in Biological Psychiatry:
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data and analysis scripts are all available on my OSF repository .
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Interesting little graph – if you calculate inflation in the same way as they did in 1980 (blue line below), then we're actually at ~17% inflation not the 10% given by current methods. Useful reply to those who say it was much worse in the 70s/80s
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Interesting article that I read recently - the impact of your research paper (on a number of indices) depends on the *clarity* of your writing, *not* readability. i.e. common recommendations to use short words/sentences all the time may be misguided.
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Delicious little sentence (one of many dotted through the book) in Katherine Rundell’s new biography of Donne
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New blog post about writing (or any creative endeavour really), and how to improve. Perhaps counterintuitively, it's important to prioritise quantity, and quality will come later. "Quantity beats quality"
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I wrote a thing about all the pseudoscientific nonsense going around at the moment - check it out:
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@Alexandra_Pike
@matthewcobb
@yudapearl
Would heartily recommend the Book of Why by the way – I read it over xmas. Perhaps this and the Idea of the Brain could be subjects for the lab reading group?
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the results of some initial self-piloting - can confirm it’s completely painless, despite my disproportionate flinch reaction 😅
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@Arnaldo_AGITF
@ole_b_peters
I’ve started reading your lecture notes and now I’m seeing ergodicity problems everywhere! - is this another example?
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If you’re up near UCL tomorrow, come and say hello! We’ve got a stall all about the neuroscience anticipation and what it tells us about anxiety. Come and chat science with us!
Come and talk to UCL's world-leading neuroscientists and find out how the brain works at
#BrainPower
, The UCL Neuroscience Festival tomorrow (Saturday, 22 June)!
@ucl_slms
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@jonroiser
@WiringTheBrain
@amitaishenhav
No evidence for a global increase of glucose consumption last time I looked (a year or two ago). Obviously transient local increases in metabolism hence PET/fMRI. Best bet potentially buildup of waste products, but evidence there is equivocal at best!
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Reading old papers, you sometimes see them refer to 'depressions' rather than just 'depression'. A slight change of language perhaps, but with significant difference in implication. Should we be returning to this plural form?
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This article is *mind blowing* – (re)identifiable location data about everybody with a phone is literally just available to buy from ad companies... (+ intelligence, journalists etc. all making use of it)
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"One of the most eye-opening, thought-shaping books I have read in my life" - New blog from me, all about why Popper's work should be read more deeply and more widely
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One for me to read later - as an aside, it feels like the dopamine story is starting (gradually) to come together?
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@TheSimonEvans
Although there's that line of Al Murray (or rather, the PL): only the italians could convince the world that a flooded city that stinks of shit is some kind of jewel in the crown...!
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@MahanEsfahani
To be followed by a gift of tennis balls from Macron at the coronation next year, surely
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Cracking paper from a few years ago by
@StatModeling
on philosophy of computational modelling. Does Bayes = inductive reasoning? No! Bayes fits into framework of falsification and deduction. In cog science imo this idea isn't understood/applied enough
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@behrenstimb
I'm proposing a preregistration joke - this isn't it, but I thought I'd let you know what I'm planning.
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(As an aside, it’s also just wildly fun to be coding an experiment where there’s *physical stuff* to tinker with and try to make work. Beats being glued to a computer screen!)
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We're interested in the role that differences in sensitivity to effort costs may play in other aspects of cognition, and particularly symptoms of MH conditions. To do so, we need to be able to isolate and measure effort sensitivity on an individual basis.
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This is rather good
For those non-Norwegian readers who asked for an English version of my recent, longish
@vinduet
reflection on the life and work but mainly work of the English novelist and critic Martin Amis (1949-2023), here it is, with some bonus material:
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@WiringTheBrain
... expand on the cognitive efference copying idea with regards to hallucinations in schizophrenia.
@annamitch28
may also be a useful person to speak to if you want to go down the cognitive thalamus route.
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@Alexandra_Pike
@matthewcobb
Scurvy is a good example! - It was well established by the 1700s that eating citrus fruit could prevent scurvy, but then around the turn of the 20th century this belief was overturned and the consensus was that scurvy was caused by spoiled tinned meat. Turns out this probably
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@Alexandra_Pike
we watched the Constant Gardener a few weeks ago if you can find it, think on Amazon. Worth it for young Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz alone
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This is important because higher difficulty results in a lower chance of successfully completing the task (and therefore gaining reward), in turn leading to greater avoidance of these trials. Which is also exactly how effort costs manifest in these tasks!
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@CapelLofft
The essence of any dictator is surely fear - ultimately the only two outcomes are that you cling onto power by any means necessary, and die in office; or one day you suffer a coup and the next you’re taken out into the street and shot. No happy retirement available to Putin.
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@arthistorynews
@arthistorynews
What is your view on deescalation? I was thinking previously it was a worthwhile aim - build your enemy a golden bridge and all that - but increasingly am feeling it would be a short term reprieve that would ultimately embolden Putin again
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Not a fan of Boris by any means, but important to recognise that a single picture can be completely misleading
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Great day of Public Engagement so far!
Having a great time at the
#BrainPower
day
@ucl_slms
representing
@UCL_ICN
! Talking about anticipation and anxiety, neatly demonstrated using games and shocks
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@WiringTheBrain
Ooh, ‘very well’ is a stretch. ‘Well enough’ is surely as much as one can say! Always blows my mind thinking of things like tetrachromacy, snakes ‘seeing’ thermal vision etc. How much of the world are we missing?
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And people say inbox zero is impossible
To my office, and there saw every thing finished, so as my papers are all in order again and my office twice as pleasant as ever it was, having a noble window in my closet and another in my office, to my great content.
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@GabrielByc
Ooh tantalising! Yes looks like thats the book I’m looking for… maybe the chap in the tweet will be kind enough to share another extract!
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The big argument recently around ultraprocessed food reveals quite a lot, I think, about how many scientists think about society. Briefly, lots of people got hot under the collar about a Panorama documentary that said that UPF is bad, for various reasons -
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Really interesting talk by Nathan Skene at the UCL Neuro symposium on genetics of SZ (and other) diseases. Red are cell types ruled in by GWAS, blue are cell types - and thus theories - ruled *out*. Interesting that both microglia and DA come a cropper here...
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Also, we standardise the difficulty across participants by setting the time allowed to complete each sequence relative to their maximum performance - which means the effort sensitivity metrics we get from the task can then be compared across people!
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