Micah G. Allen
@micahgallen
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Prof. of Computational Psychiatry @AUclinical 🇩🇰 & @HealthNeuro 🇬🇧, PI @visceral_mind - research on interoception, metacognition, & brain-body interaction.
Arhus, Denmark
Joined July 2017
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Last Seen Profiles
Pinned Tweet
Ever had a bad gut feeling ? Maybe there was something to it! In our new study, led by the brillant
@leahbanellis
&
@BrainAndStomach
, we combined fMRI & electrogastrographic imaging in 200+ participants to uncover hidden links between the gastric-brain axis & mental health
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God grant me the serenity to accept that I will not get this grant, the courage to write it anyway, & the wisdom to know it doesn't matter.
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Did you know your brain 🧠 and retina 👁️ both pulsate in time with the heartbeat 💓.
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Exciting news 🌧️raincloud🌧️ fans! Raincloud plots 2.0 are here! Now with our most common feature request - a standalone R package! And STICKERS!
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@lea_ypi
@DarwinCollege
@spectator
This is so disgusting, I’m sorry you were subjected to this. What women in academia go through is a disgrace.
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My universal directory structure, forged from years of bad organization:
/Projects
.../inProgress
....../ProjectName
.........../docs
.........../code
.........../data
.........../figures
.../published
.../submitted
You're welcome.
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It’s insane how this man can speak with confidence on topics he clearly knows absolutely nothing about to his legions of followers. This is just straight up misinformation.
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Increasingly hearing about PhD students graduating with 10+ publications. Very happy for them but publication inflation is spiraling out of control. No way a 'trainee' should be publishing at this volume and speed. Recipe for disaster - we need to slow down in science!
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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...
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Essential networking tips for young scholars:
- Google scholar page
- Personal, clean website. Quick links to: papers, CV, biography, code
- get a name/affiliation Twitter account even if you only use it to post your latest papers.
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It's official, starting next month, I'll be Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the
@AarhusUni_int
/
@AarhusUni
Institute of Clinical Medicine, for a fixed term of 5 years.
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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.
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If you are just starting out or considering a career in neuroscience, learn to code! Honestly, pick any language and just learn to do the basics: loops, indexing, conditionals. You don't need much more than that for 90% of workflows.
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Thanks to amazing work by
@nickkjudd
,
@jordyvanlangen
,
@rogierK
and others, Raincloud plots are now their own ggplot geom!
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@FrancescaFardo
and I couldn't be more happy to introduce our daughter, Aurora Jean Allen, to the world. Born @ 8:45 am this morning, a beautiful baby girl of 4.2kg. Mama and baby are doing great. ❤️🙏
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I am shocked and dismayed. Our department AU Inst of Clinical Medicine has completely reversed on our negotiations and decided that Francesca and I are both to be hired on temporary contracts irregardless of our ERC grants. It looks like Aarhus will not be our long term home.
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A hot half boiled take thread: if human neuroimaging was capable of finding decisive, sensitive and specific biomarkers of major psychiatric and mood disorders it would have already and we'd all know about it.
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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:
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It's out! Presenting Raincloud Plots: The Paper - now published in
@WellcomeOpenRes
! - if you loved the preprint, we hope you will love the final article! Thread:
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I am amazed, honored, and beyond excited to share that CANNABODIES has been awarded an ERC starting grant! What a fantastic opportunity to apply computational psychiatry and interoceptive inference approaches to understanding cannabinoids! 🤠
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Being a scientist is easy today you just need to master a few things:
Programming in multiple languages, advanced statistics ('AI' 🤣), experimental design and execution, writing, graphic design, web design, advertising, promotion, public speaking...
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True story. My PhD looked at how mindfulness impacts the brain. We did fMRI & VBM. Found sig group x time effects on amygdala volume. Showed it to
@_JohnAshburner
who immediately recognized it as a vascular artifact. Although I'd written it up, ready to submit, I binned it.
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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.
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A lot of cognitive scientists, perception scientists, psychologists, etc are stuck at home. We could distribute PsychoPy paradigms to run on ourselves repeatedly at home and generate a huge longitudinal dataset.
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Sigh. It drags on and on. I'm working every day now, mostly out of boredom. Work is sporadic too, 4 hours making one plot, then jumping elsewhere. Baseline negative affect is so high, and motivation so low, it's incredibly difficult to focus. Big picture feels elusive.
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7 plus years in the making, words cannot express how grateful and lucky we are, and how eager I am to hold our little girl for the first time!
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Stop glorifying legacy journals and impact factor. Just stop. The quality of science is fully independent from where it is published. To act otherwise is intellectual dishonesty. If you are established you have a duty to convey this message to stakeholders, grant agencies, etc.
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Good news! The blue 🟦 place sci-twitter invite pool has now been simplified to a single sign-up form, and currently has a surplus of invites available! Judging by the 300 new followers I gained today, it is a good time to join :) . .
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Our new preprint is out! We present the Heart Rate Discrimination Task, a novel psychophysical Bayesian method for estimating the accuracy, bias, and precision of interoceptive beliefs! Preview thread + all experiment code 👇
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Today I learned that women with an ADHD diagnosis are essentially barred from adopting in Denmark. What a horrendous and discriminatory rule. Absolutely shameful.
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I run a totally open lab. We share all data, code, everything we can. Of course I wonder about what I���ll do if one day we discover we’ve fucked something up. The first step is simple: I’ll take full responsibility and not throw the nearest trainee under the bus.
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Thanks twitter for recommending great introductions to scientific programming in R, Matlab, and python! Here is a draft lab document built on your suggestions - please comment for further suggestions!
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My advice to young cognitive neuroscience investigators is to pursue interesting research questions, not chase methodological fads. Methods come and go like the wind in this field, but a solid stable of research questions never goes stale and can benefit from said fads.
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What does the synthetic frog's heart tell it's Bayesian brain? Read our new pre-print "In the Body's Eye: The Computational Anatomy of Interoceptive Active Inference" to find out! - explainer thread below:
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Today the woman who rescued me from hell, who raised me from the age of four, who taught me to embrace the world, help others, and always keep my head held high has passed away. She was and always will be my guiding light. I love you Gran.
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Honored to find out I've been awarded a British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience Early Career Award! Thank you!!
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My latest out now in
@TrendsCognSci
!
Unravelling the Neurobiology of Interoceptive Inference
open access here:
mini-thread 👇
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Being a PI has a lot of great moments. Primarily when you see your trainees grow and succeed. But it is lonely, incredibly lonely.
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We won't be posting Aurora photos on social media generally speaking, but I can't resist sharing one last photo of our beautiful baby. ❤️
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We're recruiting RAs, PhD students, and postdocs for projects investigating the cognitive, affective, and neural mechanisms of cannabinoids in the brain. The only criteria are relevant priors, some coding ability, a passion for the topic, and a curious mind. Please inquire.
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Holy moly - Raincloud plots out now in
@JASPStats
! As a massive fan and daily user of JASP, this is pretty much the best news I could have read today. The Raincloud plots team is honored, thank you!
HT
@krzysztofcipora
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Our little girl is scheduled to arrive this Wednesday. Lets see if she is late like her daddy or punctual like momma. In the meantime, paternity leave responder is on, entire lab is in Finland, and I am painting the baby room! Bye bye to work for a while!
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Something amazing just happened. We went for a walk in the fields where I lost my glasses the other day. On a lark I let Saga smell my sunglasses and gave the "find it" command, which she knows. And she did it!!! We don't deserve dogs. 🥰
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One of the greatest tricks ever pulled by corporate PR firms was convincing the public that climate change is a personal responsibility issue.
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I am thrilled to share our latest publication, with Andrew Levy, Thomas Parr, and Karl Friston, in which we introduce a computational model of brain-body interaction and interoception, in
@PLOSCompBiol
! Brief thread 🧵👇
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... 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.
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I think people tend to cite work largely based on three things 1) they really like it, 2) they really dislike it, or 3) it's the first relevant Google scholar result for a sentence they wrote and need a citation for.
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In this pre-print, the authors examined data from thousands of grant reviewers to ask: how many reviewers do you need to produce reliable assessments? The answer ain't good: 3-5, reviewers produced around 0.2 reliability. 12 needed for 0.5!
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This paper where we document evidence for a null correlation between pain thresholds and depression symptoms has been desk rejected everywhere we send it. I don’t get it - study is a straight forward, well-powered replication + extension. What gives?
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Can't reveal too much yet, but excited to announce I will be starting a group (!!!) based at Aarhus University and
@psychiatry_ucam
next February. Get in touch if you want to work on the computational neuroscience of brain-body interaction & metacognition! Details in October....
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Loving how this repeated measures raincloud turned out! Thanks to the brilliant
@jordyvanlangen
for the tutorial code.
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Sometimes journal clubs turn into a shooting gallery, in which only negative critique is emphasized. While important, I suggest encouraging participants to describe at least one positive aspect of the paper. Science is never perfect and recognizing both good and bad is a skill!
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Pretty much 100% of the postdoc candidates we interview state that wanting to work in a transparent, open science environement is a major motivation for them to join the lab. If you are still running a closed shop, consider the talent you might be turning away.
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I'm not saying you gotta be a neurotic narcissist to succeed in academia, but it sure seems to help.
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Really vibing this plot for simple repeated measures. Inspiration came from a co-coding session with
#chatgpt4
(who does know about raincloud plots!).
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Paternity leave is going pretty great (don't worry, this was supervised, we don't co-sleep).
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Honored to announce I have been awarded
@lundbeckfonden
and
@AIAS_dk
fellowships to launch my research group, the embodied computation group!
@visceral_mind
- read the blog post to hear all about it!
It's official! The Embodied Computation Group awarded
@lundbeckfonden
and
@AIAS_dk
fellowships! Visceral Mind Project to launch February 2019!
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One big lesson from the 2020 pandemic should be the extreme value of sharing data openly. Countless numbers of excellent PhD theses and investigations have pivoted entirely to analysing open data, unable to collect new. It really underscores how valuable our data is when shared.
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Did you know that the effect size of ibuprofen and similar anti-inflammatory pain killers is just r = .11? Consider it a friendly reminder that 1) small effects can be meaningful at scale and 2) we tend to have wildly inaccurate hunches about effect sizes.
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Just received word that as of about 1 hour ago, the very last data point from the very last participant of the
@visceral_mind
project has been collected! We did it team! 500 comprehensive brain, body, and cognition maps collected in just two crazy years. 🙏🍾
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Friends don't let friends waste time learning to code tasks in eprime or presentation. Just learn python and use psychopy instead. You get the bonus of learning an actually useful programming language.
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To state the obvious: the relentless persuit of capital (impact factor, publication quantity, patents, etc) is the downfall of science. It turns us all into bean counters, & devastates the ability and incentive to persue knowledge for it's own sake.
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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:
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For now, we are focused on studying another, more concrete source of bliss - cannabinoids! 😉
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On writing scientific papers - you have three core audiences:
1. The editors and reviewers
2. The casual google scholar/ twitter/etc searchers
3. The journal clubs.
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Interest in brain-body coupling is rising. Current methods typically focus on a single brain-body axis, like heart-brain, in isolation. Daniel Kluger, Joachim Gross, and I argue that the brain and body exhibit complex, multi-organ dynamics. Read more:
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Twitter, what are the best online resources for introducing students in neuroscience and/or psychology to R and Python?
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I used
#ChatGPT
to simulate dynamic reward learning. We wrote an agent simulation function for a reversal-learning multi-armed bandit task, a grid search function to find optimal parameters, and made some nice plotting functions.
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How do people actually make these insane multi plots? Is it all done as separate plots and assembled in illustrator/etc? How do you maintain font point sizes?
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Does our perception of time oscillate with the heartbeat? This intresting preprint from
@irena_arslanova
and
@manos_tsakiris
suggests it does! Nice use of psychophysical methods here. The heart as a subjective pacemaker? Probable role for insula...
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Some people are still tweeting science because it's too difficult to face the world right now and they need something comforting. People react to crisis and stress in different ways. One of them is working. Empathy is your friend here.
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And I was shocked by what I saw as a total abandonment of the idea that scientists should be objective and dispassionate about their results. Instead there was an explicit belief that results where only valid if produced by "contemplative scientists" who understood the agenda.
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That was weird. I tweeted something totally innocuous ("I like wearing masks") and within seconds had several dozen nasty, violent, and inflammatory replies. Like, seriously nasty shit. Most of them almost surely bots. What a shocking look into an extremely dark side of twitter.
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Important, sobering study, likely to be widely misinterpeted. But if the strongest reproducible brain-behavior correlation is r = 0.19, we are measuring the brain, behavior, or both wrong.
Beyond excited to share our latest work, co 1st authored with
@tervoclemmensb
. Using
#ABCDStudy
data, we show that the effect sizes of brain-wide associations and sampling variability are a key element of replication failures in typical sample sizes. 1/x
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You kind of have to accept that there are people out there who will publish endless rubbish and succeed massively for it. Otherwise you just go mad. Better to lead by example and accept that corruption is as old as time.
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Happy holidays everyone. Just remember that whatever you accomplished this year, it's enough. Spend your holidays celebrating your victories, not blaming yourself for what you didn't get to. 2019 is ahead of us and full of promise!
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We're thrilled to share our latest - introducing the Respiratory Resistance Sensitivity Task: An Automated Method for Quantifying Respiratory Interoception and Metacognition! Epic work from
@ninitronic
.
Preprint:
All data & code:
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I think this is my most viral tweet so far, except maybe raincloud plots. In case you wondered why these gifs are in all my talks 😂.
Did you know your brain 🧠 and retina 👁️ both pulsate in time with the heartbeat 💓.
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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.
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As an extrovert who has been pretty rigorously social distancing since March I am starting to fatigue heavily. I never realized how much I depended on the little daily interactions. Meeting new people. Hugging and shaking hands. Feels like the color is going out of the world.
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If you want to be a researcher, start training this skill immediately.
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If you are just starting a science PhD/career, I honestly can't emphasize enough how important it is to have a systematic and sensible directory and file naming scheme! You will literally save hundreds if not thousands of work hours and sanity points.
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Thermosensory predictive coding underpins an illusion of pain! Our new study reveals how perceptions of pain can emerge from the interplay between thermal sensations, expectations, and uncertainty. Check out our thread for all the details! 🧵👇
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This essay, “Where am I?”, by Daniel Dennett, is one of my all time favorite writings in cognitive science. It was one of my very first readings as a graduate student and is as clever, beautiful, and evocative now as ever - may he rest in peace
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As a new PI, one of my biggest fears is that one day we will make some kind of embarrassing mistake in our research. It's inevitable. That is why we are committed to open data, code, preprints, and where possible, pre-registration. So the community can help us catch errors early.
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Something I love about pre-prints and twitter threads: they invite you to consider the science on it's own merits, independent of any perceived value or clout assigned by a journal. You pay attention because it's interesting, not because you see a certain URL.
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Congratulations to my brilliant, stunning, wife
@FrancescaFardo
, who's one of a kind project "IllusoryPain" has been awarded an ERC 🌟 grant. There is no joy like seeing her brilliance rewarded. Aarhus is about to be the epicenter of next generation
#pain
neuroimaging!!
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New preprint! "Breathing in waves: Understanding Respiratory-Brain Coupling as a Gradient of Predictive Oscillations". Very proud of this new theoretical review, jointly led by
@visceral_mind
PhD student
@BrMalthe
and
@danlikesbrains
.
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Whoever said "telling psychologists to use mixed effect models is like giving a toddler a bazooka" was on point. So many new papers fitting obscene 5+ way interaction models with a handful of observations and no consideration of random effects structure. It's a new p-value mill.
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I think one of the inconvenient truths we tell ourselves is that peer review keeps poorly conducted or "bad" studies out of the literature. I don't think that's true - in fact, I can't think of a single paper whose rejection I reviewed that didn't appear elsewhere.
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It brings me great joy to announce that starting this spring I will officially be joining
@PaulPcf22
's team at Cambridge Psychiatry!
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Would you like to work on a PhD or postdoc investigating the influence of cannabinoids on decision computations, subjective experience, and interoception? We will be recruiting beginning in summer 2021as part of my
@ERC_Research
StG - get in touch! Some project details below 👇
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A participant asks today, why must all the tasks be so boring and repetitive? The only honest answer I can give is because gamification is super difficult and our time is always short. But it should absolutely be a career goal to one-day only run tasks that are not boring.
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Nah, this is what voter suppression in a barely functioning democracy looks like.
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And so, although I still believe that meditation/mindfulness has some therpeutic potential, and fruitful avenues for basic research, the community did not seem invested in persuing these hypotheses or theories as an objective persuit. And so I left, never to return...
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Most young scientists I talk to entering academia today finds stuff like open data+code, pre-registration, and humility over failed replications totally intuitive and obvious. Many express a feeling that pre-registration liberates them to focus on the science. Funny that.
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