Benjamin Lowe
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brainboyben.bsky.social
Benjamin Lowe
@brainboyben.bsky.social
54 followers 45 following 15 posts
Cog neuro postdoc at Macquarie Uni, Sydney
Activist for a free Palestine 🇵🇸
AI hater
Posts Replies Media Videos
brainboyben.bsky.social
Maybe a bit of a downer, but I think this conversation may be of interest to a bunch of people on here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSbK...
Decades of neoliberalism have broken our universities
YouTube video by The Australia Institute
www.youtube.com
November 11, 2025 at 11:57 AM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
perfors.net
Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.
Slide is titled: You don't need to use LLMs. Science is a process of collaborative meaning making, by which we try to understand the world Even if AI were perfect, we rely on it at our peril — it is not science if we (i.e., humanity as a whole) do not understand and cannot recapitulate all parts of it I very, very rarely use LLMs myself. You can give yourself permission not to. Don’t FOMO yourself into it Conclusion: Don't rely on something you don't understand and can't control If you must use LLMS: 1. Treat them like you would an intern: only use them for things you can easily and thoroughly check 2. Make your process as robust as possible 3. Be aware of your own (human) cognitive biases
November 6, 2025 at 8:41 PM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
earlkmiller.bsky.social
New paper! After a distraction, rotating traveling waves steer brain processing back to where it should be.
State–Space Trajectories and Traveling Waves Following Distraction
direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...
#neuroscience
State–Space Trajectories and Traveling Waves Following Distraction
Abstract. Cortical activity shows the ability to recover from distractions. We analyzed neural activity from the pFC of monkeys performing working memory tasks with mid-memory delay distractions (a cu...
direct.mit.edu
October 31, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
democracyactionnet.bsky.social
A poll from the journal Nature found that 75% of researchers in the U.S. are considering leaving the country. That includes a man who’s been dubbed the "Mozart of Math." Stephanie Sy examines what’s behind a potential scientific brain drain.
Top researchers consider leaving U.S. amid funding cuts: 'The science world is ending'
YouTube video by PBS NewsHour
www.youtube.com
October 30, 2025 at 12:52 AM
brainboyben.bsky.social
A wonderful paper!
dotproduct.bsky.social dorottya hetenyi @dotproduct.bsky.social · 21d
Super happy to share my very first first-author paper out in
@sfnjournals.bsky.social! We show content-specific predictions are represented in an alpha rhythm. It’s been a beautiful, inspiring, yet challenging journey.
Huge thanks to everyone, especially @peterkok.bsky.social @jhaarsma.bsky.social
peterkok.bsky.social Peter Kok @peterkok.bsky.social · 21d
@dotproduct.bsky.social's first first author paper is finally out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! Her findings show that content-specific predictions fluctuate with alpha frequencies, suggesting a more specific role for alpha oscillations than we may have thought. With @jhaarsma.bsky.social. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖
October 21, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
emilya-izzeddin.bsky.social
The final bit of work from my PhD just got published at JOV! We looked at similarity judgements made for naturalistic image patches, and whether these are predicted by simple image statistics… (spoiler: yep!)

Link to paper: doi.org/10.1167/jov....

1/11
Low-level features predict perceived similarity for naturalistic images | JOV | ARVO Journals
doi.org
October 8, 2025 at 7:13 AM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
earlkmiller.bsky.social
For all the knucklehead reviewers out there.
Principles for proper peer review - Earl K. Miller
jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/qag76ip8...
#neuroscience
Principles for proper peer review
jocnf.pubpub.org
October 6, 2025 at 7:59 PM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
merrickgiles.bsky.social
One of the most depressing phd experiences is hearing of others' advisors (the ones that are supposed to train us into good scientists) encourage the use of chatbots in lieu of their students' development. thankfully mine don't.
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 21
Getting close to 50k views and I'm wondering is it just everybody is scared to say this and pleased I did? Because if there's so many of us who agree, trust me I'd know if 1k people disagreed with me let alone 50k, why are we letting AI ruin our universities?

Together we can turn back the tide.
olivia.science Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · Sep 6
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
September 23, 2025 at 1:04 PM
brainboyben.bsky.social
I feel seen—and heard: www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...
My petty gripe: not only am I losing my livelihood to AI – now it’s stealing my em dashes too
The humble em dash is being used as a tell that something is written by a large language model. But it’s James Shackell’s favourite piece of punctuation, and he’s not ready to lose it
www.theguardian.com
October 1, 2025 at 4:23 AM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
emilya-izzeddin.bsky.social
Just published some work at Scientific Reports! We investigated visual adaptation following free viewing of a film (Casablanca) that had its oriented contrast altered. To our surprise, we found adaptation effects to be pretty negligible…

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/10
Investigating orientation adaptation following naturalistic film viewing - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Investigating orientation adaptation following naturalistic film viewing
www.nature.com
September 29, 2025 at 8:27 AM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
matthieu-mx.bsky.social
1/ Why are we so easily distracted? 🧠 In our new EEG preprint w/ Henry Jones, @monicarosenb.bsky.social and @edvogel.bsky.social we show that distractibility is associated w/ reduced neural connectivity — and can be predicted from EEG with ~80% accuracy using machine learning.
September 28, 2025 at 7:14 PM
brainboyben.bsky.social
Looking forward to this!
psychopy.org PsychoPy @psychopy.org · Sep 11
Shout out to Australian researchers! 🇦🇺 (and folks in the southern hemisphere) 🌏

We're excited that our Ambassador Ben Lowe (@brainboyben.bsky.social) will be hosting a pre-conference workshop at #ACNS2025 (@acnsau.bsky.social) on getting started with PsychoPy!

Sign up here👇
shorturl.at/gvnUU
ACNS 2025 Pre-Conference Workshops - Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society
Sorry, this product is unavailable. Please choose a different combination.
www.acns.org.au
September 11, 2025 at 9:09 AM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:
September 6, 2025 at 11:09 PM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
carlbergstrom.com
5. Today I read a paper by @sabinaleonelli.bsky.social and Alexander Mussgnug that I think illustrates this point perfectly.

philsci-archive.pitt.edu/24891/1/Phil...
Convenience AI Sabina Leonelli & Alexander Martin Mussgnug12 Abstract: This paper considers the mundane ways in which AI is being incorporated into scientific practice today, and particularly the extent to which AI is used to automate tasks perceived to be boring, “mere routine” and inconvenient to researchers. We label such uses as instances of “Convenience AI” — that is situations where AI is applied with the primary intention to increase speed and minimize human effort. We outline how attributions of convenience to AI applications involve three key characteristics: (i) an emphasis on speed and ease of action, (ii) a comparative element, as well as (iii) a subject-dependent and subjective quality. Using examples from medical science and development economics, we highlight epistemic benefits, complications, and drawbacks of Convenience AI along these three dimensions. While the pursuit of convenience through AI can save precious time and resources as well as give rise to novel forms of inquiry, our analysis underscores how the uncritical adoption of Convenience AI for the sake of shortcutting human labour may also weaken the evidential foundations of science and generate inertia in how research is planned, set-up and conducted, with potentially damaging implications for the knowledge being produced. Critically, we argue that the consistent association of Convenience AI with the goals of productivity, efficiency, and ease, as often promoted also by companies targeting the research market for AI applications, can lower critical scrutiny of research processes and shift focus away from appreciating their broader epistemic and social implications.
August 19, 2025 at 5:11 AM
brainboyben.bsky.social
🚨Pre-print of some cool data from my PhD days!
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

☝️Did you know that visual surprise is (probably) a domain-general signal and/or operates at the object-level?
✌️Did you also know that the timing of this response depends on the specific attribute that violates an expectation?
The Latency of a Domain-General Visual Surprise Signal is Attribute Dependent
Predictions concerning upcoming visual input play a key role in resolving percepts. Sometimes input is surprising, under which circumstances the brain must calibrate erroneous predictions so that perc...
doi.org
August 19, 2025 at 12:30 AM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
I spoke yesterday with a lovely university student I know in Gaza who sent the message below.
His instagram page shows his beautiful English and charisma, and the dire situation he is in: www.instagram.com/jehadkmiri/
Please consider donating to his family here:
www.paypal.com/donate?hoste...
August 17, 2025 at 10:28 AM
brainboyben.bsky.social
It’s frankly absurd that we’re at the point where this critique needed to be written
August 16, 2025 at 1:09 AM
brainboyben.bsky.social
I really like this paper. I fear that people think the authors are claiming that the brain isn’t predictive though, which this study cannot (and does not) address. As the title says, the data purely show that evoked responses are not necessarily prediction errors, which makes sense!
tyrellturing.bsky.social Blake Richards @tyrellturing.bsky.social · Jul 11
1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex:

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction.

But...

🧠📈 🧪
Sensory responses of visual cortical neurons are not prediction errors
Predictive coding is theorized to be a ubiquitous cortical process to explain sensory responses. It asserts that the brain continuously predicts sensory information and imposes those predictions on lo...
www.biorxiv.org
July 15, 2025 at 11:43 AM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
renrutmailliw.bsky.social
New paper out in @plosbiology.org w/ Charlie, @phil-johnson.bsky.social, Ella, and Hinze 🎉

We track moving stimuli via EEG, find evidence that motion is extrapolated across distinct stages of processing + show how this effect may emerge from a simple synaptic learning rule!

tinyurl.com/2szh6w5c
May 23, 2025 at 8:34 PM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
albeccia.bsky.social
my NIH grant was terminated today - the grant that pays my rent and my bills and my loans and my health insurance - because I study how to improve the lives and wellbeing of queer people #episky #medsky
March 21, 2025 at 9:31 PM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
adamserwer.bsky.social
Immigrants, trans people, palestinian rights activists, eventually it’s going to be your turn when the regime decides you are an enemy
March 10, 2025 at 2:12 AM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
jthee.bsky.social
We used a brain "pinging" again and found that distractor suppression is reactive rather than proactive, meaning attention is first drawn to the distractor before being suppressed.
Neural mechanisms of learned suppression uncovered by probing the hidden attentional priority map
Learned suppression of distractor locations in visual search emerges through reactive mechanisms that involve initial spatial selection prior to suppression.
doi.org
February 27, 2025 at 8:00 AM
brainboyben.bsky.social
Climate science 👀
neuromatch.bsky.social Neuromatch @neuromatch.bsky.social · Feb 24
🚨 Neuromatch Academy Course Applications are OPEN for 2025!! 🚨

Get your application in early to be a student or teaching assistant for this year’s courses!

Applications are due Sunday, March 23.

Apply & learn more: neuromatch.io/courses/

#mlsky #compneurosky #ai #climatesolutions #ScienceEdu 🧪
Applications are now open! 3-week courses: Comp Neuro and Deep Learning. 2-week courses: NeuroAI and Comp Tools for Climate Science.
February 25, 2025 at 8:14 AM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
joemelling.bsky.social
Excited to share my first paper: a novel visual illusion discovered by my co-authors Will Turner and Hinze Hogendoorn which we call the "Split-Stimulus Effect", in which a single flashed stimulus is perceived to be in two different locations simultaneously jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... [1/5]
Concurrent perception of competing predictions: A “split-stimulus effect” | JOV | ARVO Journals
jov.arvojournals.org
November 16, 2024 at 2:14 AM
Reposted by Benjamin Lowe
lovetheants.bsky.social
Collaborating with @rin-krichilsky.bsky.social and Kanako Shimizu, we put together what's basically a top-ten list of ways to help foster trans inclusivity and awareness within our scientific and academic communities and would love if you could help share the guide!
How to Support Trans Colleagues Create a Gender-Inclusive Environment Research institutional, governmental, local, and other bureaucratic procedures and policies that recognize and support gender transition. Support training and advocacy for colleagues’ personal/professional safety (ex. in fieldwork, lab work, conferences, institution visits, affinity groups). Establish and/or identify gender-neutral bathrooms throughout your building. Implement trans-inclusive recruitment and hiring procedures. Acknowledge intersectionality and the unique needs and barriers that someone with multiple marginalized identities may face. Consider the importance of representation in your field. Advocate for Name Changes Research institutional, governmental, local, and other bureaucratic procedures and policy to recognize and support an individual’s name change. Identify journals in your field that allow authors to change their names post- publication. Improve Information Accessibility Publicly share information on inclusive practices throughout your departments and institution. (Ensure the content centers and is created by trans people.) Consider Daily Language & Use Decrease use of gendered terms to avoid exclusionary language. Ask for personal pronouns. List on all public-facing directories, and consider including them in email signatures and on professional websites. Practice discretion. Don’t out your colleagues without their consent.
January 16, 2025 at 7:21 AM