Darius Valevicius
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dariusliutas.bsky.social
Darius Valevicius
@dariusliutas.bsky.social
Restless neuroscientist and occasional artist.
PhD candidate at Université de Montréal.
Interests include: Emotion, critical psychiatry, trauma, psychophysiology, history and phil of science, painting, drawing, music, game development
dariusliutas.com
What prompted me to say this? 🤔
January 6, 2026 at 2:18 PM
Baby's first forays into messing around with RNNs 🤓
December 30, 2025 at 3:26 PM
I'm setting up a little Discord server for informal #neuroskyence discussion and project support (also open to psych and philosophy folks). Trainees especially welcome! I like this platform but sometimes it's a bit tricky to keep a good conversation going :)

DM me for an invite if interested!
December 29, 2025 at 2:17 PM
@nicolecrust.bsky.social The more things change, the more they stay the same (found in the 2008 edition of Chaos by J Gleick) #neuroskyence
December 25, 2025 at 5:27 PM
How do I bring moral ambition back to my community?
December 19, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Continuing on the reservoir business, I feel like "echo state network" (another name) is a good description of how it feels to be conscious - echoes of the previous few seconds and snippets of old memories mixing in with the present moment.
December 17, 2025 at 2:41 AM
Currently obsessed with the concept of reservoir computing - has anyone in the #neuroskyence community looked at this in depth? It seems like thinking of association areas as reservoirs is potentially very powerful, a way of operationalizing Buzsáki's "inside out" hypothesis.
December 14, 2025 at 6:01 AM
How do I bring hanging out back to my community?
December 12, 2025 at 3:11 AM
As I'm gearing up to start my own #neuroskyence projects, I have a sort of desperate urge to make sure my time is spent on things that are going to be truly useful to someone, e.g. mental health clinicians and the people they serve.

If you're a clinician: What would useful knowledge look like?
December 10, 2025 at 3:58 PM
I watched The Secret of NIMH (1982) (the animated film about the mice) after only recently connecting the dots and realizing it referred to the National Institute of Mental Health. Nice to see my field represented in the media, if only as an ominous and faceless font of dispassionate cruelty :)
November 20, 2025 at 5:24 AM
A couple sketches done at the MBAM Montréal fine arts museum today
November 9, 2025 at 4:16 AM
Little view of Montreal at dusk yesterday
October 7, 2025 at 1:34 PM
Physio question for #neuroskyence: This figure shows that global BOLD signal is already increasing before the onset of electrodermal spikes (t=0), and falls rapidly afterwards. I get the same pattern in my dataset (also for event-related analysis, GS peaks at t=0). What are potential explanations?
October 2, 2025 at 5:04 PM
Some more figure drawing this morning. Still working the mechanical pencil, though a more rigid one this time
August 16, 2025 at 8:56 PM
Need some #neuroskyence advice: What would an interpretation be for massive hypoconnectivity between one region (e.g. OFC or accumbens) and the rest of the brain as a function of a between-subjects variable Z? I.e., the mean of all edges for that node decreases as you go up in Z.
August 13, 2025 at 12:51 PM
With some trepidation, I'm putting up an article I wrote in 2023 on my personal site. It documents a visit I paid to a friend in a psychiatric intensive care unit that I found quite disturbing and depressing. I offer a little commentary at the end.

dariusliutas.com/blog/psych_i...
A guided tour of a psychiatric ICU
dariusliutas.com
August 10, 2025 at 5:13 PM
Watching the Akira Kurosawa adaptation of The Idiot by Dostoevsky with my dad. I wish I had been on tumblr 10 years ago to post stuff like this
August 3, 2025 at 1:56 AM
Now a PhD candidate :)
July 23, 2025 at 10:39 PM
I put up an old essay I wrote for a history and #philosophy of #science course on PsyArXiv. It's an overview/exploration of psychosomatic syndromes through the last 150 years or so. I think it still holds up despite writing it back in undergrad!

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

#psychology
OSF
doi.org
June 25, 2025 at 3:46 PM
To my #Montreal peeps, I'm accompanying my tall friend Danny Barwick at his gig at L'Escogriffe on Thursday, on the accordion, along with my sis on the violin. Come through for some dreamlike ballads ✌️
June 8, 2025 at 2:08 PM
This is the kind of paper that makes me wonder, "have we learned anything in the last hundred years?". You hear about the James-Lange and Cannon-Bard theories for all of a out 5 seconds in psych 101, but there are so many interesting threads in this 1927 pub. #neuroskyence

doi.org/10.2307/1415...
The James-Lange Theory of Emotions: A Critical Examination and an Alternative Theory on JSTOR
Walter B. Cannon, The James-Lange Theory of Emotions: A Critical Examination and an Alternative Theory, The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 39, No. 1/4 (Dec., 1927), pp. 106-124
doi.org
June 3, 2025 at 7:56 PM
A big part of the debate between cognitive an precognitive theories of emotion seems to boil down to the question: Can you feel an emotion without being aware of it?

So, can you? #psychscisky #neuroskyence #philosophy
We tried to put together some of the unique challenges about studying emotions (in contrast to other subjective experiences) + what is causing this divide between theories and experiments (which for one seems disagreement on what to study) in this paper: academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...
Piecing together the puzzle of emotional consciousness
Abstract. The search for neural correlates of emotional consciousness has gained momentum in the last decades. Nonetheless, disagreements concerning the me
academic.oup.com
May 29, 2025 at 2:51 PM
@nicolecrust.bsky.social Congrats on what has to be the most massive affective neuro thread on bsky so far, by a long shot (take a look at it on a thread unroller and wow...)
As I try to wrap my head around my new field of affective science writ large and The Theory of Constructed Emotion specifically, @elisennesh.bsky.social has been helpful. For the many here who like to discuss "how we sciene", my sense is that TCE is a different approach than other ways.
The Theory of Constructed Emotion: More Than a Feeling
doi.org/10.1177/1745...
#neuroscience
May 22, 2025 at 3:05 PM
Re: the Theory of Constructed Emotions, I generally try to stay theory-agnostic, but I find I have a definite attachment to "realist" emotion theories. In general, the way I approach psychology and emotional intelligence is as a dialectic between me (my ego) and things in me that I can't control
May 19, 2025 at 3:16 PM
Wrote up some (cathartic) notes on fMRI multivariate decoding in a blog post! Hope this helps at least one person somewhere, sometime :') #neuroskyence

dariusliutas.com/blog/fmri_de...
Some thoughts and sufferances on fMRI decoding
dariusliutas.com
May 18, 2025 at 6:02 PM