Ever wonder why a ventriloquist's dummy seems to talk, or why a rubber hand can feel like your own? 🤔 Our brains perform an amazing trick, merging what we see, hear, and feel into a single reality. But this process isn't always stable.

A new theory on why. 🧵

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Communications Psychology has published our new paper yesterday! Haruki et al., (2025) "Attentional bias towards smartphone stimuli is associated with decreased interoceptive awareness and increased physiological reactivity"
rdcu.be/edYM8

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Communications Psychologyに、新しい論文がでました！Haruki et al., (2025) "Attentional bias towards smartphonestimuli is associated with decreasedinteroceptive awareness and increasedphysiological reactivity" rdcu.be/edYM8

The snow is melting little by little. It feels like spring is on its way!

A view from our building in Hokkaido University

Rip Akira Toriyama

Both studies first verified that the three phenomenological dimensions usefully distinguished the different kinds of hallucination, and then asked whether the appropriate synthetic VHs were able to capture specific aspects of hallucinatory phenomenology for each aetiology. (7/n)

Using this coupled deep neural network architecture, we generated synthetic VHs that captured three dimensions of hallucinatory phenomenology which broadly characterise variations in VHs: their veridicality, spontaneity, and complexity. (5/n)

Here, we examine the potential mechanistic basis of these differences by leveraging recent advances in visualising the learned representations of a coupled classifier and generative deep neural network (4/n)

For instance, VHs arising from neurological conditions, visual loss, or psychedelic compounds have substantial phenomenological differences between them (3/n)

Visual hallucinations (VHs) are perceptions of objects or events in the absence of the sensory stimulation that would normally support such perceptions. (1/n)

The fullmoon on the Shibuya sky

Sussex Symposium On Stroboscopic Light, organised by David Schwartzman, Feb 8th-9th 2024.

宮原さんが主導する「人間と人工主体の共存のあるべき姿を学際的に問うための新たな枠組み「人工主体学」の構築に向けて」プロジェクトが主催するオンラインセミナーシリーズ開催されるそうです。

www.toyotafound.or.jp/special/2023...

ドイツの雑誌にインタビューされた。