Micah G. Allen

@micahgallen.com

Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Psychiatry, Aarhus University. PI @ the Embodied Computation Group. We study perception, interoception, & metacogniton.

https://www.the-ecg.org

@neuroskeptic.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 11:14 AMReposted by @micahgallen.com

"Several major effects of psychedelics can be understood as perturbations to serotonergic signaling, but some drug actions remain difficult to explain by existing serotonin biology" pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42833201/

It doesn't help that we really don't understand what serotonin is "for".

@samnorman-haignere.bsky.social Oct 10, 2026, 11:38 AMReposted by @micahgallen.com

New preprint from David Skrill with
@jfeather.bsky.social
: tinyurl.com/2xm8rucz

We synthesize stimuli that decorrelate neural predictions from competing encoding models, revealing a dramatic improvement in auditory cortical prediction accuracy from adversarial training.

@neuroprinciplist.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 3:35 PMReposted by @micahgallen.com

Re-post 🔁 is appreciated!
#neurojobs: we’re looking for new team members to join us @cmc-unit.bsky.social! If you’d like to study decision-making in naturalistic & embodied contexts (integrating RL, RNNs & cross-species data analysis) in a cool & collaborative research environment 😎, check 👇

@aidanhorner.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 7:59 AMReposted by @micahgallen.com

New paper! Great work from Hendrik Heinbockel & Lars Schwabe that they were kind enough to involve me in:

Targeted stimulation of face-selective visual cortex at retrieval boosts associative face memory in healthy young adults

#neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪

@erictopol.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 6:10 PMReposted by @micahgallen.com

New @science.org
A breakthrough in understanding why do we get fever and an inflammation response to vaccines.
The gut microbiome chronic production of flagellin
Paves the way to potentially prevent these acute phase side-effects in the future
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

@janellebelle.bsky.social Oct 7, 2026, 5:46 PMReposted by @micahgallen.com

The brain represents expected sensory information before it arrives. Activity predicting upcoming visual or tactile input appeared even in early subcortical sensory regions, suggesting prediction is built into sensory processing from its earliest stages. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@gaiamolinaro.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 8:01 PMReposted by @micahgallen.com

Our reward function compression work is now out in Nature Communications! 🎉 In it, we present and empirically test a computational framework that formalizes the trade-offs between goal flexibility and learning efficiency. @annecollins.bsky.social @natureportfolio.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Conceptual model of goal-directed reinforcement learning with reward
function compression. In our proposed conceptual model, we break down goald-dependent learning into several parts. Combined with other learning components, an RL learning algorithm informs value estimates W on a given trial t, which are entered into a policy. The agent selects an action a through a joint policy, to which the environment responds by outputting outcome information o and a new state s. A working memory (WM) component organizes and maintains task-relevant information (here, broadly intended and dubbed the task information), used to support the reinforcement learning (RL) process. a Initially, value attribution to o is operated by WM,which maintains the current goal (g) and supports its matching to the experienced outcome to generate a reward r used by the RL agent. WM also holds a trace of recently experienced goals. b If goals share enough similar features,
a compressed reward function can be created, which replaces active goal maintenance and can, over time, be transferred to long-term memory storage. Eventually, the compressed reward function can be directly employed to assign value to experienced outcomes, sparing resources for other WM tasks.

@nsehgal.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 3:06 PMReposted by @micahgallen.com

🚨 New paper 🚨

Are your participants using AI to take your study?

We conducted the first study directly observing AI assistance in online research, spanning 700K+ Prolific submissions.

We found very rare, concentrated AI use, but gaps in safeguards.

arxiv.org/abs/2610.09279

@mehr.nz Oct 8, 2026, 9:07 PMReposted by @micahgallen.com

fave new demonstration of survey items being really not that bad at tracking carefully-measured cognitive things: in 900,000 participants, a 5-item "how good are you at music" self-report (the colours) very directly tracks a 20min adaptive test of music perception ability (the x-axis)

a series of histograms of self-assessed music skill lined up very cleanly with music perception ability

@fiorelladpc.bsky.social Oct 7, 2026, 11:12 AMReposted by @micahgallen.com

www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

What if #interoception is more than accurately detecting the body?

In our super-fresh Opinion in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social w/ @micahgallen.com @leahbanellis.bsky.social and Gioia Bottesi we ask a different question: what do bodily signals mean for the self?

@micahgallen.com Oct 7, 2026, 11:20 AM

I’m very proud to share this work with you! Fiorella and the team spent a lot of time thinking deeply about recent results; why are interoception and mental health unrelated? We think the field must escape the “quiescence trap” to progress!

@ryanswx.bsky.social Oct 6, 2026, 5:01 PMReposted by @micahgallen.com

Haha, this fucking sucks.

Ryan Stauffer@ryanswx.bsky.socialSep 22, 2026, 9:49 PM

Almost time for a y-axis modification! climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_dai...

@micahgallen.com Oct 7, 2026, 9:14 AM

Sounds like we should be closely aligned at @the-ecg.org !

@grimalkina.bsky.social Oct 6, 2026, 2:42 PMReposted by @micahgallen.com

"why would I ever need a task to be done faster" come on, guys. Because we're dying. Because we are literally all dying all the time. Because we're running out of time. The fact that it's often hard to measure or stupidly measured doesn't mean "saving time" isn't an important thing to human beings

@meganakpeters.bsky.social Oct 6, 2026, 9:20 AMReposted by @micahgallen.com

I am able to take on new doctoral students through this amazing initiative! If you are interested please reach out to me by email to discuss.

@micahgallen.com Oct 6, 2026, 9:38 AM

There it is!

@micahgallen.com Oct 6, 2026, 9:26 AM

I pushed some fixes to both #neurobrain-top and #neurobrain-rising - should help keep both feeds cleaner and higher signal. Rising in particular was suffering from a lot of junk. Try them out!

Top: bsky.app/profile/mica...
Rising

bsky.app/profile/mica...

@vanmedge.bsky.social Oct 5, 2026, 6:30 PMReposted by @micahgallen.com

"Top-down semantic predictions align phonetic neuronal dynamics in human superior temporal gyrus"

By the @ndlab.bsky.social in Nature Communications

Congrats Pavo, Tim and colleagues!

#iEEG

doi.org/10.1038/s414...

@bigearthdata.ai Oct 5, 2026, 9:03 PMReposted by @micahgallen.com

Metabolic and neural responses to ultraprocessed foods: a randomized, controlled, crossover study
->Nature | More on "Ultraprocessed foods and brain response" at BigEarthData.ai | #Food

@elizabithian.bsky.social Oct 5, 2026, 10:57 PMReposted by @micahgallen.com

Cold sensitivity in teeth is extremely common, but what neural mechanisms give rise to it? Our new preprint is out on bioRxiv! We combine in vivo trigeminal calcium imaging with precise spatiotemporal cooling to show that myelinated mechano-nociceptors encode noxious cold in the tooth.

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