John McBride

It's difficult to know how long music has existed. 🎶 Bone flutes 🪈 suggest minimum 40k years, but it's likely longer because music vocal music probably existed before instrumental. Based on recent genetic studies, we argue that it was likely at least 135k years! www.frontiersin.org/journals/psy...

1/2 🎇 Good news! 🎇 The kind people at Behavioral and Brain Science have made the new collection on "Conscious AI and biological naturalism" #OpenAccess for a limited time: target article, all 50 commentaries, & my response. Go to the link and click 'save pdf': doi.org/10.1017/S014.... Do share!

New work by @msaddler.bsky.social with a striking finding: a wide range of human perceptual thresholds are replicated in a neural network optimized for real-world auditory tasks. Suggests that thresholds are determined by linear separability in task-optimized representations.

Let me try this once more. It was a choice. EITHER the Greens adopted a slogan. OR they could have joined the next govt, where they could push for an end to arms sales, sanctions, support for the arrest warrants etc. It was never going to be both. Which one makes a material difference? #GazaGenocide

For the sake of a slogan achieving nothing except great concern and distress to British Jews, Green members have probably destroyed any hope that a party - their party - which consistently and clearly opposes the #genocide will join the next government. Genius. 🤦‍♂️ www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Also

I'm burnt out of discussing "AI". I don't care for the press releases from big companies. I hate having to comment immediately. I dislike "hot takes". I'm worried we, as scientists, are losing touch with scientific values. We've become customers, salivating at ads marketed to investors. 1/15

A group of 25 Fields Medalists, including myself, have made a joint declaration on Math and AI: mathandai.org . We welcome additional signatories. See also this article in the Economist announcing the declaration: www.economist.com/science-and-...

(🧵|🚨) BREAKING: *Three years* ago PROOF ran a long, well-sourced report confirming that Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu *knew* from Middle Eastern “grand bargain” co-conspirators that the October 7 attack was coming before it came—and let Israelis die for political gain. Now Haaretz has confirmed it.

Are you interested in lexical competition, agent-based modelling, strong inference and Ukrainian? Then this paper, just published in @pnasnexus.org, is for you. With @oliviermorin.bsky.social and @sobchuk.bsky.social, we asked a simple question: why do some words become more common than others?

Great to see a Leeds colleague receiving this prestigious Royal Society Award.

RE: freedom of speech, academic freedom, and race science. In this (long) thread, I’m going to 1) establish my bona fides on academic freedom and race science, 2) show why academic freedom and freedom of speech are different and… 1/34

New >100-author preprint led by @zixuanjia.bsky.social @yutoozaki.bsky.social and @danya-pav.bsky.social is IMO our most important yet. TLDR: music is not "useless" "auditory cheesecake" - across 901 participants speaking 30 languages, singing bonds us together >1.5x more than speaking. osf.io/pv3m9

Call for papers for the next ICMPC (Int. Conference on Music Perception & Cognition) is now up (due end Oct): www.jyu.fi/en/events/ic... I'm honoured to join the other fabulous keynote speakers (@tuomaseerola.bsky.social, Bahar Tunçgenç, and Robert Zatorre). Can't wait to see everyone in Finland!

As Maya Angelou said, when people show you who they are, believe them. I'd rather have a klan member clearly articulating his views of how I should be eliminated than these garbage people dressing up their racism in intellectualism. You can fuck all the way off.

Lots of names on this list I don't recognize, but all the ones I do are like "Ah, OK". As I understand it, there are clear violations of contract in Cofnas's actions. The question is more: why didn't the univ notice this sooner?

here is the thing. if you tell me that you believe that race is a biological category and that it is a guide to the objective superiority and inferiority of groups of people, i am not calling you a racist to *insult* you, i am calling you a racist because it best describes your beliefs.

Sorry chatbot lovers but the waning of Boolean operators in most search functions on websites has made my life actively worse. You can't find anything, you can only have things suggested to you.

Time to start the new superstition that Mayo can only win the All Ireland while wearing white #GAA

oh nice to see this thread resurrected. dual (and more) life cycle organisms are so common. those of us who study vertebrates are studying some of the most boring animals ever to evolve on this earth

Has anyone noticed that data on Zenodo is downloaded at an absurdly high rate? I deposited data a few days ago. I haven't made any post about it. I can only assume that the 16 downloads are NOT humans trying replicate or extend the work. Who is harvesting data from Zenodo??? Any blog posts on this?

My son just told me is favourite sentence is: “I didn’t say we should kill him” because if you emphasise each different word it changes the entire meaning

our new paper with @plechac.bsky.social puts thousands of poems across languages in one shared space of poetic form! we use sequence alignment on rhyme schemes to investigate 'fixed forms' and all things between: not only 'sonnets', but 'sonnet-like' things. doi.org/10.1371/jour...

Every time this goes around I’m stunned that there are still people who’ve never seen it, this performance is to drag what the Mona Lisa is to paintings, but maybe you’ve never seen the Mona Lisa, so today is the day you shall behold it

The great thing about the World Cup if you are Irish, is that you get to passionately support a different team every couple of days.

What's with articles on "how scientists will adapt" and "AI inevitability in science" these days? Speed and volume are not ends in themselves. If we prioritize efficiency over curiosity, we risk optimizing for what AI can do rather than what science is for.

My latest piece for @quantamagazine.bsky.social might stir the pot somewhat. It takes on the contentious notion that biological organisms can be considered to possess agency. www.quantamagazine.org/is-life-just...

In the spirit of self-promotion, here again is a summary of the best work I've done to date, containing the sort of insight and advance that I went into science to deliver ** Linguistic intuitions are about communicativeness, not grammaticalness ** thomscottphillips.substack.com/p/how-i-stoo...

RE: https://spore.social/@yoginho/116680080654641368 Offend in every way: a spontaneous little rant about honesty, integrity, and civility in academic (and social-media) discourse. https://www.johannesjaeger.eu/blog/offend-in-every-way Or: read it in thread form ... 👇 #academia #civility […]

shocking stuff... I was ready for a light bit of eugenics, but that was a bit too much for me

And finally it was published! Massive thanks to my coauthors, the editor and reviewers, and the institutions that supported our research. journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Complexity is ubiquitous in the world around us. But different stimuli are complex for different reasons. Does the mind nevertheless represent a ‘unified’ notion of complexity across domains? In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show the answer is: yes! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Zeng et al. (2026, Science) reported an intriguing study of rhythmic pattern discrimination in bumble bees (Bombus terrestris). Yet the claim that ‘[they] form robust abstract rhythm representations’ may be premature. See doi.org/10.31234/osf....

Psychology not special, this is just terminology, I think? The way we describe is framework > theory > model - so framework is most general set of ideas. Model is most specific instantiation.

What is a psychological theory? Here's our take on this tricky and controversial question in this week's Experimentology chapter summary. Many things called "theories" in psychology aren't actually theories — they're frameworks. 🧵 experimentology.io

Can there also be bans for citing papers as supporting a claim when they, in fact, show the exact opposite of the claim?

irishtune.id is live! Identify the Irish tune in a live performance or uploaded recording. Is it the best automated Irish tune identification in the world? You be the judge: share your feedback and comments here or using the irishtune.info feedback form.

I have no idea what causal inference means anymore. It's a grab-bag ranging from "we drew a DAG" to "we have identified Universal Truth and your puny RCT is no match for our IPW." Thinking clearly about your data, model and limitations isn't "causal", it's the bare minimum. #statsky #rstats #episky

Psilocybin mushrooms are found worldwide, yet I have long argued (based on direct evidence) that traditional use is confined to Mesoamerica. I was wrong! In a new paper led by @eselster.bsky.social, we document Indigenous psilocybin mushroom use—potentially very old—in highland southern Africa.