Rosalind McAlpine

Excited to share our latest work, unifying the large-scale neuroscience of psychedelics 🧠: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We're now recruiting UCL MRes/MSc students (eg Cog Neuro / Brain Sciences) for the 2026/27 academic year to join several research projects involving psilocybin and nitrous oxide. If you're a student on one of these programmes and would like to find out more, email ucjurgm@ucl.ac.uk or dm here 😊

The neuroscience of consciousness often feels like imperialist geography; theories laying claim a universally privileged terrain in the brain, as the seat of subjective experience. We provide evidence from >500 neuroimaging studies for a distributed, decentred, and context-sensitive alternative:

How can students and postdocs shape their field of research? We're excited to share our TiCS piece, showcasing MESEC as a case study for exactly this question! So grateful for our wonderful community of MESECeers 🤗 doi.org/10.1016/j.ti... *Free access* link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1njPQ4sIRv...

Our recent blog for @drugscience.bsky.social about our ongoing MDMA study with psychoanalysts 💊🧠 www.drugscience.org.uk/ucl-drugscie...

We’ve already recieved nearly 400 responses on this survey, but still need another 600 for the validation work! If you’ve ever had a #psychedelic experience, please do consider completing this 10 min survey 🍄🐸 We’d be soo grateful if you could share with anyone who might be eligible 🙏

New paper in the Journal of Psychopharmacology led by UCL PhD student @joannakuc.bsky.social and the @thelablab.bsky.social "Speech markers of psychological change following a psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT retreat". journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Please help if you've taken a psychedelic, its anonymous! tinyurl.com/pfs-study 👽 🍄

If you are at #ICPR2026 come by my poster this lunch break and let's chat about how rumination mediates psilocybin-induced changes in wellbeing 🍄 1/2

If you're an ECR interested in consciousness research / psychiatry, do consider applying for the next MESEC Workshop in Lago di Bolsena, Italy (30th August - 7th September 2025)!

Thank you to study lead @rosmcalpine.bsky.social , and collaborators Merve Utanğaç, Joanna Kuc, Henok Pankhurst, Milly Sellers, Doug Kraft, Andrew Litchy, Naina Eira Gupta, @christimmermann.bsky.social , and Sunjeev Kamboj The study of >100 experienced meditators and psychedelic ...

Can our core subjectivity survive bodily death? | https://buff.ly/2V6PU4D @bernardokastrup.bsky.social uses the work of Arthur Schopenhauer to explore the conception of self. #philosophy #consci #philsci

Happy to announce funding for, and founding of, the MIT Consciousness Club shass.mit.edu/mit-human-in... #neuroscience

1/ Here are some of the books I read and listened to this past year, mostly in order. Some real gems, as always. “A life without books is a life not lived” Jay Kristoff.

Fascinating work showing that ants working in groups outperform individual ants in solving the piano movers’ puzzle. Human groups do not show such improvement and can even perform worse than an individual person, if communication is restricted. #neuroscience 🧪 🧠

I'll be talking about all things metacognitive on 23rd Jan in a public lecture at the @royalsociety.org It's free to attend and will also be broadcast live on the RS YouTube channel (no pressure then 😅) royalsociety.org/science-even...

I co-edited a special issue on dreaming and mind wandering for @phimisci.bsky.social The first papers are now online. Check them out! And don't hesitate to follow/read this amazing, free & open access journal! 🔬🧠💤💭

New from us: People with delusions sometimes feel that the world is unreal. Here, we explain this in terms of prediction errors, with Kamin blocking behavioral and computational data from patients, psychics, and controls www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article/S245...

Meet Nicolas Decat, our scientist-artist at @dreamteamicm.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s42... This beautiful interview is a tribute to Nicolas' passion for science and talent for turning it into images that tell stories! He started with nothing but his ideas. Dedication pays off!

Honoured to be included in Webdelics’ list of Top 25 Emerging Leaders in Psychedelic Research and Modern Theory, alongside so many inspiring friends and colleagues. You can check out the full list here: www.webdelics.com/top-25-emerging-leaders-in-psychedelic-research-and-modern-theory

My article 'Constitutive Self-Consciousness' is now published online in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. It argues (spoiler alert!) against the claim that self-consciousness is constitutive of consciousness.

On behalf of the #ASSC28 Scientific Program Committee, the Symposia and Tutorials are now announced 🥳 assc2025.gr/programme/sy....

Out today: we discovered a new class of social hallucination - perception of chasing with high confidence. It is elevated in people who are paranoid and people who perceive meaning in the universe www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Mona-Marie Wandrey & me on the need to take a precautionary approach towards patients in a so-called "vegetative state" (and the term is part of the problem!). theconversation.com/its-hard-to-...

This app is no good for posting extended commentary since it gets chopped up, but on FB I agree with @philipgoff.bsky.social, not Andy Clark and @keithfrankish.bsky.social (see their nice Mind Chat), that PP ala Andy leaves something out about experience. www.facebook.com/naturalism/p...

Finally published: “Metastability demystified — the foundational past, the pragmatic present and the promising future” rdcu.be/d3bh9 All about metastability: what the heck it is, how to measure it in models and data, and how to interpret it in neuroscience!

Great work from Emilia exploring attentional focus. This could be an interesting avenue to explore DoC patients. The rest of the amazing work that Emilia did during her PhD will soon go out. Stay attentive!

Anyone interested in an EEG head tattoo? www.cell.com/cell-biomate... 🧠📈 🧪

Naturalistic encoding of concepts in the brain @viktorkewenig.bsky.social shows that, while concepts generally encode habitual experiences, the underlying neurobiological organisation is not fixed but depends dynamically on available contextual information. 👏🍾🐐 elifesciences.org/articles/91522

🧠 www.nature.com/articles/s41... "... when mice are exposed to traumatic social stress, susceptible animals become socially withdrawn and anhedonic ... Manipulation of vCA1 inputs to the BLA in susceptible mice rescued dysfunctional neural dynamics... and reversed anhedonic behaviour.... "

Mind Chat is back 4pm today (UK time)! Great interview with leading philosopher and cognitive scientist Andy Clark. It's a pre-record but at least one of me and @keithfrankish.bsky.social will join you in the live chat. www.youtube.com/watch?v=taDM...

‘An investigation into the varieties of extended difficulties following psychedelic drug use: Duration, severity and helpful coping strategies’ Full text: akjournals.com/view/journal...

New publication by CPCR Faculty Albert Garcia-Romeu, Sandeep Nayak, Nathan Sepeda, and colleagues! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

New paper! This was a fun lil collaboration with Maastricht University in which we thought we might find evidence that ayahuasca would increase false memory in an observational study. WRONG! Ended up enhancing memory (but read 'til end for caveats) journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... 1/8

finally published! Optimal metacognitive decision strategies in signal detection theory -- with the brilliant Brian Maniscalco and Lucie Charles #neuroskyence #neuroAI #metacognition #consciousness #psychology link.springer.com/article/10.3...

✨Our paper is out in Nature today! ✨ In this work, we investigated how we can leverage study designs to improve the replicability of brain-wide association studies (BWAS) 👇👇👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"Large language models surpass human experts in predicting neuroscience results" w @ken-lxl.bsky.social and braingpt.org. LLMs integrate a noisy yet interrelated scientific literature to forecast outcomes. nature.com/articles/s41... 1/8

Sleep-like state during wakefulness induced by psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT in mice www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

There are also exciting ways we can take this forward. for example, we could expand the types of thoughts we used mDES to measure, such as to include awareness of our bodies - see this cool work by @leahbanellis.bsky.social and @micahgallen.com www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How is confidence related to confidence RTs? @stefherregods.bsky.social @lucvermeylen.bsky.social and I showcase how our recent EAM of confidence accounts for various relationships observed in empirical data. link: pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC... #PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

unfortunately nothing to share yet. I have several collaborations ongoing at the moment and the first (presentable) result is a map of consciousness science: maxnoichl.eu/full/talks/C...

I guess I should finally post something here. We recently reviewed what is currently known on how psychedelics acutely & post-acutely impact fear conditioning, extinction learning, episodic memory, & semantic memory & how such fx may speak to PTSD treatment. link.springer.com/article/10.1... 1/10

1/ Excited to share a part of my PhD in our new preprint: Integrative Electrophysiology and Neuroimaging Approach in Assessing Disorders of Consciousness: A Multimodal Multicentric Machine Learning Study #DoC #MachineLearning #Multimodal medrxiv.org/cgi/content/... A 🧵...

✨Keynote alert✨ Thrilled to announce @frosas.bsky.social as our first keynote for the #MESEC Winter School 2025! 🎙️ 💡 Is consciousness an emergent phenomenon? 📈 How can we begin to make something so complex more tangible? 🤔 Curious? Then join us 👉 mesec.co/event/winter...

now out in Cerebral Cortex! my newest opinion piece, "Introspective psychophysics for the study of subjective experience" #neuroskyence #neuroAI #consciousness #introspection #psychology academic.oup.com/cercor/advan...

Time to start promoting the Consciousness Club on here! 🦋 On Wed 27th November at 11am-1230pm UK time we are excited to host @keithfrankish.bsky.social for his talk: "How to think about artificial consciousness" For more info and how to join see: metacoglab.org/consciousnes... All welcome! 🧠🧪

This new study compares different strategies for resolving challenging psychedelic experiences. Well-known strategies such as acceptance were often used & pretty effective. Less common strategies (asking for forgiveness or disclosing something) also look promising! www.nature.com/articles/s41...