hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social @hakwanlau Twitter profile

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

turns out, i was not joking. today i put in my resignation. not only will i be leaving UCLA, i'll be leaving California, the US, & universities in general... but i'm not leaving science. i'm going to start a new lab at the Riken Institute near Tokyo (Center for Brain Science)

hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

i've decided that i don't want to be a professor anymore. do you think i'm joking?

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

2022 is gonna be exciting (for me, selfishly)

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

8 months

in light of the spread of some misinformation on public media (including news articles in Nature & Science), a group of 124 researchers weigh in & consider it necessary to label the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness as pseudoscience

The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness as Pseudoscience

The media, including news articles in both Nature and Science, have recently celebrated the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a ‘leading’ and empirically tested theory of consciousness. We are...

osf.io

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 months

i plan to move to Korea later this year, & will soon hire at all levels (students, postdocs, staff scientists, junior PIs) - my lab in Japan will run till at least 2025. RIKEN has been nothing but the dream job. but hopefully the above explains it. 1/2

neuroscience job openings (at all levels) in Korea

docs.google.com

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

don't buy this book! save your money! it is available for free if you click the open access link~

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

... this means i'll be hiring~ multiple postdoc openings available for ppl broadly interested in perception / working memory / imagery / metacognition / attention, using fMRI / TMS / FUS. we'll have 7T MRI. collaboration w/ folks working on animal models is also a possibility ...

hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

turns out, i was not joking. today i put in my resignation. not only will i be leaving UCLA, i'll be leaving California, the US, & universities in general... but i'm not leaving science. i'm going to start a new lab at the Riken Institute near Tokyo (Center for Brain Science)

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

in less than 2 weeks i won't be a psychology professor anymore. i'm glad to say, i have never consulted the APA style manual and probably never will

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

today is my last day as a professor. besides some tech consulting side gigs, all my adult life i've been at universities. looking back, i've really done so many things so wrong. & i start to worry for the future of tertiary education. but let me say something constructive: ...

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

does anyone w/ a strong computational background (can code well in e.g. python & understand data science / signal processing concepts) want to visit us at Riken near Tokyo, for a paid internship (ending before April 2023), to do a project involving analysis of fMRI data?

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

i want them to learn how not to be bullied by people who know more math than they do... ideally through learning more math themselves, but better still if they can detect total BS hidden behind walls of equations, like the works of ...[tweet cut off due to character count limits]

Kording —-& Lab 🦖

@KordingLab

4 years

Please, if you do experiments, what would you like your students to learn at a computational neuroscience summer school? I am worried our results so far may be biased towards the more twitter active ML folks.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

happy new year~ i just found out that @smfleming 's much anticipated book is available for pre-oder. now that's something to look forward to in 2021 -

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

"Can humans be trained to make strategic use of latent representations in their own brains?" @aure_cor 's paper is out -

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

"do you read fiction?" "yeah i read theories of consciousness now and then."

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

i remember 'hating' Dennett's Consciousness Explained. it read like a David Lynch movie. & i remember 'loving' Chalmer's Conscious Mind. it was so crisp & clear. but these days, as i read abt physics-centric theories, i recall every one of Dennett's arguments against them 1/

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

1/ although @theamygdaloid got me into memory stuff slightly before that, this paper is pretty much a pandemic brainchild. the hypothesis that prefrontal grid-code may be involved in representing the quality space was suggested to me by @smfleming over i talk i gave on zoom

Nature Reviews Psychology

@NatRevPsych

2 years

'The mnemonic basis of subjective experience', a Perspective by Hakwan Lau, Matthias Michel, Joseph E. LeDoux & Stephen M. Fleming @hakwanlau @theamygdaloid

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

do you do research in order to get grants, or do you get grants in order to do research? do you try to do good science in order to get tenure, or do you get tenure in order to do good science? i remember asking myself these Qs a lot at some point. which is pretty messed up....

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

when you think Japan, you may think sushi, manga, etc. but there's more. this job is amazing for a number of extraordinary reasons. these shouldn't be secrets. so here i am: 1/🧵

Murayama lab, RIKEN CBS

@mlab_cbs

2 years

OPEN FACULTY POSITIONS @RIKEN_CBS !! 理研CBSにて複数名のチームリーダーを採用予定です。一緒に脳科学を楽しみませんか。

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

when i was a poor foreign grad student, i once worked on xmas day. i don't recommend it. as soon as i became faculty, i've been hosting foreigner trainee parties for winter breaks this year, i can't, becoz of omicron. but if u are there working alone, i'm here too in solidarity

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

we are organizing an online meeting to showcase the work by some PIs working on the cog neuro of consciousness in the US, to help trainees / prospective grad school applicants find a good match - please RT~

hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

new blogpost: how (not) to apply to a phD program in psychology / neuroscience (to work on consciousness)?

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

when i was in grad school i (naively) thought working memory was boring and consciousness was exciting. funny how these things change.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

9 months

don’t buy this book! despite the title, cover, etc, this is a super nerdy monograph written for researchers for a general audience, there are gazillion better popular books also it is open access. so - i repeat: don’t waste your $$!! please RT

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

more evidence for the role of the PFC in perceptual reality monitoring

Decoding distributed oscillatory signals driven by memory and perception in the prefrontal cortex

Tanigawa et al. show that dynamically changing neural oscillation patterns of specific frequencies in the macaque prefrontal cortex (PFC) carry mutually distinct information about the same color of...

www.cell.com

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

- this has just been accepted in Nature Communications finally, my collaborator Kawato accepts to be senior author on this, although he could have been so in any and all of our previously published work where we co-authored together.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

if you’re worried about moving classes online.... in solidarity, we make these available for sharing now they are far from perfect, but free. hope it helps. via @YouTube

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

6 years

@NAChristakis i'm going to tell them that if they are actually counting the number of hours, they are probably missing the point

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

it will take some getting used to to be called Hakwan-sensei.... but so far i like it better than better called Professor Hakwan

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

"calls for more [...] “phenomenon-driven research” " ".. doubtful whether making [...] theories more mathematical or formal, which is a common theme in the recent literature [...] will lead to [...] advances" i hope more of my colleagues will read this

The Theory Crisis in Psychology: How to Move Forward - Markus I. Eronen, Laura F. Bringmann, 2021

Meehl argued in 1978 that theories in psychology come and go, with little cumulative progress. We believe that this assessment still holds, as also evidenced by...

journals.sagepub.com

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

1/ at Riken we've been experimenting w/ the seminar format where we pre-watch a pre-recorded talk, then meet live to discuss w/ the speaker for 1.5 hours! it's been amazing. reminds me of those NYU philosophy seminars where we really go deep w/ the speakers (i.e. 'grill' them)

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

copy-editor said my book is expected to be out by Feb next year

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

i try to limit the number of my political posts on twitter. but the situation at PolyU (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) has gotten dire. if u would please spare some attention & consider RT, i‘d be nicer to u when i see u at conferences via @ABCNews

Hong Kong mask ban ruled 'unconstitutional' as university siege continues

Hong Kong police lay siege to one of the city's universities, firing tear gas and rubber bullets at demonstrators trying to breach their cordon as judges rule against a facemask ban imposed by the...

www.abc.net.au

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

i am a Hong Konger. i will live in Japan for the foreseeable future. many of my friends have recently moved to Taiwan or the UK. people i care about depend on the military protection by the West, against forces from which my family have run away. Ukraine’s problem is mine.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

today UCLA j wrote to me to say they would like me to book the first flight available to leave HK asap, as the situation deteriorates. instead of looking for tickets, i've written a new blogpost -

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

9 months

i was asked to review a recent report from the highly publicized Cogitate adversarial collaboration on consciousness. so here it is. most of the points are perhaps obvious. but i did find one really surprising thing (hidden in the supplementary) 1/

Where is the ‘posterior hot zone’? Open Review of Cogitate et al (2023): “An Adversarial Collabor...

The target of this review is the June 26, 2023 version of a recent preprint (1), in which the authors reported the first set of results of a highly publicized project (Cogitate) generously supported...

osf.io

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

i've recently found that: i've been living in English-speaking countries for two decades, and it is still vastly less exhausting for me to talk on the phone / zoom in my native language (Cantonese). not all zoom fatigues are made equal. be kinder to foreigners.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

the official ad is out pls RT

hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

... this means i'll be hiring~ multiple postdoc openings available for ppl broadly interested in perception / working memory / imagery / metacognition / attention, using fMRI / TMS / FUS. we'll have 7T MRI. collaboration w/ folks working on animal models is also a possibility ...

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

over the years, i’ve come to appreciate that bureaucracy in academic institutions are hard to avoid. but yesterday, an admin staff member personally drove me to the bank & helped me get an account in Japan. the extraordinary support at @RIKEN_CBS has made working here such a joy

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

"I'm not pro abortion. I'm pro-Becky who found out at her 20-week anatomy scan that the infant she had been so excited to bring into this world had developed without life sustaining organs.... 1/

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

my next paper will be titled "意識を理論化する際の難所" yes it will be in Japanese no i haven't mastered the language yet. i'm at infant level still it's nice to have an RA who is fluent in not just English & Japanese, but also Cantonese Hong Kong youngsters rock. hire them

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

we don't talk enough about how tough the pandemic has been for grad students

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

when ppl say consciousness = X, often what it really means is: X is how the brain works in general, as conscious introspection suggests analogy: let me tell u what the fridge light does- when it shines on food it makes them cold! let's call this the inverse fridge light problem

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

atonement aka: confidence & perceptual decisions may depend on the same decision variables after all i'm sorry, @weijima01

Performance-optimized neural networks as an explanatory framework for decision confidence

Previous work has sought to understand decision confidence as a prediction of the probability that a decision will be correct, leading to debate over whether these predictions are optimal, and...

www.biorxiv.org

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

when i was young i just didn't get how someone could take 2 months to get back to my email. i thought after a week, if no reply, the person just wasn't gonna reply now i understand.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

at UCLA we're looking for a computational modeling / big data person for a faculty position - please RT. happy to chat informally about the pros & (general lack of) cons in working my department too; i'm not on the search committee

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

1/ at the cognitive level, the mind seems fairly centralized & unified. at the neurobiological level, things are relatively distributed & resilient. it therefore seems unwise to think the two would directly map onto each other, at least at the higher-cognitive / conscious level

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

panpsychism is not gaining acceptance in science. it is not taken seriously at all, by most scientists who are respected within the mainstream scientific community. doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it’s intellectually dishonest to promote it having a status it doesn’t have.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

i love designing new experiments.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

when asked to list my representative papers, i have in the past chosen those w/ higher impact factors. but this time i decided to actually pick what i want ppl to read to better understand what i do: & i'll have a photo to reflect my 'true' age soon...

Hakwan Lau, Consciousness | RIKEN Center for Brain Science (RIKEN CBS)

Research overview and publication list - Hakwan Lau, Consciousness, RIKEN Center for Brain Science (RIKEN CBS)

cbs.riken.jp

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

time to debunk some myths re: the history of neuroscience of consciousness with co-authors like @theamygdaloid & @MatthiasMichel_ ... you can imagine my contribution needed was minimal ;-)

A little history goes a long way toward understanding why we study consciousness the way we do...

Consciousness is currently a thriving area of research in psychology and neuroscience. While this is often attributed to events that took place in ...

www.pnas.org

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

recommended, especially for those who think neuroscience would benefit from being more like physics

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

it is often assumed that aphantasics don't activate their visual cortex when they try to 'visualize', as they don't experience vivid imagery. this study - the most comprehensive one to date? - found no such evidence. 1/

Behavioral and Neural Signatures of Visual Imagery Vividness Extremes: Aphantasia versus Hyperpha...

Abstract. Although Galton recognized in the 1880s that some individuals lack visual imagery, this phenomenon was mostly neglected over the following centur

academic.oup.com

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

10 months

our paper on a neural network model of perceptual confidence is finally our it reconcils some pretty puzzling and apparently conflicting previous findings

Taylor Webb (@taylorwwebb.bsky.social)

@TaylorWWebb

10 months

This is now published at Nat Comms, with some additional analyses of single neuron representations:

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

new blogpost: how (not) to apply to a phD program in psychology / neuroscience (to work on consciousness)?

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

it's been difficult to admit, but i've not been enjoying giving talks for a while... yes i published a book recently. but w/o new data to talk about, what's the point? damn this pandemic but today i learned that our 1st fMRI exp at RIKEN worked! Yijun Ge is a force of nature!

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

"neural activity in the insula, anterior cingulate, and prefrontal cortex was linked to both the shape of the decoded distribution and reported confidence" nice finding! i imagine this may hold up even when confidence is dissociated w/ sensory precision

Subjective confidence reflects representation of Bayesian probability in cortex

What gives rise to the human sense of confidence? Here, we tested the Bayesian hypothesis that confidence is based on a probability distribution represented in neural population activity. We implem...

www.biorxiv.org

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

29 days

do u know of someone who may be interested in starting a lab as a junior PI in Korea, to work on perceptual decision-making in mice? besides postdocs, we would consider someone fresh out of grad school too, or someone who wants to be a staff scientist for the longer term. 1/

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

Kiyo Miyoshi, a postdoc in my lab, will become an assistant professor at Kyoto University later this year. i may lose my ability to pretend that i still know anything about the psychophysics of metacognition very soon, coz he's been my consultant and adviser on the topic.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

i've recently been asked by several film makers about my views on the science of consciousness. i told them that i think currently more popular media attention wouldn't do the scientific research any favor. unsurprisingly, they ignored that, went on to ask other questions instead

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

5 years

as promised, here is the full paper expanding on the ideas from my recent short piece in @aeonmag the project started about 3 years ago... or was it 20 years? thanks everyone for the critical feedback. it's been a privilege to have your attention.

Consciousness, Metacognition, & Perceptual Reality Monitoring

I introduce an empirically-grounded version of a higher-order theory of conscious perception. Traditionally, theories of consciousness either focus on the global availability of conscious informati...

osf.io

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

although my book is open access, so that there's really no reason to buy it, there's now a reason to potentially not to even bother downloading it for free - you can read this more succinct, lucid, & sassier review by @ibphillips and @simon_a_b_brown , which is also open access

The BJPS

@TheBJPS

2 years

New on the BJPS Review of Books: Ian Phillips and Simon Brown review In Consciousness We Trust, by Hakwan Lau

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

people say they get impostor syndrome being on twitter. i get it. but i also get impostor syndrome just talking to my postdocs. where should i go.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

8 months

to some, the p-word seems too harsh. but why would 124 researchers do such an apparently unnecessary thing? maybe i am indeed crazy. but others? to those outside of the field, i'll provide some background in a couple of days this is not a normal sci disagreement. pls stay tuned

hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

8 months

in light of the spread of some misinformation on public media (including news articles in Nature & Science), a group of 124 researchers weigh in & consider it necessary to label the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness as pseudoscience

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

6 years

RIP Larry Weiskrantz. the concept of blindsight lives on, may it be more fully appreciated in years to come. thanks also for all the funny jokes that cheered up an overworked grad student when he most needed them

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

10 months

great paper. like the recent one from @MalachLab (the same journal), taught me something new here, which is getting rare in our field (coz we‘re all obsessed w/ doing repetitive no-report controls as we’re told to). cool analyses on dynamics + pfc too

Distinct ventral stream and prefrontal cortex representational dynamics during sustained conscious...

How is ongoing visual experience represented neurally? Vishne et al. decode images lasting different durations from intracranial electrophysiology, uncovering distinct representation dynamics across...

www.cell.com

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

5 years

this work will come out soon in Nature Communications - rats suffer from the same kind of metacognitive illusions as humans and monkeys do, and exploiting this fact my colleagues studied the relevant neural mechanisms @A_Izquierdo1 @meganakpeters

Dissociable roles for Anterior Cingulate Cortex and Basolateral Amygdala in Decision Confidence and...

It has been suggested the subjective sense of certainty, or confidence, in ambiguous sensory cues can alter the interpretation of reward feedback and facilitate learning. We trained rats to report...

www.biorxiv.org

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

who may be so kind to read a draft of my book (on consciousness), and comment (on some selected chapters)?

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

years ago, a senior colleague met this phD student working ‘part-time’ in my lab (i.e. first-authoring multiple papers including one in jNeurosci). she said: “he seems smart. can we save him from philosophy, and bring him over to science?” we made it.

Jorge Morales (@jorge-morales.bsky.social)

@jorgemlg

3 years

Friends, I’m thrilled to announce that, starting January 2022, I will be joining @Northeastern University as assistant professor in Psychology & Philosophy. The Morales Lab will study the subjective character of the mind with an interdisciplinary approach! A dream come true!

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

when i recruit phD students next year i'll particularly look for candidates interested in understanding sexism and gender bias (e.g. in politics), and our (lack of) metacognition for such biases.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

1 year

in doing experiments, we sometimes have the choice to either collect a lot of data (multiple sessions each) from a few subjects, or, we can collect relatively less data (single session) from many subjects. what are some good stats/methods paper discussing this tradeoff?

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

my theoretical speculations on consciousness, from mechanisms for simple subjective experiences, to affects, culture, and clinical applications

Consciousness Hard and ‘Soft’ Problems

Narrated, Produced and Edited by Peter KeatingWritten by Hakwan Lau-FAIR USE NOTICE: This video contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always...

www.youtube.com

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

4 years

once, in a pub, a philo grad student whom i've just met told me that he likes 'sober Hakwan' better, when he is no less critical of pseudo-scientists working on C, but keeps his tone not so harsh. unfortunately, i myself (secretly) like 'drunk Hakwan' better.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

graphical abstract for my talk next Friday at the Brain Meeting in London:

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

6 years

i've been made a Fool Professor.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

1) they claim that insects have subjective experiences, because their brains allow them to have an "integrated and egocentric representation of the world from the animal’s perspective" i'm not sure about this, *conceptually*. hence, a thread:

What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness | Proceedings of the National Academy...

How, why, and when consciousness evolved remain hotly debated topics. Addressing these issues requires considering the distribution of consciousnes...

www.pnas.org

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

how can these authors be so consistently creative and interesting??? 🤯

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

some ppl think i conflate consciousness & metacognition, but i never equate the two. instead all i want to do is to de-confound consciousness & basic task performance capacity. that's why metacog is interesting. it is more 'subjective', even if it isn't strictly the same as C

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

5 years

tip for scientists hoping to engage w/ philosophy: don't just go & talk & argue w/ them. write an essay on ur views as clearly and convincingly as u can & ask ur philosopher colleagues to comment. then u'll see what this is about, w/o talking past each other & getting mad

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

as promised, a new picture to reflect my true age. next time i'll remember to ignore my shirt before taking a mug shot

Hakwan Lau, Consciousness | RIKEN Center for Brain Science (RIKEN CBS)

Research overview and publication list - Hakwan Lau, Consciousness, RIKEN Center for Brain Science (RIKEN CBS)

cbs.riken.jp

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

"anxiety exerts a strong influence on metacognitive awareness while sparing first-order task performance"

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

when will academic papers start with a section called "TLDR" rather than "abstracts" or "highlights" or "lay summary"?

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

if we put bad philosophy into big equations, we get bad philosophy - & worse, it may get mistaken as something profound, so it is likely to end up doing more damage still. to those who thrive on that career playbook, be more considerate pls. i wrote this in English. so can you.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

if Freud had added abstruse equations into his writing, psychology would have had zero chance of ever recovering

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

8 months

as pointed out also by Sandberg, Frassle, Pitts (2016), the PCI "is equally predictive of conscious states whether it is measured at Brodmann area 8 (BA8; frontal lobe) or at BA19 (occipital lobe)" how can this be so laughably simple as 'front vs back'?

A Theoretically Based Index of Consciousness Independent of Sensory Processing and Behavior

A theory-derived index of consciousness, which quantifies the complexity of the brain’s response to a stimulus, measures the level of consciousness in awake, sleeping, anesthetized, and brain-damaged...

www.science.org

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

this figure from Frassle et al 2014 JNeurosci is often taken to sugggest that when report was not required (B), changes in subjective percept was no longer associated with lateral prefrontal activity. but this interpretation seems to neglect what was the control condition. 1/

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

6 years

Manipulation of deep brain activity in primates using transcranial focused ultrasound stimulation. evidence! now that's something to talk about.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

5 years

my philosophical view on consciousness in 1200 words. full version to come soon.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

there are days i don't feel proud to be a scientist at all "Has the Society for Neuroscience lost its way?"

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

if u don't want to cough up the $2k just to get it reviewed by a Nature journal, u can pay me $1k to run it by me first. w/ help from a team of volunteering experts, we will provide an honest assessment as to whether your $2k will likely lead to nothing but an eventual rejection

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

much of academic training is about metacognition: so that we know when we can get away with skipping a block of technical text / equations, & when we absolutely need help from an expert outside of our own field.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

these PI positions come w/ amazing internal funding subpport, & our center is committed to making sure that "half or more of the newly recruits will be women" please feel free to contact me if you have any questions

OPEN FACULTY POSITIONS (Brain science in general) | RIKEN Center for Brain Science (RIKEN CBS)

Faculty position in brain science in general, Center for Brain Science

cbs.riken.jp

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

8 months

no hard feelings. the room was heated. & we brought some of the heat there ourselves.

Maxwell Ramstead

@mjdramstead

8 months

For those who have been following the IIT letter story—and who care—one happy update is that @hakwanlau and I have reconciled behind the scenes. I apologize for at times having veered into trolling territory. Sharing this in the hopes we can all move forward without fractures

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

1 year

i’ll be giving a talk this Friday on how to build sentient machines/agents. all are welcome

Hakwan Lau

Hakwan Lau (Riken Center for Brain Science) presents to the GoodAttention group on

www.hf.uio.no

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

8 months

this is longish preprint. it addressed 3 things: 1)what i mean by (IIT as) 'pseudoscience' 2) what's wrong w/ the recently highly publicized adversarial collaborations 3) what's wrong w/ the field of consciousness in general let's discuss on bsky

What is a Pseudoscience of Consciousness? Lessons from Recent Adversarial Collaborations

Some colleagues have questioned about our recent joint statement (Fleming et al 2023), so I try to address them here, as well as to provide some background. I also discuss what I think really went...

osf.io

hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

8 months

to some, the p-word seems too harsh. but why would 124 researchers do such an apparently unnecessary thing? maybe i am indeed crazy. but others? to those outside of the field, i'll provide some background in a couple of days this is not a normal sci disagreement. pls stay tuned

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

“the arc towards a true science of consciousness is long, but it bends away from bullshit”

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

12 days

hi Machine Learning ppl~ who wants to spend 3-18 months in Korea, some time between Sep 2024 - Mar 2026, to get paid to do some 'light' work (e.g. write a perspective paper together) & just chat about AI (and/or do some of your own work)? if so, pls hit me up at hakwan @gmail .com

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

i don't read many books on consciousness. so this one remains one of my favorite. it has deeper insights about the stage of development of the field than some of the other books on the topic that i've read.

Thinks . . .

www.amazon.com

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

2 years

i’ve been involved in several different professional networks. today i find myself gravitating towards the ones which have at least shown some care about Ukraine. there isn’t a lot we can do. but i am uncomfortable with not even caring about the people whom the West has let down

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

why do we think that ppl aren't having conscious experiences during dreamless sleep? maybe they are having experiences, just not being able to report/access/remember them? i don't believe that at all. but don't anti-functionalists need to have answers for questions like these?

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

5 years

after turning down two other offers, Brian Odegaard accepted to join U of Florida as assistant professor this Fall. he will make sure people there will not think about consciousness without a prefrontal cortex. the lab has gained a ‘local’ host for VSS.

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hakwan lau 🇺🇦 @hakwan.bsky.social

@hakwanlau

3 years

i've said a lot of stupid things this year on twitter. my new year resolution is that i'll remember less of them next year.

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