Personal announcement - (BIG!) With the support of the @simonsfoundation.org, I'm redirecting my research program to study how our brains support one of the biggest & most mysterious feelings: Mood. So much to say! More here: www.nicolerust.com/thepivot www.simonsfoundation.org/2024/11/05/s... - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

nicolecrust.bsky.social • 182 days ago

Personal announcement - (BIG!)

With the support of the @simonsfoundation.org, I'm redirecting my research program to study how our brains support one of the biggest & most mysterious feelings: Mood.

So much to say! More here:
https://www.nicolerust.com/thepivot

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2024/11/05/simons-foundation-announces-third-class-of-pivot-fellows/

Comments

bwyble.bsky.social•181 days ago

That is a great idea for a grant mechanism and congratulations to you for winning it and having the courage to take a new direction.

nicolecrust.bsky.social•181 days ago

Thank you Brad! I agree: what a great grant, right? A fresh set of eyes can bring a new take; imagine what could happen if we all picked an entirely new question every decade or so? We all have fresh takes to give, I suspect. But it's very hard to switch - this is one of the few mechanisms for it.

bwyble.bsky.social•181 days ago

Musical disciplines.. but without removing a chair each time.

neurostats.org•181 days ago

That's wonderful. Congratulations!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•181 days ago

Thank you so much! I'm soooooo excited.

neurostats.org•181 days ago

I'm excited for you too. This is so needed!

I pivoted towards human neuroscience and psychiatry around 2014 (also inspired by Kendler). I stumbled into many kinds of misattributions to neural functional connectivity that which could be attributed to something else.

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nicolecrust.bsky.social•181 days ago

I suspect we have quite a lot in common. Would love to meet you someday.

dlevenstein.bsky.social•181 days ago

Can vouch that this meetup needs to happen 🫶

neurostats.org•181 days ago

I appreciate that @dlevenstein.bsky.social.

hugospiers.bsky.social•182 days ago

Congrats Nicole! Exciting development.

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you Hugo!!

jasonsynaptic.bsky.social•181 days ago

Awesome, congrats!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•181 days ago

Thank you Jason!!

geilsonsantana.bsky.social•179 days ago

📌

andpru.bsky.social•181 days ago

Amazing. Congratulations!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•181 days ago

Thanks Andrew! In a way, work in the motor system is facilitating this. If we had no way of tackling complex dynamical systems in the brain, I wouldn’t go anywhere near mood. So much of the reason we do have those tools follows from studies of motor function like your own.

turrigiano.bsky.social•181 days ago

congrats!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•181 days ago

Thank you!!!

aidanhorner.bsky.social•182 days ago

That's exciting, and this also sounds like such a great funding scheme. Congrats!

micahgallen.com•182 days ago

huzzah!! fantastic news Nicole!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thanks so much! I'm entering your world with much respect and gratitude for all the roads that you and other affective researchers have paved. Your roads are those steep and precarious ones on the edge of cliffs. I'm here with my shovel.

eblissmoreau.bsky.social•181 days ago

Congrats!!!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•181 days ago

Thank you Eliza! I can't wait to discuss so much with you - insula, ACC, temporally extended affective states; all of it!

wergend.bsky.social•182 days ago

Now that's a subject I WISH I knew more about!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Maybe a nice start? Written to be friendly for all. Gives a bit of a sense of what we know versus don't (and why mood is so challenging to understand).

https://www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-picture/what-if-anything-makes-mood-fundamentally-different-from-memory/

wergend.bsky.social•182 days ago

I'm wondering how social anthropology may or not, help understand some of the origins of ADHD and depression.
The former seems to be emerging as so prevalent it may have prehistorically met a useful social role, perhaps still could, and help lessen the latter?

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

It's a great question. And so tricky. @wiringthebrain.bsky.social discusses this in "Innate". Here's a sample (it's a great book and I recommend it in full).

https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691204154/innate

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wergend.bsky.social•182 days ago

My interest is ADHD.
I have a very strong hunch, that in an environment with big cats, or subtle cues as to potential resources, an ability to hyper-focus on something, finding your "zone" in a chaotic emergency where most feel overwhelmed, or just increased creative linking ...

wergend.bsky.social•182 days ago

That was a great read, thank you very much 🙂

wergend.bsky.social•182 days ago

Great, thank you! 🙏🏼
I have spent a LOT of time thinking about it ... but you already know what my experience has been, and why 🤣

lennietm.bsky.social•178 days ago

Sounds like an incredibly valuable endeavour. Good luck 🍀

nicolecrust.bsky.social•178 days ago

Thank you!!!

bwjones.bsky.social•182 days ago

YEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

karenswilcoxphd.bsky.social•182 days ago

congratulations! a lot of mood going on right now. ripe for research@

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

thank you! And no kidding.

jimthommo.bsky.social•182 days ago

Congrats, this really looks awesome! Nice plug in there for process-like brain functions too!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you! That's something I didn't get until recently. In vision, we often regard the learning as the underdeveloped child-like phase that needs to be waded through to get the brain to work as it should. In mood, learning has no end because continual re-calibration is the entire point!

smfleming.bsky.social•182 days ago

What a wonderful opportunity- congratulations Nicole!!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you Steve! If 5 years ago you would have told me that my future involved studying subjective experience, I would have laughed. It was only when I realized the vastness of the unmet need that I saw the light. I'm very grateful to you and others who have been sense-making in this space!!

dickretired.bsky.social•182 days ago

When I did psychology in the 1960s you would have failed the exams if you had mentioned consciousness. Behaviorism ruled both in psychology and in philosophy (Gilbert Ryle). It was a tremendous advance when Larry Weiskrantz later asked patients what they saw and what it was like.

hakwan.bsky.social•182 days ago

'subjective experience' is the new code word. no more c-word among polite company!

maciekszul.bsky.social•182 days ago

If you think about it, subjective experience is the main topic of psychology, and that's great.

dickretired.bsky.social•182 days ago

That is what William James would have thought, I guess.

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

I'm perfectly happy with c but I'm still not ready for q. I'm not sure I'll ever be ready for q.

smfleming.bsky.social•182 days ago

Must have been tremendously exciting to be hearing about the Weiskrantz results first hand! But wasn’t the cognitive revolution already licensing talk in terms of internal (subjective) states?

dickretired.bsky.social•182 days ago

Yes, because of Broadbent in the UK and Miller and Neisser in the USA. But they did not talk about subjective experience. The problem at first is that a review was written saying that blindsight as Weiskrantz and Warrington claimed was an artefact. Luckily Larry Weiskrantz followed it up.

maciekszul.bsky.social•182 days ago

Ha, over my 5 years of studying psychology at uni, I experienced turbulent transition of my own beliefs 😂 Staunch behaviourism in the beginning, through psychophysics as the only way to study subjective content, to really enjoy the debate (and sometimes the science) about consciousness.

dickretired.bsky.social•182 days ago

How come behaviorism? I once heard Skinner but that was year’s ago.

maciekszul.bsky.social•182 days ago

As a young student I have read few books by Skinner and the simplicity of the approach appealed to me, and because I hated psychoanalysis (I still feel a deep antipathy)😁 I'm proud of the fact that education changed my beliefs 😁

cianodonnell.bsky.social•182 days ago

Congrats Nicole! Very happy for you and excited to follow your new work.

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thanks! Mood is certainly one of those things that needs bridging from the biophysics all the way up to the mind of the type you are so fluent in. If you ever wanna talk ... 🙂.

cianodonnell.bsky.social•182 days ago

Absolutely, would be great to chat! I do feel that this is a place where computational neuroscience has great potential to contribute. We are meant to be theoreticians, and this is a deep theoretical problem!

alexkwan.bsky.social•182 days ago

Congrats!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you Alex! I'm now in the psychedelic-adjacent space and I'll be diving deep into those terrific papers of yours.

alexkwan.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you - and I look forward to learn more about your new perspective on mood.

martinwiener.bsky.social•182 days ago

How wonderful. You will do great things 😇

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you so much! 🤞 Strong parallels between mood and memorability forthcoming (I'm not joking; the parallels are striking!).

martinwiener.bsky.social•182 days ago

Really? I'm curious to know more! Cannot wait :)

marcelomattar.bsky.social•180 days ago

This is so cool, Nicole! Congrats! Also happy for Yael! Can't wait to see your work in this area over the next few years!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•180 days ago

Thank you Marcelo!! It’s a “pinch me” moment of cognitive dissonance. On one hand, I think I’m bringing in some good ideas. On the other, WOW!!!! “They” are going to “let” me study some of the biggest and most fascinating things. I keep having to remind myself that “they” and “let” are constructs.

nicolecrust.bsky.social•180 days ago

At the same time, I’m approaching this with a lot of epistemic humility.
Mood is an all hands on deck situation, I think!

https://bsky.app/profile/nicolecrust.bsky.social/post/3lagupbwkck2v

cantlonlab.bsky.social•182 days ago

Congratulations—this looks awesome

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you! (Pinch me).

nmwilkinson.bsky.social•182 days ago

How very exciting and brave! Good luck!

I have a take to plug, but I'll keep it for later 😉

nicolecrust.bsky.social•181 days ago

Thank you Dr. Nick!!

tyrellturing.bsky.social•182 days ago

Congrats!!!!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thanks! I'm so happy that this gig is allowing me to evolve and change. (Even with a plan, I wasn't sure if/how it was going to happen).

stevenmunger.bsky.social•182 days ago

Congratulations! That’s an exciting opportunity.

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you Steve! Lobster noses to human mood and so many things in between ... I love that my career is peppered with all of it!

bita137.bsky.social•182 days ago

Seeing this puts me in an excellent mood :)

Congratulations and have fun!!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you Bita!!!!!!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

I'm so grateful to @simonsfoundation.org for their support. There aren't many opportunities to pivot an entire research program like this.

As part of the Fellowship, I get to embed in Yael Niv's lab at Princeton for a year to learn the ropes. I can't wait to work with Yael!

lluaces.bsky.social•182 days ago

This is so cool, I think our understanding of depression is limited by our understanding of “normal” mood. Congratulations on the grant!

nmwilkinson.bsky.social•181 days ago

Yes for sure. Lots of pieces of this puzzle still missing. This 👇, imo, is one of them

https://bsky.app/profile/nmwilkinson.bsky.social/post/3l4yarlwu2i2c

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you so much! That is really helpful to hear. (I hope funding agencies will agree too 🤞).

lluaces.bsky.social•182 days ago

I was interested in this when I was at Penn esp. the adaptive value of low mood following a stressor but could never figure out good ways of studying it so I only researched the history of how we’ve thought about this.

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Have you read these ideas (and if so, thoughts)? The TL;DR: reward-based learning requires some measure of how good/bad things are globally (like fruit in the spring & fall). b/c mood is an integration of events, it can provide that.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4703769/

lluaces.bsky.social•182 days ago

I’ll have to read this it seems very interesting. My “test” for most of these theories is whether they can account for the fact that moods seems like it can be influenced by anything but also people vary a lot on what lowers their mood. Also how it fits with the literature on emotion regulation…

lachkent.bsky.social•181 days ago

Agree. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2012.667392 and also my own theory of mental gravity. Mood is high/low and stable/unstable and I think this encodes value of emotional self-world relations using physical analogues (inertia, momentum, gravity, etc).

neurograce.bsky.social•182 days ago

Great use of a great program

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thanks! I've been looking at it from afar for awhile now ... it's been fun to know that it exists and to imagine what I might do with it.

seanmcarroll.bsky.social•182 days ago

Congrats! That's great.

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you! One motivation is to tackle a function that is undeniably part of a complex dynamical system. Our moods impact our percepts of the things that happen and those percepts in turn impact our moods - this is why mood can spiral into depression. Adaptability at the cost of fragility.

kurtfraser.bsky.social•182 days ago

Amazing! Congrats!!!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Thank you so much!!

christakou.bsky.social•182 days ago

Many congratulations, this is truly exciting - for all of us :-)
Looking forward to following your work even more!

nicolecrust.bsky.social•182 days ago

Wow - thank you so much!!

nerofil.bsky.social•174 days ago

📌