Alexis An Yee Low

PhD in anxiety theoretical neurobiology / computational psychiatry 🧠 @WCHN_UCL | medical student @UCL_MBPhD | powerlifting + poetry | she/they

[Alexis An Yee Low @Alexis_AnYee]

Paper out now (my first first author paper)!!

Self-esteem depends on beliefs about the rate of change of social approval: https://t.co/xK3P8TWfWg

[Alexis An Yee Low @Alexis_AnYee]

New preprint! ✨ with William Hopper, @ilinca_ang, @DrLiamMason, @GeertJanWill and @M_Moutoussis

https://t.co/i8pvrnbNM6

Short thread below:

[James Throt MBBS, MD, PhD, FRCPath @JamesThrot]

Surging aggression. Language delays. Developmental issues. Teachers & parents report major changes in children

Lockdowns are often blamed. But many lockdowns were short (e.g. UK)

So what else changed in early childhood since 2020?

I’m a neurologist. Let's talk COVID & brains🧵 https://t.co/Yq9Mc7FKyZ

[Masud Husain @MasudHusain]

Thank goodness people are waking up to the fact that there is a crisis for clinical research in the UK @FT
High on the list are the bureaucratic processes that have become such an obstacle to getting things done

[Dr Sanil Rege FRANZCP | MRCPsych @sanilrege]

No evidence... Other than sexual function - as if sexual function doesn't involve mood, cognition, hedonic drive, aversive experience, activity dimensions? Oh dear! 🚨

How does a researcher just spew all this even though they have access to material to learn 👇

1. Serotonin is produced by a small proportion of neurons (mainly dorsal raphe) but released widely across the brain, influencing large-scale neural networks.

2. Functional connectivity of serotonin networks varies between individuals, influencing behavioural traits.

3. Two independent modes of variation are linked to:

-Impulsivity, antisocial behaviour, and aggression.
-Negative bias in reward processing, depression, and panic.

4. Serotonin modulates both behavioural inhibition and aversive processing.

5. Neuroimaging–gene mapping links specific serotonin receptor subtypes to distinct brain-wide functional circuits.

6. While receptor distribution patterns are not fully mapped, evidence shows serotonin’s roles span mood regulation, cognition, perception, and pain modulation... well beyond sexual function.

There is more - with anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory properties but I’ll leave it at that!

[Henrietta Bowden-Jones @HBowdenJonesOBE]

This will be an incredible Summit!! As National Advisor on Gambling Harms I urge all of you to attend if you can including colleagues in mental health who do not work in gambling. What a line up of great speakers. So sorry not to be in the country on that day.
Well done to @pgreform !!!

[Jonathan Gibb @gibb_jonathan]

Great work by @BMAstudents. Urgent need for Government action to prevent medical students not being able to succeed on courses and miss out on crucial learning experiences due to financial hardship. #FixOurFunding @TheBMA

[Neurologist Mom @NeurologistMom]

If you have Long COVID, your gut microbiota is most likely traveling through your body.

“There are emerging data, some of which we heard in Cambridge, suggest that at a microscopic level, in ME and Long COVID, there are inflammatory changes, not classic inflammatory bowel disease, but small microscopic changes.

These changes lead to abnormalities of the gut blood barrier. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest leakage of certain bacteria or even viruses out of the gut microbiome.

This is abnormal, and either the organisms themselves or their byproducts are deleterious and may affect the whole body.” Dr. David Systrom, M.D., Brigham & Women’s, Pulmonary/Critical Care; Harvard Med School
@NSU_INIM
Watch the full podcast here ⬇️

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Fabulous quote on AI, from someone in the media who actually gets what we have just witnessed.

“In the aftermath of GPT-5’s launch, it has become more difficult to take bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value, and the views of critics like Marcus seem increasingly moderate… Post-training improvements don’t seem to be strengthening models as thoroughly as scaling once did. A lot of utility can come from souping up your Camry, but no amount of tweaking will turn it into a Ferrari.”

- Cal Newport, @NewYorker

And yes, on a personal note, I am human, and it is downright thrilling to be vindicated after all these years, in the pages of The New Yorker. Truly a life moment.

[basvanopheusden @basvanopheusden]

A few weeks ago, I started a new job at @OpenAI. I wrote a document about my interview process and recommendations for anyone on the job market for AI research positions. I hope it's helpful!

https://t.co/0I6f6UrAqD

[Jim Waterson @jimwaterson]

What's the deal with London's Harry Potter shops, which are in some of the capital's most prominent shopping areas? And why are so many of these businesses now owned by a 31-year-old woman in Oxford who originally claimed she was not the actual owner when we tracked her down?

[Ryan Smith (@rssmith.bsky.social) @RyanSmith_LIBR]

Excited to share this new preprint led by @FaryadNavid.

"Computational Mechanisms of Learning and Forgetting Differentiate Affective and Substance Use Disorders"

https://t.co/Q9Zef21GZq

Navid tested the utility of RL and active inference models in differential diagnosis🧵↓

[Shawn Rhoads @shawnrhoadsphd]

📢 Out now in @NatMentHealth

Social factors greatly impact the progression & treatment of psychiatric conditions—@JoeBarnby, @XiaosiGu, & I propose that modeling social complexities rooted in mental health & disorder will enhance computational psychiatry

https://t.co/SaY88qY00k

[Paul Sharp @paul_b_sharp]

🚨Preprint on anxiety & planning biases is updated: https://t.co/pYooBKycsu! I give examples of (1) how biased task construal leads to repetitive worry and (2) how intolerance of uncertainty + biased sampling leads to generalized worry. Send feedback & thanks to anon reviewers!

[Michael; mastodon: @[email protected] @M_Moutoussis]

New work! In evaluating other's motives, people first make a rough good/bad judgement, then (if all goes well) refine their views. Serotonin may help learning beyond the good/bad impression: https://t.co/gDmDzQoQW4 . Thanks @JoeBarnby , @DrLiamMason , @RobbRutledge and gang!

[Itai Yanai @ItaiYanai]

Is the scientific paper a fraud? Peter Medawar (Nobel Prize winner) suggested that publications are overly structured and formal, giving only a sanitized version of the discovery without revealing the thought process that actually led to it.

[ontologoff 🛜 @ontologoff]

They were letting her pay her fees annually without expressing concerns about her work until the last minute...her 4th year!!! That letter about Shakespeare being cancelled because of her case is wild but the institutional failures still stand. She has every right to be angered.

[Lakshmi Balakrishnan @lakshmipriyab07]

To provide further context to my @BBCNews piece and @QueensCollegeOx letter, I am sharing below the supporting statements I received for my DPhil. I also taught at @UniOxford, including about my research topic on Shakespeare. I am sharing the references I received for that below.

[Yuan Yi Zhu @yuanyi_z]

This is helpful information about the Oxford DPhil case. Her supervisor never raised more than Minor Concerns in the termly supervision reports, and you wouldn't generally expect someone to fail Confirmation twice without prior red flags being raised by the supervisor 1/

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

What kind of childhood makes a top scientist? Is it enough to have all the right traits (brilliance, grit, etc) or do you need the right family too?

And why should we care? A 🧵 on our paper on the Nobel Laureates.

A teaser: the income distribution of the laureates' fathers.1/N

[Tobias Hauser @TobiasUHauser]

🚨My Tübingen lab has 2 new job openings🚨:
Neuroimaging postdoc on real-time fMRI to uncover the role of neural noise on behaviour: https://t.co/HFXqJ5wZWM
Computational modelling postdoc, co-supervised w Peter Dayan: large datasets & mental health: https://t.co/Ttrx9uYZr9

[Adam Grant @AdamMGrant]

The scientific method isn't only for scientists. It can help us all learn faster.

Study of 759 startups: teaching scientific thinking boosts revenue. Founders become quicker to abandon bad ideas.

A key to good judgment is treating plans as hypotheses and choices as experiments.