2026 British Neuropsychiatry Association Conference. Registration is open.
Memory & identity, brain injury, epilepsy, functional cognitive disorder, evolving forensic risk, neurostimulation
📍 London | 🗓 12–13 March 2026
🤝 Joint meeting with DoN
Programme and registration👉 bnpa.org.uk/agm/
First paper to look at 5-HT release in vivo in schizophrenia, suggesting increased release (5-HT2A receptor availability not altered) in the frontal cortex, correlating with worse motivational symptoms, potentially by devaluing immediate reward shorturl.at/8Tfru
@wiringthebrain.bsky.social 🫡
Beautiful takedown of the autism-microbiome hypothesis by Kevin Mitchell et al - Built on “pseudo-triangulation”: weak observational, mouse & clinical studies made to look convergent.
✅B
Autism → behavioural/dietary differences → microbiome variation, not the reverse
www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
Our June members' newsletter has just been sent out.
It has the latest in neuropsychiatry news and debates from the academic literature, media, and conference circuit.
Not a member? You can sign here:
bnpa.org.uk/membership/
...and this capacity for shared agency required 1) self-reflection to consider oneself part of a group and 2) self-regulation & motivation to maintain group membership (a positive social identity) --> conformity and loyalty --> group membership --> survival
Loved this talk by Leon Li at the Royal Society on how social identity may have evolved as part of our human capacity & motivation for shared agency; putting “we” over “me” - with the original form of social identity not being race/class, but moral identity as a cooperative group member....
🧠 Help Us Understand Pain Perception in FND! 🧠
Looking for volunteers with & without #FND for a study in London @kingsioppn.bsky.social. Single lab visit testing pain perception with electrical stimulation.
Interested? Please message me: Livia.Asan@kcl.ac.uk ✉️
Thanks for sharing!
So interesting 🙏
ADM levels mediated up to 16.3% of the effect of loneliness on mortality, showing its importance in stress-related disease mechanisms
ADM (Adrenomedullin) and ASGR1 (Asialoglycoprotein Receptor 1) showed the strongest causal evidence using colocalization analysis.
ADM levels correlated with reduced grey matter in the insula and caudate, brain regions involved in social and emotional processing…
Powerful study - used Mendelian Randomisation to show loneliness causally increased 5 proteins widely linked to various inflammatory and metabolic blood biomarkers but also brain regions involved in interoception, emotion, and social processes www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Our 2025 annual conference is happening in London, March 13-14.
Neuropsychiatry of sleep, FND treatment, impulsive control disorders, neuropsychiatry of TBI and much more.
Sign up, it'll be great to see you there
bnpa.org.uk/agm/
Interesting findings from this Phase 3 RCT of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD: Participants w/ higher baseline alexithymia saw the greatest PTSD symptom reduction, & the MDMA group saw a significant decrease in TAS-20 (DDF, DIF) scores. n.b. blinding challenges!
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...
🚨 Save the Date! 🚨
Join the next #BRNet Seminar:
💭 Body and Self: A Dialogue Between Philosophy and Neuroscience with @anatajadura.bsky.social & Adrian Alsmith.
📅 Jan 17, 2025
📍 Online
🎟️ Reserve your spot today: shorturl.at/nl3Ur
#Body #Philosophy #Neuroscience #Research
🚨 New meta-analysis highlights psychiatric diagnoses in persons with epilepsy (565,443 PWE vs. 13,434,208 controls)
1️⃣ Autism Spectrum Disorder: OR 10.67
2️⃣ Psychotic Disorder: OR 3.98
3️⃣ ADHD: OR 3.93
4️⃣ Schizophrenia: OR 3.72
5️⃣ Bipolar Disorder: OR 3.12
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Aphantasia as “Blindsight for the Mind’s Eye” – a fantastic letter presenting evidence (e.g., mental rotation tasks, forced choice tasks) that aphantasics may have nonconscious visual representations, not a true absence of imagery 💭👁️🪬🧠
Via @jorge-morales.bsky.social
philarchive.org/rec/MICAAI-5
I (masochistically) enjoyed getting my head (almost) around Body as First Teacher on the Visceral Afferent Training Hypothesis – how the body’s rhythms (e.g. heartbeats) train the developing brain, shaping its architecture & building predictive models foundational for cognition
tinyurl.com/572pze6k
Brilliant critique by Thomas Pollak on the rise of inflammation as a monocausal/catch-all explanation for complex conditions: "Inflammation has become the go-to explanatory model for those disillusioned by ambiguity and complexity" A must-read ❤️ academic.oup.com/brain/advanc...
Enjoyed this article challenging the singular and classic reward prediction error role of dopamine www.thetransmitter.org/dopamine/rec...
