New preprint out, with @olijrobinson and @jonroiser! 📢 ‘Measuring cognitive effort without difficulty’ We highlight a major confound in previous cog effort tasks and present a new task that solves this.🧵 #cognitiveeffort #effort #cogneuro @ucl_icn.

RT @NoS_Cambridge: We're very excited to announce the launch of 'Turning Points', a new podcast presented by @HugoFleming_ and @_cmhood, an….

Shaping up to be a cracking discussion this - looking forwards to it!.

RT @thelizcarr: I made my BBC documentary Better Off Dead? to explain why me & many other disabled people oppose legalising assisted suicid….

"Are we looking in the wrong place for answers to Britain's mental health crisis?" - me, for @spectator .

'What if. ?': Creativity in science.

P.S. Extra shout-out to Martyna who helped to turn this study from an abstract idea into a fully-fledged study that was already collecting data within the span of her 6-week internship!.

Check out our preprint 'Differences in glucose control are associated with altered reward learning' if you want to find out more!.

Obviously lots of work needs to be done to establish causality and tease apart the complexities of the relationships between these different variables. But we think this is a really cool contribution to the burgeoning new field of 💫metabolic computational psychiatry💫.

So while peripherally, insulin resistance might impair glucose control, in the brain it may affect reward processing. In any case, to be able to link metabolic health to changes in a specific neurocognitive process, reward learning, *in humans* is new – and really exciting!.

One possible mechanism for these effects is via insulin receptors in the brain. Animal studies have shown that insulin readily crosses the blood-brain barrier, and brain insulin receptors are mainly located in the ventral striatum, where they modulate dopamine signalling.

These two results *really* intrigued us though. Poorer glucose tolerance was associated with higher reward learning rates (essentially, these participants were more influenced by recent rewards) and, in turn, reward learning predicted worse depression symptoms.

First (in the right-hand plot) people with poorer glucose tolerance (higher iAUC) tended to have worse depression symptoms. This replicates what we already know from patient studies, but it's interesting to see it holds true in the general population too.

We gave 48 people a glucose tolerance test (usually used to assess insulin resistance in diabetics), and then asked them to complete a reward learning task and some mental health questionnaires (we used the PHQ9 for depression). What did we find?

. might contribute to both depression and diabetes? To what extent are our mental and metabolic health entwined? . In our* recent study, we've taken a first step in trying to understand this. (with *Martyna Stasiak, @annalise_bw Isabel Lau @camillalnord).

Well, clearly at least part of this is straightforward: having a long-term health condition of any kind is stressful, and makes maintaining your mental and physical health harder. But part of me wondered whether something deeper is going on. What if the same biological process.

I've never been one to shy away from new/unusual ideas, and at the start of my postdoc, I stumbled across an interesting question: . Why is there substantial comorbidity between depression and type-2 diabetes? (x2 risk of developing one if you already have the other). The answer?

RT @camillalnord: In the past couple years my lab has gone down a rather wild new road of metabolic computational psychiatry. We wondere….

RT @hulme_oliver: What’s your preference when it comes to risk?. Are you a risk-seeker, or are you risk-averse?. Have you always been?. Ris….

Reading old papers, you sometimes see them refer to 'depressions' rather than just 'depression'. A slight change of language perhaps, but with significant difference in implication. Should we be returning to this plural form?.

We're now open to new contributors, so if you'd like to pitch an idea do drop us a line. We're keen to hear from ECRs from any field related to science! You can message the Notes on Science page on here, or drop us an email (notesonscience.cam@gmail.com).