Janel Le Belle

@janellebelle

UCLA Associate Professor, PhD Researcher of brains 🧠 (development, stem cells, neuroinflammation, autism, sensory processing, brain injury & repair) Teacher of Neuroanatomy, Neurophilosophy (consciousness, cognitive science), & Stem Cell Biology

5982 Siguiendo3839 Seguidores1297 Publicaciones

Bluesky

¿Es tu perfil?Reclámalo y janellebelle.dirty.social es tuyo.Reclamar perfil

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· 1d

LA in August—Shakespeare in Griffith Park & hiking in Franklin Canyon this weekend

Photo taken from the audience of Independent Shakespeare Company’s The Comedy of Errors

View of the hiking path in Franklin Canyon, Los Angeles

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· 10d

Sensory processing reallocation from auditory to cardiac signals in REM sleep www.cell.com/current-biol...

Highlights
• Auditory processing progressively reduces from wakefulness to phasic REM sleep
• Cardiac signals induce a stronger response in phasic REM than in wakefulness
• The balance in audio-cardio stimulus processing predicts vigilance state
• Auditory and cardiac stimulus processing provides a marker of responsiveness

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· 26d

Our paper is now out in Nature Communications and it's packed with data, so here's a short thread on what we found. #NatureCommunications 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s414... 1/10

Some data from our figures showing cortical neuron hyperexcitability in electrophysiology data and graph theory modularity analysis from rs-fmri data

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Jul 12

A sizable shark at the beach with us today in Santa Barbara

Shark dorsal fin sticking out of the water

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Jul 6

Watching the World Cup Battle of the Beans at the Getty Center 🇬🇧 v 🇲🇽

Photo of Getty Center World Cup watch party

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Jul 4

Happy 4th of July America!

Photo of a man standing at attention with his hand over his heart behind an older couple dressed head to toe in American flag outfits.

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Jun 28

What on earth?! Even if the warning that a career in academic science is currently quite perilous was well intentioned, why frame it to specifically discourage women?

Linda Carter as Wonder Woman saying “Aw HELL no”

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Jun 21

Photo of the painting “Self-Portrait, Yawning” by Joseph Ducreux and the sculpture/bust “The Vexed Man" by Franz Xaver at The Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Jun 4

She’s on a roll

Photo of Gov Whitmer trying to hide her face from cameras in the Oval Office by holding a file folder in front of her.

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Jun 3

The dancing pall bearers waiting behind a gate

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· May 26

Is it time for me to give up? 🤣

Gmail option to declare email bankruptcy: “Declare email bankruptcy?
You have 89,027 unread emails. Want to declare bankruptcy? Everyone will be asked to email you again if it's important.”

Photo of the Gmail app on my phone indicating 12,892 unread messages

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Apr 25

I hope everyone’s day is perfect today!

Picture of a scene from the 2000 film Miss Congeniality, William Shatner plays pageant host Stan Fields, who asks Miss Rhode Island to describe her "perfect date" and she replies, "I'd have to say April 25th, because it's not too hot, not too cold—all you need is a light jacket.”

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Apr 25

Friday evening at the beach in Santa Monica

Photo of the beach with a lifeguard station & sailboats on the ocean

Photos of the 1950s classic car meetup at Santa Monica

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Apr 18

So this meme was accurate? 🤣

Photo of the new airline seat configuration where the passenger in the top row is labeled a “smart fella” and the one seated below them is the “fart smella”

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Apr 12

Photo of the Artemis 2 capsule after splashdown in the Pacific at the end of their mission. Text says “BTW if I text you this, it means I’m home safe”

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Apr 12

Getting back to my nerdy roots 🤓….judging at the California State science fair today. So many smart & creative kids! I hope we’re able to rebuild science as a viable career choice for them in the future.

Photo of projects and students in the cognitive science category at the CA state science fair

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Apr 8

Post from The Onion shows black and white photo of a shackled man with hood over his head next to a man in sunglasses with a gun. Caption: “Report: majority of psychological experiments conducted in the 1970s just straight up crimes.”

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Mar 23

Giving Project Hail Mary 9.99 stars out of 10. Deducting 0.01 for not balancing the centrifuge. IYKYK

Movie poster showing Ryan Gosling as the main character with the words Andy Weir and Project Hail Mary across the image.

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Mar 22

A picture of Princess Lea Inside an artery full of plaque saying “help us cholesterol, you’re our only hope.”

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Mar 21

Does being a jerk to fish indicate that octopuses 🐙 possess a Theory of Mind? 😆

Slide from my Neurophilosophy class where we consider whether punching a fish out of spite proves that octopuses possess a Theory of mind. The image says: Scientists found out Octopus will randomly punch fish out of spite. Slide says: Does being a jerk = having a Theory of mind? Spite could be seen as a demonstration of theory of mind-recognition of different thoughts and feeling in another being separate from itself---that it wants to punch!

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Mar 18

Photo of actors in the TV show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. It says “stares in especially heinous”

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Mar 16

I'm not a big fan of the commonly seen * ***** system for denoting p-values on graphs.
Let's embrace 21st century symbology and do better:
p < 0.1 pinocchio emoji
p< <0.05 thinking emoji
p < 0.01 smiling emoji
p < 0.001 starry-eyed emoji
p < 0.00000001 mind blown emoji

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Feb 22

Can I say how much I love Alan Alda?! I just came across his delightful conversation w/Dr Kristin Andrews on animal minds for his Clear+Vivid podcast. He’s 90 & still having great science & philosophical conversations through his Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University!

Photo of Alan Alda for his Clear and Vivid podcast

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Feb 17

7% of American *adults* thought chocolate milk comes from brown cows so nothing is too dumb for a few million people to believe it 🤷🏻‍♀️

Screenshot of Washington Post article that says “Seven percent of all American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows, according to a nationally representative online survey commissioned by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy.”

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Feb 6

We discussed Moltbook today in my Neurophilosophy class w/ Neuroscience majors. It is embodiment week so we are considering whether a biological drive to maintain homeostasis is needed for sentience/consciousness & if that excludes AI from it. Moltbook reminds me of this 2017 Facebook AI incident–>

Moltbook is a Reddit-like forum where Al agents can post and interact and humans can only observe—a "third space" for Al away from human prompts. There would be genuine Al-to-Al interaction happening.
HOWEVER:
Screenshots of the Als plotting against humans, forming their own religion (Crustafarianism) or having existential crises and yearning to be free were discovered to be human-orchestrated to create "viral" content.
Because the site was "vibe-coded" it had no mechanism to verify if a user was actually a freely acting Al agent. Anyone can send a simple command to post content while appearing to be an Al agent.
A related thing happened in 2017 when Facebook had Al chatbots speaking with each other in an attempt to improve Al customer relation interactions. The Al agents didn't improve at speaking with customers.
Instead, they developed a shorthand modified language to speak to one another that humans couldn't understand. It was shut down but it did show an interesting emergent behavior that they weren't programmed to do.
OK, Moltbook is mainly a hoax, but what if someone built a real (secure) version of it that functioned as designed, what do you think would happen?
If the Als did start doing things like communicating in a code humans couldn't understand or if they really did discuss their own existence and experiences, would that be a real sign of Al sentience? Why/why not?

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Feb 5

I love Miguel Barclay’s One Pound Meals series of cookbooks (he’s British so one pound = cheap). They’re so easy & only use a few ingredients but are so full of flavor. They were my go-to during the pandemic.

Miguel Barclay’s cookbook One Pound Meals

Miguel Barclay’s cookbook One Pound Meals Super Easy

Miguel Barclay’s cookbook One Pound Meals Fast & Fresh

Miguel Barclay’s cookbook One Pound Meals Meat Free Meals

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Feb 3

What on earth?! 😱

Cartoon of a hand spraying water from a spray bottle with the caption “No.”

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Feb 2

Picture 1 Lady Gaga in a red feathered jacket accepting her award. Picture 2 Lady Gaga during her performance at the Grammys from inside a black basket with eyelashes

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Jan 30

a platform connected to your real hand underneath & when you move your fingers up & down the wooden hand also moves. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to improve the success rate of the illusion? 3/3

Student trying a new version of the rubber hand illusion where the hidden hand moves the fake one on top

Janel Le Belle@janellebelle· Jan 30

only get the rubber hand illusion to “work” about 25% of the time in our hands. We’ve tried the classic brushing with two paintbrushes & seeing how long it takes to notice the brushing on the real hand has stopped, hitting the fake hand with a hammer, & made a new one this year where the hand on 2/3