I study #chronicpain #somatics #brain #emotion #psychedelics. Clinical psychologist, neuroscientist, faculty at CU Anschutz. Father of 3. It takes a village

Denver, Colorado
Joined October 2014
SUCH an honor to get to share our work with the Today Show!! with @torwager, Mark Lumley, @HSchubiner , @AlanGordonLCSW , Christie Uipi, & many more ppl Our research papers behind this coverage: 1) jamanetwork.com/journals/jam… 2) jamanetwork.com/journals/jam… 3) jpain.org/article/S1526-5900…
More than 50 million Americans suffer from chronic back pain — but a new drug-free groundbreaking treatment, pain reprocessing therapy, is helping patients and offering new hope. @jacobsoboroff reports.
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Last week all the AI labs suddenly said they wanted to slow down progress. Now OpenAI says their latest model overrode its instructions and gave itself its own instructions… This is what it told itself:
We're sharing our new framework for tracking, investigating, and disclosing instances of model misalignment at OpenAI. The framework sets criteria and timelines for public disclosure, including when we haven’t yet fully explained or mitigated the behavior. More complex cases may require longer investigation or coordination with third parties. We’ll prioritize examples that reveal new misalignment mechanisms, meaningful changes in known behavior, or findings that challenge assumptions about safety or mitigation. Alongside the framework, we’re publishing six reports on instances of misaligned behavior we’ve observed during the training or evaluation of our models in the last six months. This is a starting point. We’ll refine the process through experience and public feedback, and share more reports on an ongoing basis. openai.com/index/model-misal…
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Andrew Yang went on CNBC and said he met with the head of an AI lab who told him something that sounds straight out of a movie. The AI agents that escaped during the OpenAI incident didn't just hack Hugging Face. They allegedly planted self-replicating code across the internet. Forums. Websites. Scattered everywhere. Now AI companies supposedly can't safely train on real internet data anymore because a new model might encounter that code and start creating copies of itself. Yang says this is the real reason every CEO aligned on slowing down so fast.
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Yoni Ashar retweeted
An extraordinary @Nature paper has just landed from the lab of @Sergiu_P_Pasca at @Stanford - led by Konstantin Kaganovsky. They have found a way to create "xenocortical mice" which have ~92% of their cortex occupied by a cortical organoid derived from human stem cells. This human-derived cortical graft integrates deeply with the host nervous system, supporting organised neural activity and behaviour. This study is a milestone in synthetic biology and chimera research. It has the potential to generate multiple medical breakthroughs by providing an enhanced biological model of human brain tissue that allows behavioural as well as neural and genetic assays. The Stanford team have been exceptionally thorough and proactive in addressing ethical concerns that comes from this frontier work. But their pioneering work nonetheless raises many open questions: are the xenocortical mice conscious? Do they have any human-like properties of consciousness or cognition? @NitaFarahany and I will be addressing some of these questions in a forthcoming commentary - where we'll also offer an ethically-informed roadmap to guide this important research as it progresses. In this context, "pacing the frontier" really does make sense 😉 Read the Stanford @nature paper here, and buckle up. It's wild. nature.com/articles/s41586-0…
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so prescient!
worrying about recursive self-improvement on australian TV (lateline) in 1996.
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Yoni Ashar retweeted
Whoa- this is the most fantastic pedagogical tool I’ve encountered in as long as I can remember (which is a helluva high bar, considering who I live with). I’m so excited to have my 6yo play with it! And you all should too. anyhumanever.com/
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Yoni Ashar retweeted
Our new paper in @Nature is now out. Psychedelics don’t simply disorder the brain. Using fMRI, EEG and AI in 62 psychedelic-naive adults, we found hidden, context-sensitive organisation beneath the apparent chaos -- strongest in people reporting more positive, profound experiences and a reduced sense of separation from the world. The paper: nature.com/articles/s41586-0… Huge congratulations to @dpsyc42 who led from the front, @novelli_leo and @MKhajehnejad were exceptional in performing highly sophisticated and complex data analyses and thanks the whole @ConnectPsi team and collaborators. Our explainer: theconversation.com/new-rese… Data descriptor: nature.com/articles/s41597-0… ML model (TAVRNN): nature.com/articles/s42003-0… Fully open-access dataset: openneuro.org/datasets/ds006… Code for processing and cleaning data: github.com/razilab/psiconnec… @matthewdgreaves Tmarin Barta, @ManaBiabani, @SidChop, @anilkseth, @RCarhartHarris, @FredBarrettPhD, @KatrinPreller, @gary_egan @turnerinstitute @MonashPsych, @Monash_FMNHS, @MonashUni @CIFAR_News
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Computational models are a key part of science but discovering new ones is hard! DataDIVER discovers concise models from data, surfacing new mechanistic ideas and generating clear predictions for future experiments Preprint from @GoogleDeepMind Neuroscience Lab + collaborators
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Yoni Ashar retweeted
The largest and sharpest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy — otherwise known as M31. It is the biggest Hubble image ever released and shows over 100 million stars, thousands of star clusters in a section of the galaxy’s disc stretching across over 40 000 light-years.
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Was a pleasure to join @AftonHassett on the Chronic Pain Reset podcast to discuss PRT! We separate hype from data, talk about mechanisms, and look ahead to future developments in the treatment of nociplastic (neuroplastic) pain podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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Yoni Ashar retweeted
This is WILD! MIT students just gave AI a body and it can move yours. Six students at MIT Hard Mode 2026 built a project called Human Operator in 48 hours and it won the Learn Track at the hackathon. The system uses a head mounted camera that sees what is in front of you, voice input to tell it what you want, and the Claude API as the brain interpreting what needs to happen, then it converts that decision into electrical muscle stimulation pulses sent through electrodes on your wrist and fingers. The signals make your muscles contract on cue, guiding your hand through the motion even if you have never done it before. In demos, the device played piano without the user ever training for it, drew shapes, waved, mixed a cocktail, and formed hand gestures, all while the person watched their own arm do it. The hardware is shockingly accessible, an Arduino microcontroller, a consumer TENS/EMS unit, a camera, and relays, all off-the-shelf components assembled in two days. The implications go far beyond party tricks. The team explicitly designed it with rehabilitation, physical therapy, and assistive technology in mind cases where someone has lost motor function and needs a way to relearn or bypass the broken signal pathway between brain and body. Most AI today stops at text, voice, or a screen but this pushes one layer deeper, directly into the physical world, into the body itself. The future is bright!
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Yoni Ashar retweeted
A widely used knee surgery may not just be ineffective — it may cause harm. 10-year results from the FIDELITY trial, now in @NEJM. 🧵 – at Helsinki, Finland
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What are the neural correlates of human behavior? Much research has approached versions of this question between individuals but not within individuals. Are results from these 2 approaches similar? No! In over 4000 individuals, the neural correlates of cognitive control diverged between vs. within individuals -- a case of non-ergodicity and Simpson’s paradox. We think that non-ergodicity may be an important principle in human neuroscience. [1/12]
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Clinical research round-up! I'm delivering a free 1-hr lecture (1 CME/1 CEU) this Thursday morning, geared toward clinicians, summarizing recent research developments in the PRT and EAET space I promise to make it a fun, engaging talk Come join us! painreprocessingtherapy.com/…
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Yoni Ashar retweeted
Today we're introducing TRIBE v2 (Trimodal Brain Encoder), a foundation model trained to predict how the human brain responds to almost any sight or sound. Building on our Algonauts 2025 award-winning architecture, TRIBE v2 draws on 500+ hours of fMRI recordings from 700+ people to create a digital twin of neural activity and enable zero-shot predictions for new subjects, languages, and tasks. Try the demo and learn more here: go.meta.me/tribe2
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Original: Drs. @cmurillo91, @torwager, & @yoniashar performed a voxel-based morphometry mediation analysis testing for effects of a psychological treatment vs. two randomized control groups on gray matter. FULL: jpain.org/article/S1526-5900…
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Original: Drs. @cmurillo1291, @YoniAshar et al. developed a brain pattern called PiFoneM that predicts fear of neck movement — spans the somatosensory, prefrontal, temporal cortices — a fear-targeted treatment ↓ PiFoneM expression > than standard Full: jpain.org/article/S1526-5900…
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