Simon Fisher
Director of Language & Genetics at Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen.
Tracing the complex connections between genes, brains, speech & language.
Website: mpi.nl/people/fisher-simon-e
ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3132-1996
- One of my academic colleagues looks a bit like Bob Mortimer. One time near our labs I saw him walking towards me and I warmly said Hey Kevin. It was Bob Mortimer. Please share your very low impact celebrity encounters here.
- Melbourne 2019: We're in queue for a @watsoncomedian.bsky.social gig. Someone taps me on my shoulder - he looks oddly familiar. It's Mark Watson. He hands over a blank postcard + pen, asks me to write out my strangest opinion, habit or character trait. (Apparently he does that kind of thing a lot.)
- Most people can call up pictures in their minds, visualizing the past & summoning images of the future. But for ~4% of us, such mental imagery is weak or absent. New edition of @nature.com has a nice introduction to how research on this phenomenon (aphantasia) opens up novel windows into the brain.🧪
- Shared this before but I once fingerpicked Radiohead's "Street Spirit" on an acoustic guitar I was considering buying, in a music shop in Oxford, unaware that Thom Yorke was standing directly behind me. My wife observed the sad affair but only informed me later, after we'd exited said establishment.
- Heritability = a statistical description of sources of interindividual variation in a specific set of people under a specific set of environmental conditions. It doesn't index a fixed underlying feature of human biology. A few lines in this paper acknowledge that but its overall framing may mislead.
- As I've posted on before, heritability is one of the most commonly confused concepts in public (mis)understanding of genetics. 👇
- Heritability = one of the most commonly confused concepts in public (mis)understanding of genetics. Let’s break it down. Imagine studying a cohort of people in a specific set of environmental circumstances. You assess everyone for an observable trait & find it varies from one person to another. 🧪1/5
- I had intended to post something about this new Google DeepMind paper that appeared yesterday in Nature, but the press coverage has added to what there is to say. So this is a long 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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View full threadOne of the common themes was that only around 2% of our genome encodes proteins, and the rest was dismissed as junk, but then scientists started to realise that some of that other genetic material has important biological roles too. /4
