Mark Stokes: Scientist’s Final Twitter Post Before Death Goes Viral

Mark Stokes is a scientist whose final Twitter post about his last days before death has gone viral.

On December 18, 2022, Stokes announced on Twitter that he only had days to live. His post has more than 777,000 likes, with many people, from celebrities to non-celebrities, praising his composure and grace in the face of looming death. The cause of death will be cancer.

His Twitter page describes him as: “Scientist, dad, not a robot (impeccable CAPTCHA track record).” Stokes was Head of Attention group at Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology until recently, according to a journal article highlighting his accomplishments.

Stokes is an associate professor in cognitive neuroscience at Oxford University. “Mark’s research explores the role of selective attention in perception, working memory and flexible decision-making. Mark is particularly interested in how these core cognitive functions are integrated for goal-directed adaptive behaviour,” his bio explains.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. Stokes Wrote, ‘I leave This Crazy World With Much Love in My Heart’

In the tweet, Stokes revealed that he only had a few days to live after battling cancer.

“Hi folks, I’m afraid it’s time for me to say goodbye,” he wrote.

“Not just leaving Twitter, but the whole show. I’ve been battling cancer last 2 years, but now only have a few days left now. Thank you wonderful people, I leave this crazy world with much love in my heart ❤️.”

2. Stokes Is Described as Having a ‘Remarkably Outsized Influence on Many Areas of Research Within Cognitive Neuroscience’

According to the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, for the past 20 years, Mark Stokes “has had a remarkably outsized influence on many areas of research within cognitive neuroscience.”

The article says that, as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, in the laboratory of Jason Mattingley, he contributed “to several studies pioneering the use of TMS for the study of human cognition…Although many of these addressed fundamental questions about attention, arguably the most enduring of his contributions from that time was methodological, 2005’s ‘Simple metric for scaling motor threshold based on scalp-cortex distance: Application to studies using transcranial magnetic stimulation’ (Stokes et al., 2005).”

Google Scholar “shows that although the citation count for this introduction of ‘the Stokes method’ initially peaked in 2011, its year-by-year histogram has remained stubbornly elevated, achieving additional modes in 2017, in 2019, and now again in 2022 (for which, already by the 9-month mark, it has already eclipsed the previously most highly cited calendar year),” the journal article reveals.

3. People Praised Stokes’ ‘Bravery,’ Saying It ‘Appeals to the Deep Humanity in All of Us’

Journalist Yashar Ali wrote, “Mark, as someone who just discovered you and your account I wanted to thank you for your generosity and bravery in sharing this. You may be going on ahead of us but after learning how you interacted with the world I can tell you will stay in many people’s hearts. Including mine.”

Wrote Dr. Jennifer Cassidy, “So many don’t know you. But so many of us would have loved to have known you. Words are little at this time. But it is clear, that so many souls here, myself included, are wishing you the peaceful crossing. Your glory and impact will reign here and I wish you nothing but peace.”

A Twitter follower wrote, “I don’t know you, but your message appeals to the deep humanity in all of us. May you be surrounded by love and peace. May your journey end in enlightenment. May your family have strength and lasting memories of your wonderful time with them. Om Shanti.”

Other people offered religious messages.

Katie Couric was among those who chimed in. “Dear Mark, My friend @DavePriceTV directed me here. Thank you for sharing your journey and for reminding us of our common humanity. Wishing you peace and deliverance. And that you are surrounded by love. ❤️🙏🏻🦋” she wrote.

4. Stokes Has Conducted Research at Both Cambridge & Oxford

The journal article says that, for his PhD, Mark Stokes moved to Cambridge University where, in the laboratory of John Duncan, “he was among the first to apply multivariate decoding analyses to neuroimaging studies of high-level cognition.”

He then moved to Oxford, “initially to work with Kia Nobre as a research fellow and later establishing his own independent group and mentoring an impressive cohort of trainees.”

The article describes his work at Oxford, saying that, “across his time at Oxford, he played a major role in bridging research on memory and attention, promoting a functional account of working memory in which forward-looking memory traces are informationally and computationally tuned for interacting with incoming sensory signals to guide adaptive behavior.”

The article continued:

In addition, and perhaps most influentially, soon after his arrival at Oxford, Mark Stokes turned his analytic acumen to developing a then-novel approach for the ‘retrospectively multivariate’ analysis of data from single-unit extracellular recordings from awake, behaving animals.

As recently as the decade of the 2000s, the preponderance of neurophysiological studies of nonhuman primates used the approach, during chronic recording sessions, of first isolating a single neuron, then recording from that neuron while the animal engaged in the behavior of interest, repeating this process across hundreds of recording sessions, then averaging the results across similarly tuned neurons.

Stokes’ insight was that one might learn more from such data sets by, rather than approaching them as a collection of univariate observations, treating them as a single multivariate observation by, in effect, pretending that these hundreds of units had all been recorded simultaneously. The results have been breathtakingly revealing.

5. Stokes Shared Photos of Sunsets & Thanked Colleagues in Other Recent Tweets

Stokes’ most recent tweets before the viral message have been posts thanking colleagues for their contributions and kind words.

He also shared people’s tweets about their work, and posted photos of sunsets.

“18 years ago I turned up at this gate with a suitcase, and some vague ideas for graduate studies. Always fun to return and check out the old haunts,” he wrote with one post in August 2022.

Some posts show him traveling with young children.

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