Dean Buonomano
@deanbuono.bsky.social
Author of Your Brain is a Time Machine: the Neuroscience and Physics of time. A brain studying brains at UCLA
The Neuroscience Department at UC Berkeley is hiring an Asst Professor in Computational Neuro. All areas of computational/theoretical neuro are welcome. Deadline Oct 30. Join our neuroscience community! aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05446 #AcademicJobs #Neuroscience #NeuroJobs
Assistant Professor - Computational Neuroscience - Department of Neuroscience
University of California, Berkeley is hiring. Apply now!
aprecruit.berkeley.edu
Off to Rio for my first #CogSci2026 meeting! If you're interested in timing, don't miss our symposium Thursday morning, "Perspectives on Temporal Cognition" with me, @kianobre.bsky.social , @deanbuono.bsky.social , and Vera Sinha. #cogsci
Opinion | A Great University Undermines Its Mission Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/o...
Opinion | A Great University Undermines Its Mission
nytimes.com
NSF grantmaking update Two weeks ago (6/8) New grants: 1,471/4,407 — 33.4% of avg. Obligations: 1.70/2.52 billion — 67.4% of avg. Now (6/22) New grants: 1549/4481 — 32.6% of avg. Obligations: 1.8/2.82 billion — 63.8% of avg. Data from: grant-witness.us/funding_curv...
Black boxes trying to understand black boxes.
UCLA Neuroscience Theme@uclaneurotheme.bsky.social · 2mo agoClosing AI week with a conversation with @deanbuono.bsky.social on something that doesn't get said enough: brains & AI are both black boxes. Figuring out how each works & how they shape each other may be the defining scientific challenge of our time. #artificalintelligence #AI #neuroscience
I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇
An interesting consequence of LLMs having no intrinsic working memory is that I'm telepathic. More accurately we can backward prime them by asking them to think of something, ask leading questions and then quess "what they thought of". The prompts below worked 10/10.
Amazing work from my friend and post-doc mate Anand Suresh and the rest of the Portera-Cailliau lab: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...
Translatome profiling reveals opposing alterations in inhibitory and excitatory neurons of fragile X mice and identifies EPAC2 as a therapeutic target
Suresh et al. profile the translatomes of excitatory and parvalbumin neurons in fragile X syndrome mice and identify Rapgef4/Epac2 as the only gene that is synaptic, an FMRP target, and an NDD candida...
cell.com
An interesting consequence of LLMs having no intrinsic working memory is that I'm telepathic. More accurately we can backward prime them by asking them to think of something, ask leading questions and then quess "what they thought of". The prompts below worked 10/10.
The primary is coming fast - ballots have been mailed out, and the final day is June 2. That is the deciding election, and my team is working hard. Help us out with a donation to pay for signs, event space, clipboards, mailers...all the stuff! secure.actblue.com/donate/sam4n...
Donate to Sam Wang
Show your support with a contribution.
secure.actblue.com
For those interested in memory, engrams, and how scientific ideas and career trajectories evolve over time, I recommend this personal perspective by @sjo09.bsky.social (even though I'm pretty sure I missed many of the Taylor Swift references). www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1...
Engrams and Memory: My Scientific “Eras Tour”
Memories are widely thought to be encoded by sparse populations of neurons, often referred to as engrams. My entry into this field began with a 2001 report in this journal showing that overexpression ...
jneurosci.org
Just saying hi to: @braininspired.bsky.social and @worldwideneuro.bsky.social my two nearest neighbors in the 2D universe below. Say hi to your neighbors (search your self and scroll to zoom in).
Theo Sanderson@theo.io · 6mo agoI made a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users - see if you can find yourself! bluesky-map.theo.io I've seen some similar projects, but IMO this seems to better capture some of the fine-grained detail
The date of when cherry blossoms in Kyoto bloom has been tracked for 1200 years. Certainly one of the most beautiful data points confirming global warming. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/c...
Los Angeles! I'm doing a cool event at UCLA this Thursday. Telling a few stories, signing my new paperback, and having an on-stage conversation about memory with neuroscientist @deanbuono.bsky.social and the philosopher, Pamela Hieronymi. www.eventbrite.com/e/the-poetic...
The Poetics, Philosophy, and Neuroscience of Memory
Nate DiMeo of "The Memory Palace" performs stories and converses about memory with UCLA Faculty Pamela Hieronymi and Dean Buonomano
eventbrite.com
A new paper from @ladenardo.bsky.social helps explain how males and females in the way that reward circuits are re-wired after early life stress. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/2...
Sex and Stress Govern the Function and Innervation of a Basolateral Amygdala to Nucleus Accumbens Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone/GABA-Expressing Projection
Motivated behaviors are executed by refined brain circuits. Early-life adversity (ELA) is a risk for human affective disorders involving dysregulated reward behaviors. In mice, ELA causes anhedonia-li...
jneurosci.org
Here is a graph with dollar amounts of funding committed. The curves look very similar to those based on the number of awards.
"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux@bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 5mo agoIs there a version of the chart follow the dollar-value of the grants? Is it fewer-bigger grants or simply - as I would guess - straight up less money going out the door?
Many of the scientists Jeffrey Epstein courted were already well-established and well-funded. So why didn’t they all just say no? Science talked with three who did just that. Here’s how Epstein approached them, and why they refused to have anything to do with him. ⬇️ https://scim.ag/40qbXnv
Meet three scientists who said no to Epstein
The warning signs included a web search, a mother’s doubts, and inklings of a “sexist attitude”
scim.ag
Calling all PFC and PFC-adjacent neuroscientists--registration for the GRC Frontal Cortex - "Frontal Cortex in Function, Dysfunction, & Therapies" is open! Check out the amazing lineup of speakers for this year's program, feat. keynotes by Geoff Schoenbaum & Helen Mayberg www.grc.org/frontal-cort...
Goddness, there's lots to say about this. Good to see the case pro laid out in detail. I wonder if Nature will be publishing the counter-argument too? www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Does AI already have human-level intelligence? The evidence is clear
The vision of human-level machine intelligence laid out by Alan Turing in the 1950s is now a reality. Eyes unclouded by dread or hype will help us to prepare for what comes next.
nature.com
Why I’m running for Congress: www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2026...
Why I'm running for Congress
Congress today is deeply polarized, ignores the priorities of voters, and fails to check the other two branches of government. But neither party, Democrats nor Republicans, is meeting our moment of ne...
dailyprincetonian.com
It was stimulating to chat about time, clocks, pendulums, death, physics, AI, the brain, movies, Kung fu and squirrels with @neildegrassetyson.com, @chucknicecomic.bsky.social, and @garyoreilly.bsky.social startalkmedia.com/show/your-br...
Your Brain is a Time Machine with Dean Buonomano - StarTalk Special Edition
Is time fundamental or a human construct? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, & Gary O’Reilly explore our brain as a time machine w/ Dean Buonomano.
startalkmedia.com
It won't actually exist for another month or so, but because it now 'exists' on amazon, I'll humbly observe that, after working through this book, your student/trainee would be able to read and understand all but two or three papers in this week's J. Neurosci. Check it out:
Rankings are always problematic, but it is telling that in this productivity ranking, of the top 20 Universities 2 are American, and 16 Chinese. Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/u...
Chinese Universities Surge in Global Rankings as U.S. Schools Slip
nytimes.com
It was stimulating to chat about time, clocks, pendulums, death, physics, AI, the brain, movies, Kung fu and squirrels with @neildegrassetyson.com, @chucknicecomic.bsky.social, and @garyoreilly.bsky.social startalkmedia.com/show/your-br...
Your Brain is a Time Machine with Dean Buonomano - StarTalk Special Edition
Is time fundamental or a human construct? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, & Gary O’Reilly explore our brain as a time machine w/ Dean Buonomano.
startalkmedia.com
South Park called it, and it’s hilarious. One of the creators purchased the Trump Kennedy Center URL address before the name was even changed because they know Trump’s narcissism is in the driver’s seat.
![Comic. Lionel Messi: World Cup Goals per game. [Graph with x axis as year and y axis as number of goals per game, ranging from 0 to 3. Data points: 2006 (~1/3), 2010 (0), 2014 (~1/2), 2018 (~1/4), 2022 (1), 2026 (3) with parenthetical (so far). Behind the line connecting the points is a grayed out curve showing the trajectory.] [caption] At this rate, by 2040 Messi will be scoring hundreds of goals per game.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cz73r7iyiqn26upot4jtjdhk/bafkreigq2lsyt6ad4so43vtssddjw4mvo2i4i54uf4fqves6yk3jiudko4)
