I expect to recruit a PhD student this cycle! The Control and Decision Making Lab at WashU studies control, effort, and decision making, combining behavioral experiments with modeling and neuroimaging. If that sounds cool, check out our work: cdmlab.wustl.edu. How to apply: psych.washu.edu/apply

Our work recently online in Nature Neuroscience: a neural reason why we err more when juggling tasks nature.com/articles/s41593-026-02430-w 🧵 Switching between tasks for different goals is an important form of cognitive flexibility.

I'm recruiting a PhD student for Fall 2027 at the University of Maryland — Cognitive Flexibility Dynamics Lab, studying cognitive control via brain recording (M/EEG, MRI), stimulation (TUS), and computational modeling. Please email me: cfd-lab.com/join

Check out our new Trends In Cognitive Science paper on mechanisms of cognitive flexibility - a broad collaborative piece with Florian Bähner, Ali Hummos, Sarah Oh, Kai Sandbrink, and Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying cognitive flexibility: a translational perspective

Cognitive flexibility allows us to adjust behavior when environmental rules change and to recombine prior knowledge in novel situations. However, the …

sciencedirect.com

Our task-switching paper is now out at Current Biology! www.cell.com/current-biol... We find that that our brains reset to a task-neutral state between trials, providing flexibility when the upcoming task is uncertain. RNNs also learn this strategy, but only when trained to switch tasks.

Monkeys learn to report their own sensory cortical population activity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.07.743408v1

New paper out: Led by super grad student Jim Zhang and in collaboration with Greg Cogan, we review and synthesize Insights into the neural mechanisms supporting cognitive stability and flexibility from human intracranial electroencephalography. For free access: authors.elsevier.com/a/1nRYWY3M3p...

Computational models are a key part of science but discovering new ones is hard! DataDIVER discovers concise models from data, which surface new mechanistic ideas and clear predictions for future experiments From Google Deepmind Neuroscience Lab + collaborators www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New review with Cheng Xue at U Chicago @cxue.bsky.social in Trends Neurosci@cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social! We discuss the neural geometry of task-dependent computation: disentangled encoding, RNN modeling, switch cost, etc. www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

The ‘neat’ and ‘messy’ in task-dependent neural geometry and computation

To solve diverse real-world tasks, the brain must flexibly switch between task rules and adjust computations. Recent advances in analyzing neural data and modeling neural networks have revealed their ...

cell.com

New preprint as my first post! "Monosynaptic connections link functionally similar regions in human cortex." We use electrical stimulation + fMRI in epilepsy patients to map whole-brain monosynaptic connectivity at 42 cortical sites. doi.org/10.64898/202... 1/n

Very excited to share our latest paper led by @nbinish.bsky.social in @natneuro.nature.com We demonstrate how a communication subspace channels higher-dimensional PFC dynamics into lower-D motor activity to enable efficient behavior using human iEEG. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

A communication subspace relays context-dependent actions from human prefrontal to motor cortex - Nature Neuroscience

Context-dependent behavior selects actions according to task demands. Using direct brain recordings in humans, Binish et al. uncover how coordinated population activity efficiently channels informatio...

nature.com

I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics. It turns out I was wrong. Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future. rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...

Hopeless in Tehran

Essays on neuroscience

rezashadmehr.blogspot.com

The 6x US memory champion – Nelson Dellis – can memorize a deck of cards in 40 seconds and knows the first 10K digits of pi. To figure out how, he let us peak inside his brain. Here is what we learned in our precision brain mapping study www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... youtube.com/shorts/MryMq...

how does his brain do it ? #neuroscience #memory #sport Nelson Dellis 6x US memory champion

YouTube video by Roselyne Chauvin

youtube.com

An Efficient Computing Theory of Prefrontal Structured Working Memory Representations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.16.706126v1

Kudos to the Brown University students who are posting continuous live updates, spaced just minutes apart, on the campus shooting. A lot of grace and professionalism under immense pressure. www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

Live updates: Two deceased in active shooter incident at Brown University

Serving the Brown University community since 1891

browndailyherald.com

Ellis starting the day off by reading out Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago" in its entirety.

New paper from the lab: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A brief thread (1/10)

Longitudinal measures of monkey brain structure and activity through adolescence predict cognitive maturation - Nature Neuroscience

Working memory improves during adolescent brain development. Zhu et al. tracked monkeys through adolescence, revealing that maturation of white matter tracts and refinement of neural firing patterns s...

nature.com

I made a video about the shutdown, and why this government worker won’t be a pawn. When the president and Supreme Court are both acting lawlessly, Congress must stand up and stop it. US science is collapsing and Congress needs to act. 🧪 Full video here: www.instagram.com/reel/DP1tXXE...

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature

Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...

nature.com

I'd like to commend the lawyers who wrote this complaint on behalf of the professors and employees of the University of California against the Trump administration. It's a sober legal document with strong claims, but also, this is a fight for public opinion, and this reads like the writers know it.

AAUP-UC-Trump Lawsuit -- Uploaded by Jaweed Kaleem of the Los Angeles Times

documentcloud.org

Want to know the behind the scenes of the "Disuse-driven plasticity in the human thalamus and putamen" paper? discover @ndosenbach.bsky.social and I interview by @cp-cellreports.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Q&A with Nico U.F. Dosenbach and Roselyne Chauvin

Nico U.F. Dosenbach and Roselyne Chauvin spoke with Cell Reports about their recent paper, in which they observed subcortical plasticity in humans following a 2-week arm/hand-casting paradigm with dai...

cell.com

I will always be grateful for the immense -- and unique -- contribution the Swartz Program made in supporting theoretical neuroscience over the past 30 years. Its closure leaves a profound void. doi.org/10.53053/FPR...

Long-standing theoretical neuroscience fellowship program loses financial support

Funding from the Swartz and Sloan Foundations helped bring physicists and mathematicians into neuroscience for more than 30 years.

doi.org

via Benedicto.Uribe on TikTok

The conditions that have led to what’s happening in the US today exist in democracies around the world. They are an inevitable outcome of our collective failure to adapt to fundamental changes in the information ecosystem on which our democracies were originally built.

It's a demoralizing time to be a US scientist but that is part of their strategy. My friend Jeff Dangl just emailed our faculty reminding us that NSF and NIH grant review panels are still being held and staff there want us to keep submitting. Stay engaged and keep fighting! 1/n

Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com, we show how cognitive maps in the hippocampal system could solve the general problem of representing and relating multiple alternative action plans.  doi.org/10.1038/s414... With @doellerlab.bsky.social, Patrick Haggard, @vigano.bsky.social, Daniel Reznik

we're crowd-sourcing a searchable repository of tangible benefits stemming from federally-funded research. Come enjoy the great stories; or send in an idea; or volunteer to join the team. publicusaresearchbenefits.com please share and re-share so we get more great stories in there!

New work by @liushuze.bsky.social establishes an empirical link between policy complexity and neural dimensionality: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Neural and behavioral signatures of policy compression in cognitive control

Making context-dependent decisions incurs cognitive costs. Cognitive control studies have investigated the nature of such costs from both computational and neural perspectives. In this paper, we offer...

biorxiv.org

An open letter supporting the international bachelor’s psychology programs threatened for cuts. Proceeding with these cuts would damage some of the most important and impactful psychology departments globally. #supportdutchpsychology openletter.earth/against-lang...

Against Language Barriers: A Call to Protect International Education in Dutch Academia

openletter.earth