Now final in @elife.bsky.social: #Synesthetes really do 'see' when reporting colors while reading (typeface gray) numbers: pupils change according to the perceived colors' brightness - if a synesthete sees a bright yellow, the pupils become smaller. elifesciences.org/articles/110...

Christoph Strauch@cstrauch.bsky.social · 5mo ago

We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1). If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!

How many subjects do you actually need for reliable task fMRI studies? Much larger samples are often recommended—but that depends on how you analyze the data. New preprint with @neuranna.bsky.social biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Scaling laws for group-constrained, subject-specific task fMRI analyses

Functional MRI provides a powerful way to characterize the architecture of the human brain. Yet individual brains often vary in the exact anatomic locations of functionally specific regions; as a resu...

biorxiv.org

ADA leaders were forcibly removed from their own meeting for sharing copies of an ADA OpEd critical of Jay Bhattacharya. Thanks to you it's now got >125,000 views. As CDC interim director, Jay also blocked publication of this paper because it showed that COVID vaccines work. You know what to do.

Interim Estimated Effectiveness of 2025-2026 COVID-19 Vaccines in Adults

This case-control study estimates vaccine effectiveness of 2025-2026 COVID-19 vaccines among adults with COVID-19–associated emergency department or urgent care encounters and COVID-19–associated hosp...

jamanetwork.com

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Human learning of noninvasive brain–computer interfaces via manifold geometry - Nature Neuroscience

Busch et al. use nonlinear neural manifolds to help humans gain rapid control over a noninvasive brain–computer interface, allowing them to learn how to play a video game with real-time fMRI neurofeed...

nature.com

Emerging evidence suggests that LLM outputs can shape the text and thoughts of human users go.nature.com/4b5A94v

AI can 'same-ify' human expression — can some brains resist its pull?

Emerging evidence suggests that LLM outputs can shape the text and thoughts of human users.

go.nature.com

A "country of geniuses in a data center" by 2028. Sounds profitable! youtu.be/n1E9IZfvGMA?...

Dario Amodei — “We are near the end of the exponential”

YouTube video by Dwarkesh Patel

youtu.be

the human hippocampus receives convergent input from multiple sensory systems, yet we lack a basic understanding of how this structure integrates across senses. we tackle this problem in our new preprint! paper: doi.org/10.64898/202... w/ Aryan Agarwal, @yannanzhu.bsky.social, & Nick Turk-Browne

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Ethical and animal-welfare concerns have long fuelled efforts to curb animal use in research — and now rapid advances in alternative scientific methods are accelerating the shift go.nature.com/3P0OtCB

The age of animal experiments is waning. Where will science go next?

Advances in organ and computer models are raising the prospect that some animal experiments could be eliminated. But there are still huge hurdles to overcome.

go.nature.com

Come work with us at the computational memory lab!

Norman Lab@ptoncompmemlab.bsky.social · 6mo ago

We are hiring a research specialist, to start this summer! This position would be a great fit for individuals looking to get more experience in computational and cognitive neuroscience research before applying to graduate school. #neurojobs Apply here: research-princeton.icims.com/jobs/21503/r...

Our new paper is out in @natmed.nature.com 😱! A thread: Can our thoughts and feelings directly affect our physical well-being? Our pre-registered, double-blind RCT investigated this by testing if modulating the brain's reward system could enhance immune responses to vaccination.

Nature Portfolio@natureportfolio.nature.com · 7mo ago

Training people to activate a part of the brain linked to reward and positive expectations may be associated with an increase in the body’s immune response to a vaccine, according to a study in Nature Medicine. go.nature.com/4sQo3mK #medsky 🧪

Training people to activate a part of the brain linked to reward and positive expectations may be associated with an increase in the body’s immune response to a vaccine, according to a study in Nature Medicine. go.nature.com/4sQo3mK #medsky 🧪

Positive thinking may boost immune response from vaccines, new brain training study shows

Brain training may boost immune response to vaccines

Positive thinking may boost immune response from vaccines, new brain training study shows

scientificamerican.com

Direct human evidence that the #PlaceboEffect can shape humoral immunity: reward-related brain activity correlates with vaccine-induced antibody www.nature.com/articles/s41... @naturemedicine.bsky.social @telavivuni.bsky.social @nitzanlubi.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

quillette.com/2025/12/28/t...

Tech Wants You to Believe AI is Conscious

Tech companies stand to benefit from widespread public misperceptions that AI is sentient despite a dearth of scientific evidence.

quillette.com

Come check out my poster at SfN today between 13:00 and 17:00 (Mm15), about how we used fMRI-Neurofeedback to teach individuals with Major Depression to reduce their negative attentional biases!

Come check out my poster at #SfN, Wed (8am-12pm, NN1)! "Auditory and multisensory representations in the human hippocampus" Using high-resolution fMRI, we ask how does the human hippocampus represent sensory modalities beyond vision, and how does it integrate sense information across modalities?

In our Trends in Cogn Sci paper we point to the connectivity crisis in task-based human EEG/MEG research: many connectivity metrics, too little replication. Time for community-wide benchmarking to build robust, generalisable measures across labs & tasks. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Confronting the connectivity crisis in human M/EEG research

The cognitive neuroscience community using M/EEG has not converged on measures of task-related inter-regional brain connectivity that generalize acros…

sciencedirect.com

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants

Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

science.org