Check out our new paper! 🧠 Me, @xiongbowu.bsky.social and @fuentemilla.bsky.social review how reactivation at the end of events support memory formation and propose it serves multiple functions from preventing interference to helping preserve temporal continuity! ✨ www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

Neural reactivation supports memory formation when events end

Memory routinely transforms continuous experience into discrete episodes that support flexible retrieval. We propose that these structured representations are established via rapid neural reactivation...

cell.com

How do we make good decisions with little experience? Adults can rely on memories of past choices. In our new study in @pnas.org we show kids & teens do something similar–but what they remember turns out to be quite different! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Developmental changes in memory structure and precision alter the use of retrieved episodes during decisions for reward | PNAS

Most widely studied option evaluation strategies rely on knowledge accumulated across repeated experiences. But how should options be evaluated in ...

pnas.org

📣New paper! How does the sleeping brain help us to integrate new experiences while managing memories from the past? For his PhD work, @sabbaspoor.bsky.social recorded hippocampal ensembles in freely moving monkeys and found something unexpected. 🧵1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧪🧠📈👩‍🔬#OpenAccess

Experience reorganizes content-specific memory traces in macaques - Nature Neuroscience

In macaques, old memories, relative to new ones, are supported by more stable and interconnected cell assemblies. New-biased and old-biased assemblies reactivate during overnight sleep and can sometim...

nature.com

🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵

How do 2 meters of DNA fit inside a nucleus you can barely see? 🧬 Our new study mapped individual nucleosomes inside human cells.

🔥 Published today, and just in time for summer conferences, here are your guidelines for presenting badly www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/fqa92

Are you annoyed with the anthropomorphizing language being used in the "AI" discourse, but not sure how to talk about this stuff without it? @nannainie.bsky.social and I have got you covered: buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...

How to talk about

Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie In our op-ed for Tech Policy Press ("We Need to Talk About How We Talk About 'AI'"), we made the case against the...

buttondown.com

Is paid peer review a good idea? "Reviewers were paid £220 per manuscript only if they completed the review on time, and the review met editorial quality expectations." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates? In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

APA no longer shows me the actual paper, authors, abstract etc when I click on a paper in a search engine. Everything gated now, including basic paper info. Screenshots: (1) search hit (2) resulting APA site. Tried for a few papers now. What on Earth.

What matters most for childhood brain organization? We analyzed 649 variables. The answer: Socioeconomics (SES); with brain patterns pointing at sleep & stress as drivers. Even brain-IQ associations were better explained by SES. In Science today: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

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. 👇

🧵 Thread: Does the internet threaten democracy? I argue that it does in my latest piece in Science: doi.org/10.1126/scie... Here's the short version. 1/9 1/10

The architecture of the internet creates risks for democracy

Will democracy survive the internet? Do we need to choose between Facebook’s surveillance capitalism or democracy? Layered lines of evidence can inform questions like these. When considered together, the evidence gives rise to a concerning picture, as summarized in a recent report for the European Commission that I co-led.

doi.org

1. How common is LLM use in scientific publishing, and how does it vary across field, publisher, journal prestige, author demographics etc.? @kylesiler.bsky.social has new paper in PNAS that addresses this question on a massive scale: 7.3 million papers from Elsevier, PLOS, MDPI, and Frontiers.

The diffusion of large language models in published academic articles | PNAS

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly changing academic research, raising questions of who is adopting these tools and under what conditions. Th...

pnas.org

A hackathon reveals that disagreement in neuroscience runs deeper than most researchers suspect—even in electrophysiology, a field that prides itself on hard data, write @mattiachini.bsky.social and Gaelle Chapuis. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/reproducibil...

18 teams analyzed a neuro dataset and got different answers

Disagreement in neuroscience runs deeper than most researchers suspect—even in electrophysiology, a field that prides itself on hard data.

thetransmitter.org

How does your brain filter out the noise and focus enough to learn efficiently? In our newest preprint, we use intracranial recordings + computational modeling to explore how selective attention shapes learning and state representations in the human brain 🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/🧵

Honoured to share our new paper in @nature.com today. Across 12 countries in eastern and southern Africa and Southeast Asia, 1 in 6 internet-using children had experienced technology-facilitated child sexual exploitation and abuse. A thread 🧵

Nature@nature.com · 3mo ago

Nature research paper: Technology mediation in child sexual exploitation and abuse in Africa and Asia go.nature.com/4fbTNyk

My new @thetransmitter.bsky.social piece. Does Claude AI have emotions? *No*. Does Claude have nontrivial emotion-equivalents? *Yes*. Like your "memory" vs your laptop's; similar but not the same. Here, I unpack why that's interesting. www.thetransmitter.org/emotion/what...

What can AI teach us about ‘emotions’?

Exploring why Anthropic’s AI, Claude, displays something like emotion could ultimately help us better understand the function that emotions serve in humans.

thetransmitter.org

Iota oscillations made it past peer review! Welcome to the zoo of sleep oscillations 😊 journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....

Iota oscillations (25–35 Hz) during wake and REM sleep in children and young adults | Journal of Neurophysiology | American Physiological Society

High-frequency brain oscillations in humans are currently categorized into beta (13–30 Hz) and gamma (>30 Hz). Here, I introduce a new class of oscillations between 25 and 35 Hz, which I propose to call “iota.” Iota oscillations have low amplitudes but can still be measured with surface electroencephalography (EEG). Within an individual, iota activity has a narrow spectral bandwidth typically less than 3 Hz, thus distinguishing it from broadband beta and gamma. Iota oscillations occur in sustained bursts during both wakefulness and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. They are only found in a subset of individuals, more in children than in adults. Overall, iota oscillations are challenging to detect but could serve as a marker of both brain development and states of vigilance. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Electrical brain waves are some of the only neuronal signals that can be measured noninvasively in humans. Until now, only six classes of waves have been identified. Here I introduce a new class, iota, specific to wakefulness and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This makes iota just the second class of brain wave known to characterize REM sleep (after theta), and opens up new opportunities to investigate this elusive state.

journals.physiology.org

"Structure and metabolism should no longer sit in separate boxes. The brain’s wiring could also be part of its fuel strategy. Myelin may be more than insulation; it may also form part of the brain’s adaptive metabolic infrastructure." 🧠👇 #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/metabolism/b...

Beyond glucose: The brain may feed itself

Myelin may serve as an energy reserve for the brain, and neuroscientists are rethinking how the brain stores, shares and protects energy.

thetransmitter.org

We have a new preprint, examining what happens at the single neuron level in humans while people emerge from anaesthesia. Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... tldr: neurons in medial temporal lobe (and thalamus, albeit limited data) often show increases in activity way before overt responses 🧠🟦 🧠💻

We present the LARGEST normative model of the brain’s white matter microstructure: 54,583 subjects, 4-91 yrs, 19 datasets. We derived lifespan centile curves for DTI FA, MD, RD, AD, detecting anomalies for dementia, and Mild Cognitive Impairment: doi.org/10.1038/s414... ⤵️

We're happy to announce our new preprint! 🐸 easymode: general pretrained networks for cellular cryo-ET. Segment ~20 cellular features – ribosomes, microtubules, mitochondria, nuclei & more – with zero model training. 🔗 doi.org/10.64898/202... 🧵👇

Now out in Nature Neuroscience: "Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand". www.nature.com/articles/s41... Our eyes don't linger because recognition is hard; they linger to remember. Let me take you on a quick tour. 🧵

Fixation duration on natural scenes is explained by memory encoding not processing demand - Nature Neuroscience

By combining magnetoencephalography and eye tracking, this study sheds light on why people fixate on some parts of natural scenes longer than others. Rather than visual complexity, fixation durations ...

nature.com

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

The metabolic engine of cognition: microglia–neuron interactions in health, ageing and disease - Nature Metabolism

This Review highlights how metabolic interactions between microglia and neurons shape brain health, and how their disruption in ageing and disease contributes to cognitive decline.

nature.com

On the one-year anniversary of EMPIRE OF AI, I am so, so excited to announce The AI Resist List, a new project that documents examples of resistance to the AI empires around the world 😍 airesistlist.org

As a cognitive scientist, I'm embarrassed at how long it took me to realise that emotion matters a lot, not just for understanding humans, but for understanding any thinking agent. Why? Because emotion is an indicator of what that agent values, and values are essential to rationality. Examples:

Nicole Rust@nicolecrust.bsky.social · 7mo ago

There's much talk these days about what's required for "real" intelligence, such as world models and the like. One thing we know about the human evolution of it: it required/requires emotion. That may have been better appreciated in 1938 than today. archive.org/details/in.e...

🧪 #alzheimer #amyloid Amazing new paper from @sfackley.bsky.social that exposes the statistical alchemy Lilly applied to their donanemab data: jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... There is little to no correlation between amyoid removal and clinical outcomes with donanemab (or lecanemab).

Methodological Considerations for Quantile Aggregation in Alzheimer Disease Trials

This study evaluates the quantile-aggregation method using both simulated data and publicly available Alzheimer disease randomized trial data.

jamanetwork.com

New paper with @paulm-k.bsky.social and Mark Stokes on how we switch internal attention between working memory contents. Beta-band oscillations tracked the magnitude and success of these switches. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1... #neuroskyence

Human Beta Oscillations Reflect Magnitude and Fidelity of Priority Shifts in Working Memory

Flexible prioritization in working memory (WM) is supported by neural oscillations in frontal and sensory brain areas, but the roles of different oscillations remain poorly understood. Recordings in h...

jneurosci.org

Science Needs 3rd Spaces We envision scientific third spaces as “collaborative hubs where researchers, artists, engineers, and practitioners co-develop methods, share resources, and pursue projects driven by curiosity". authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...