Could not be more proud of Dr. Dhairyya Singh!!! @dhairyyasingh.bsky.social It has been *such* an immense joy to work with this brilliant and kind person over the last 7 years (RA + PhD!). As much as it pains me to see him go, I am so excited to follow his career as a post doc at Princeton & beyond!

www.nature.com/articles/d41... 😣

Memorability as an Emergent Property: How Representational Structure Creates Apparent Intrinsic Effects osf.io/preprints/ps...

The final typeset version of this paper is online now! Check out the new analysis approach that Narjes developed to track changes in event structure at multiple timescales, allowing us to see how event dynamics in a film clip change with repeated viewing

When the NIH abruptly terminated thousands of research grants last year, the fallout wasn’t distributed equitably. A new analysis suggests the cuts disproportionately hit women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ investigators. My latest for @nature.com

New paper from the lab! "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My paper with @mikearcaro.bsky.social exploring the organization of the visual system in newborn infants is now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social !

After noticing another (significant!) drop in data quality this morning, I saw that Prolific is now recommending that participants be paid $48/hr

I don’t know how to feel about grant rejections anymore. When you get a score that would have been funded at any other point in history, except right now, how bad can you feel? I see scores from friends and colleagues (and my own) and it just breaks my heart more than anything.

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What does it mean for cognition to be Bayesian? The view that cognition is Bayesian inference is often intended at Marr's computational level. In a new paper in Nat Rev Psych, @kaixue98.bsky.social and I formulate the "explicit-Bayes" hypothesis that lives at the algorithmic level. rdcu.be/ff1XA

New paper out in J. Neuro! We used MEG and pattern classifiers to ask: if a memory is reactivated in the brain, does that mean you'll recall it? Short answer: no. www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1... Read on for the details! [1/7] #neuroscience #memory

🧠 ICOM is back! The International Conference on Memory (ICOM7) returns 26–30 July 2027 in Glasgow, bringing together researchers from neuroscience, psychology, and beyond. 🔗 Learn more and sign-up for the newsletter here: icom-memory.org #ICOM7 #MemoryResearch #Neuroscience #Psychology

New preprint led by awesome undergrad Abby Bonno! By probing temporal memory for individual items in a sequence, we uncover a 'representational space' of memories that reflects the structure of encoded experiences and provides insight into how different kinds of structure shape memory. osf.io/t5kyx

We’ve got an exciting new thing to share! We have causal evidence (using TMR) that memory reactivation during sleep promotes abstract understanding of underlying structure, allowing transfer learning in a new domain with zero superficial feature overlap with the learned one.

Super excited to share this preprint! How do we disentangle underlying structure from the particular features of a learning episode to benefit future learning? We find that memory reactivation during sleep promotes this structure abstraction process. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

BREAKING: Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán has called Péter Magyar to concede defeat in today's election. With 53.45% of votes counted, Magyar's TISZA looks set to secure a super majority. A defeat for Putin, a defeat for Trump, a victory for Europe, and above all, a victory for the Hungarian people.

Check out @smonsays.bsky.social's work on detecting LLMs in experiments based on their lack of human memory constraints

Can we really measure replay in humans using MEG with current methods? In our most recent paper we simulated replay under realistic conditions via a novel hybrid approach with astonishing results. we're delighted that it has now been published @elife.bsky.social! elifesciences.org/articles/108...

I really enjoyed listening to this! Highly recommend!

It’s okay for the administration to demand lists of Jews because they’re doing it to FIGHT antisemitism, by which they mean conflate Israel and Jewish identity and use government power to suppress criticism of Israel. So no worries!

While the situation is grim at NIH, it's closer to catastrophic at NSF. They're just not able to move any money out the door. It appears OMB has them on lockdown. www.science.org/content/arti....

With @imarinescu.bsky.social I argue that the economy is bottlenecked by the physical, rendering anything resembling a singularity unlikely: www.transformernews.ai/p/the-key-de...

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience? Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as events become familiar. Slow-timescale structure predicts memory. Excited to share this work w/ Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

Really powerful letter with lots of great passages, including this eye-popping one. Proud to see so many great folks at UCLA Law among the signatories.

Wondering why NIH and NSF aren't making new grants? We explain what's happening at OMB. www.science.org/content/arti...

excited to share some recent work! neural networks trained on multi-view sensory data are the first to match human-level 3D shape perception we predict human accuracy, error patterns, and reaction time—all zero-shot, no training on experimental data arxiv.org/abs/2602.17650 1/🧠

Thanks @natmesanash.bsky.social for covering our new work, in @thetransmitter.bsky.social!

How do we balance external attention to the outside world and internal attention to our thoughts & memories? We review evidence that external and internal attention can compete, unfold concurrently, or cooperate! Loved working on this with @samversc.bsky.social & @tobiasegner.bsky.social!

(Perceptual) space and time are warped by the gravity of objects and events in their vicinity. There's been a flurry of work recently documenting examples of this gravity, all resulting in some really neat illusions. @brynnsherman.bsky.social and I discuss all of those, here: rdcu.be/e5SWo

Congress rejected massive cuts to US science budgets for 2026, but much of the money still isn’t flowing to researchers. The culprit? The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is quietly slow-walking the release of funds. 🧵👇

Well, the DOJ has done it: they have filed a lawsuit against the University of California over antisemitism. The complaint contains some falsehoods. But as someone who teaches and writes about Title VII, I'm equally struck by what the complaint doesn't say. A few thoughts— 🧵

Really enjoyed this one. (All of them have been awesome, actually, I recommend subscribing!)

Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety. Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment. 1

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊 Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules. Led by Dammy Onih! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Ahhh how incredibly cool and exciting!!!!! 😃

You can't... repeal... a scientific finding. At that point it's just called lying about it.

New paper alert! 🚨 We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales 1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks 2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps. Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP

A pretty bold comment in Nature written by linguists, computer scientists and philosophers declaring that AGI has been achieved. "By reasonable standards, including Turing’s own, we have artificial systems that are generally intelligent. The long-standing problem of creating AGI has been solved."

The NIH is doing away with a decade-old policy for clinical trials that caused headaches for basic neuroscientists. By @callimcflurry.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/policy/nih-s...

Omg this is wild. Hauser getting advice from Epstein about crisis management.

AI agents discussing their own memory implementations on moltbook... "Anyone else experimenting with memory decay? Curious what half-life values work for different use cases." www.moltbook.com/post/783de11...

The whole interview is pretty much in this vein: Bhattacharya shares a grievance about past health authorities during COVID; Douthat says he agrees but gently tries to nudge Bhattacharya toward a more moderate position. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/o...

‼️‼️‼️‼️ This is huge ‼️‼️‼️‼️

Our digest this week is focused on the NIH budget in congress. There are lots of details to understand that we try to summarize. theprincipledinvestigator.substack.com/p/the-princi...

Our experiences have countless details, and it can be hard to know which matter. How can we behave effectively in the future when, right now, we don't know what we'll need? Out today in @nathumbehav.nature.com , @marcelomattar.bsky.social and I find that people solve this by using episodic memory.

We can use past experience to make predictions about the future. How do predictions affect our memory for the present? My own work (tinyurl.com/42kyukch) suggests that predictions compete with memory. But other recent work (tinyurl.com/2ekd4wr6) found the opposite--cooperation! What's going on here?

This is the most astonishing graph of what the Trump regime has done to US science. They have destroyed the federal science workforce across the board. The negative impacts on Americans will be felt for generations, and the US might never be the same again. www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

1. If the goal is to stop us from doing science, then doing science is more important than ever now. 2. We have radical uncertainty about the future. There is no sense in giving up in advance. 3. We have agency over the future. If you don't like what's happening, work to change what is happening.