PSA for trainees cold emailing with interest in joining a lab: Be careful about your use of LLMs in writing these emails!! It is now *extremely* common to get emails with a bizarrely-detailed, clearly-LLM take on a paper finding or with specific phrases pulled from the lab website. Don’t do this!

A *super* exciting new paper from @lizsiefert.bsky.social!! Human hippocampal ripple rates track very closely with several indicators of low arousal, during both sleep and wake. This is probably the most compelling data I have ever been associated with.

New preprint! We show low arousal states promote hippocampal ripple genesis in sleep and wake. This bridges rodent work, where ripples predominate during sleep, with human studies reporting ripples during active behavior, identifying low arousal as a common mechanism www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NIH grants have been under political scrutiny since early 2025. But what does the screening process actually look like? What is being flagged? I spent a month digging into leaked docs and emails. We've published the 235-word list that are being flagged by an internal AI tool. And so much more. 🧵

"Program managers would normally rush to inform potential and current grantees about such dramatic changes. But the memo tells program managers to keep their mouths shut. 'This information is highly confidential...Please do not communicate anything to PIs.'” www.science.org/content/arti...

Check out @jonathannicholas.bsky.social 's new preprint measuring eye movements to infer individual memory retrievals during decision making, plus a cool RNN modelof that process. Can't express how excited I am about this new technique!

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

For the past 18 months, the Trump administration’s approach to federal grants has followed a familiar pattern: announce a cancellation, face a lawsuit, sometimes lose. That is precisely what OMB’s proposed rewrite of 2 CFR Part 200 is designed to end. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/the-omb-ru...

Striking convergence across the U.S. political spectrum on concerns about AI and what reasonable laws and policies would look like. Politicians take note!!

And if you are in the Washington DC area this coming weekend, feel free to come to our conference! futurerealities.org/FOR2026/

Some findings from our national survey of U.S. population attitudes toward AI. First, feelings about AI are actually very similar across political parties (and many other demographics). They vary most by people's experience with AI tools. Explore the data: futurerealities.org/poll/2026/ 🧵

I've seen a lot of info for specialized audiences (e.g. scientists, non-profits) on how to comment on the proposed OMB rule change for grants, but less for the general public. So I made this one-pager that can be shared more widely. docs.google.com/document/d/e...

Interested in human replay and solid methods? Jointly with @skjerns.de we're releasing a benchmark dataset with known ground-truth neural sequences in MEG & fMRI, for developing & validating replay methods. First test: existing methods show similar effect sizes, but room to improve shorturl.at/6TgIr

READ: My Public Comment on Proposed OMB Rule: Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/my-public-...

Very excited to share that my lab will be moving to Princeton (Neuroscience & Psychology) this fall. I'll be recruiting at all levels (more info to come soon), please share / get in touch if you're interested in joining!

We're recruiting postdocs to study how people build structured knowledge from experience & use it to act flexibly. Behavioral work, fMRI, computational & AI models, with a lifespan focus. You don't need experience with every method; fit & curiosity matter most. Please repost & share! 🧠

What are the real problems to be solved in continual learning? In my latest post, I tackle this question — reviewing where I think the field went astray in the past, how language models changed things, and where the real challenges remain. infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/what-are-t...

Calling all Scientists! Research Administrators! Deans! Fans of Science! No one is coming to save us. Here is your assignment. I have written a step by step, easy to understand "how-to" document to help you comment on the proposed OMB rule. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/what-we-ne...

Summary of Key Changes in OMB’s Proposed Federal Financial Assistance Rule. Russell Vought is going destroy American Science. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/summary-of...

(1) Overall impact scores will be binned into THREE bins: Top 25%, 25-50%, and >50%. (2) Overall impact scores will be retained but will NOT BE SHARED with program officers, advisory councils, or institute/center/office (ICO) leadership. 2/3

Scoop: NSF has been quietly blocking new funds and grants to four top universities: Duke, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Dozens of proposals from PIs at these universities—and their collaborators—have been stuck at the Office of Award Management awaiting finalization for months.

The National Science Foundation is terminating and suspending grants again, and at Grant Witness we need you to help to track them! 🧪 We can only identify research being suppressed by under-the-radar suspensions directly from researchers. Please report! grant-witness.us/posts/2026-0... #NSF

The NIH has been holding back grants from funds Congress has already approved. www.wsj.com/opinion/get-...

Excited to share I will be joining UC Davis as an assistant professor starting July 2027! Thank you dearly to all mentors and friends who have supported me over the years ❤️ and Cal Poly friends, I'll miss you!

👀 Read my in-depth series of articles about how OMB has taken control of NIH Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) despite having ZERO statutory authority to do so. (This is illegal!)

Liz Ginexi is now on bluesky! You are going to want to give her a follow!

Wondering why the NIH has such a slow pace of grantmaking this year? Here’s my breakdown. elizabethginexi.substack.com/p/the-execut...

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....