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.

How do hippocampal pathways contribute to learning regularities and exceptions? To answer this, Melisa Gumus & @drmack.bsky.social use diffusion imaging to identify the endpoints of different hippocampal pathways, and then analyze functional activity within those "footprints". Super innovative!

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!! This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay! elifesciences.org/articles/99931

We should no longer trust data collected on MTurk link.springer.com/article/10.3... My guess is that other online data is going to drop in quality due to LLMs. This is going to be an existential crisis for the behavioral sciences.

🚨 New preprint! Why do some insights from spikes translate to field potentials while others don't? In this paper we compare visual memory representations in spikes and LFPs to propose a general framework that answers this question. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵 (1/10) 🧠🟦 🧠💻

Happy New Year everyone!! May your 2026 be blessed with good friends, brave actions, and resilient institutions.

We talked about running these numbers at UM soc when it became so obvious that women TAs got more complaints for the same classes. Glad someone tested it formally.

Tap tap tap. Does this work? @jenna-m-norton.bsky.social is serves the people. Not the political will. We are #scientists. #NIHStrong #imwithjenna #BethesdaDeclaration

The 5th International Sleep Replay Workshop is just 80 days away- Mar 6th in Vancouver! isrw.bio.uci.edu If you'd like to be considered to give a short talk, register by December 19th, 2025. General registration & poster submission ends February 15th, 2026. @cnsmtg.bsky.social Please repost

Prediction: task-based optimization will ultimately prove to have a relatively minor role in DNN models of the ventral stream. Although tasks (including self-supervised ones) are currently crucial, there are signs that a simpler approach is possible. A thread:

Several people have mentioned online that they get terrible responses from online services such as Prolific, e.g., bots, LLM responses. I'm curious if anyone who has experienced that in a memorable way would mind sharing the details of their project (code, etc.).

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Proud of the Penn faculty senate for *unanimously* passing this resolution.

It's over. Despite the fact that the academic council recommended against it, despite the fact that the program brought in more tuition than it cost, and despite the fact that Nebraskans need & deserve this expertise, Earth & Atmospheric Sciences will be cut. www.dailynebraskan.com/news/adminis...

Excited to share a new article, led by Barnes Jannuzi. Here we tried to pinpoint something about visual familiarity that isn't reflected in visual cortex via something putatively hippocampal. Nope! Per the theme of this era, the brain is not so simple. /1 www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Under Trump, the NIH is giving fewer grants to fewer scientists. The grants awarded are smaller and scientists have less time to spend them. Projects in cancer, diabetes, aging, neurological disorder, and more are going unfunded. “Make America Healthy Again.”

The most frustrating thing about American universities’ fragmented response to the Trump administration (shall each school capitulate with a “deal”?) is that it takes attention and focus away from the broad, destructive cuts to federally funded research that are an ongoing generational disaster.

I don't think it is physically possible for me to be more excited about this. You want to join this lab, trust me!!

starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳 my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science! reach out if you're interested 😊

Forceful op-ed in the Guardian about the UVA and Cornell "deals" with the administration by two lawyers from Penn. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Just an absolutely gutting essay by Tatiana Schlossberg, a writer, mother of two young children, and cousin of RFK Jr who is dying of leukemia. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

This is very bad.