I finally got around to setting up a lab website! Have a look: the-steel-lab.github.io Just in time to start the new semester.

** Recruiting a Postdoctoral Researcher! ** We are seeking a postdoc to help examine how brain networks might change within individuals across transitional times, such as adolescence & pregnancy! Please share widely and apply at the link! #NeuroJobs uva.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/UVAJobs/job/...

7year old this morning: Mama can I look up where brain rot came from? Me: Oh, sure—I think it’s an internet thing but look it up… 7: It says here it’s from some author, Henry David Thoreau?! Me: ?!?!?! Dying laughing—but the OED also cites Walden for the first usage of the word…

Our new paper in @sfnjournals.bsky.social shows different neural systems for integrating views into places--PPA integrates views *of* a location (e.g., views of a landmark), while RSC integrates views *from* a location (e.g., views of a panorama). Work by the bluesky-less Linfeng Tony Han.

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

🚨Super excited that Dartmouth's Society of Fellows is hiring a postdoc with the Program in Cognitive Science 🚨 Specialization in computational and empirical approaches to artificial and natural intelligence, including perception, representation, and complex planning: apply.interfolio.com/176946

To add further enticement to the coolness of VR and laser scanning microscopy -- Manuel is among the coolest scientists I know & a PhD working with him would be the coolest 😎

Columbia Psych is hiring *two* junior faculty in Cognitive Science/Neuroscience this year! If you work on cognition (broadly defined), submit your application materials as soon as possible (review starts Nov 1). If you have questions you can reach out to me by email! apply.interfolio.com/175428

ok this breakdown of AI writing indicators is incredible. Huge shout-out to the Wikipedia community for this

New work led by @mattmattoni.bsky.social “Overall, results suggest that BOLD activation to reward tasks, and likely other fMRI tasks, is more appropriate for within-person study than between-person study, highlighting a need for intensive longitudinal neuroimaging designs.”

Now out in @natneuro.nature.com What happens to the brain’s body map when a body-part is removed? Scanning patients before and up to 5 yrs after arm amputation, we discovered the brain’s body map is strikingly preserved despite amputation www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02037-7 🧵1/18

Excited to be in Amsterdam for #CCN2025! Come learn about a project combining many of my favorite interests - naturalistic neuroimaging, development, & manifold learning (of course). Catch me at poster C181 on Fri - “Intrinsic dimensionality of brain activity manifolds across tasks and development”

The lateral prefrontal cortex 🧠— which we think of as critical for goal driven behavior + is a target for psychiatric treatments— is fundamentally different in individuals relative to the group averages we’ve often studied. 👇see preprint and thread, led by Zach Ladwig #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

🚨 New Preprint 🚨 Targeting intracranial electrical stimulation (ES) to network regions defined within individuals causes network-level effects By Cyr et al. *** Q: Can we use individualized network maps from precision fMRI to modulate a targeted network via intracranial ES? A: Yes! 🧵:

I’m excited to share my final co-first author paper from my postdoc in Dan Dombeck's lab! We explored how behavior, senses, and neurons influence how much information in the brain changes over time. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #science #research #neuroscience #hippocampus #placecells

New profile! Dr. Sarah Heilbronner (@srheilbronner.bsky.social‬) uses cutting-edge neuroanatomical and neuroimaging techniques to decipher the wiring diagram of the primate brain. Follow the link below to learn more! www.storiesofwin.org/profiles/202... #StoriesOfWiN #WomenInNeuroscience

In these tumultuous times, still happy to report a scientific achievement: our preprint on affordance perception was just published in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Using behavior, fMRI and deep network analyses, we report two key findings. To recapitulate (preprint 🧵lost on other place):

🚨Paper alert!🚨 TL;DR first: We used a pre-trained deep neural network to model fMRI data and to generate images predicted to elicit a large response for each many different parts of the brain. We aggregate these into an awesome interactive brain viewer: piecesofmind.psyc.unr.edu/activation_m...

🎺 #BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! This Friday, June 13th, the brain meeting speaker will be Adam Steel with a talk entitled “Mechanisms underlying perceptual and mnemonic interaction in the brain” This will be an online only meeting. All are welcome. Details here: www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/event/mechan...

When you successfully anticipate future events, what happens to your ability to encode the present? 🤔 Successful prediction increases the likelihood of successful encoding. We speculate about how switching between distinct encoding & prediction states can produce this effect. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Despite everything going on, I may have funds to hire a postdoc this year 😬🤞🧑‍🔬 Open to a wide variety of possible projects in social and cognitive neuroscience. Get in touch if you are interested! Reposts appreciated.

🚨 Practical URGENT tip for NSF grantees: Out of an abundance of caution, I would right now go into Research.gov and… 1. Download your NSF award letters. 2. Print PDF your annual reports. 3. Screenshot the status table for annual reports. NSF is planning maintenance tomorrow to Research.gov

I'm very excited to speak at UBC next Thursday!

Likely hiring one postbac trainee for @fmri-today.bsky.social's Section on Functional Imaging Methods. Give the relatively later start time for the search, I'm not yet sure how quickly this search will happen. If you are interested, apply and reach out ASAP. fim.nimh.nih.gov

OK here it is, the moment you have all been waiting for! Our advert for 5 posts here at Glasgow: Cognitive neuroscience/psychology. Closing date May 12 - please spread the word www.nature.com/naturecareer...

I have been doing entirely too much earnest posting about deep things recently, I need to do a proper thread about hippo testicles or something just to keep myself sane. Oh by the way hippos have migratory testicles.

Reflective piece by Eve Marder – "What happened to the pursuit of truth" rupress.org/jgp/article/...

New paper out in @pnas.org with @laurendinicola.bsky.social, Noam Saadon-Grosman, Mark Eldaief and Randy Buckner! We revisited the functional specialization of the human hippocampal long axis across two independent datasets, with some surprising results. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Have you wondered where scene perception and memory intersect in the brain? Do you want to localize these areas? In a preprint, @carolinerobertson.bsky.social, Deepa Prasad, Brenda Garcia, and I detail this topography and release these parcels and our localizer. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

(recycled from X) My favorite take on LLM intelligence is by Paul Cisek on the connectionists mailing list: "We are like a bunch of professional magicians (...) wondering: 'Maybe there really is magic? I think it’s not that machines have passed the Turing Test, but rather that we failed it." 🔥

We strongly suggest that academic publishers and other platforms that host research rapidly implement a Share to Bluesky button for their articles. Here's how: docs.bsky.app/docs/advance... #AcademicSky #HigherEd #Altmetrics

Finally deactivated my twitter account -- looking forward to enjoying #neuroskyence in its place

What kind of information gets prioritized for remembering by the brain? A thread on my first paper, now out in PNAS, working with 5-⭐️ advisor @meghanlmeyer. We find evidence that the DMPFC prioritizes social learning during rest.🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining the psych department at the University of Illinois as an asst. professor! My lab will study perception and memory in the human brain using amazing resources of the Beckman Institute (inc 7T MRI)! I’ll be looking for grad students, so please reach out!

🚨 I'm looking for postdocs! More info and apply here: recruit.ap.uci.edu/JPF08916 We are looking for: 1) individual differences in navigational (and other cognitive) abilities, multimodal imaging; 2) aging & the role of sex hormones; 3) spatial & non-spatial cognitive graphs

🪶 How did birds evolve wings? A partial wing is of no use for flying, but natural selection can't plan ahead and allow a species to gradually evolve toward wings that are actually useful for flying. 1/n

I wrote a j-club commentary on a recent article published in #Jneurosci by @neurosteel.bsky.social et al. I discuss the phenomenon of retrieval-related 'anterior shift' and I highlight the implications that this work has on studies examining neural reinstatement. www.jneurosci.org/content/44/1...

#PsychSciSky #neuroskyence

New paper out in Nature Neuro, wherein we ask: How do perceptual and mnemonic brain networks share information? www.nature.com/articles/s41... Massive work with Ed Silson, Brenda Garcia, and @carolinerobertson.bsky.social

#PsychSciSky #neuroskyence

Exciting work from Peter Angeli in @carolinerobertson.bsky.social lab! I've really enjoyed working with him and thinking more about the hippocampus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Devastatingly sad news. My good friend, colleague, and a treasured scientist at the NIH for over 20 years, Dr. Sean Marrett, has passed away today. I wrote a short obituary for him. www.thebrainblog.org/2023/12/13/a...

I'm hiring a lab manager! The Social Identity in Dialogue (SID) Lab at Dartmouth is seeking a full-time lab manager interested in the social psychological study of interracial interactions, relationships, and conversations about race. Pref. apply by Jan 9 searchjobs.dartmouth.edu/postings/71464

For my first post on bsky I am thrilled to advertise an NIMH-funded open postdoc position in my lab in collaboration with Jen Wildes at UChicago. Please spread the word! For more info and instructions to apply, please see: bakkourlab.uchicago.edu/join-us/post...

Excited to share that I will join the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam as Assistant Professor for #CompCogNeuro in January! My lab will study the link b/w spontaneous behaviors & brain activity during vision/recall/imagery - focusing on multi-task studies to find general principles. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖 #PsychSciSky

Our lab is recruiting a PhD student and postdoc! Check our our website to learn more about what we do: sites.dartmouth.edu/stoermerlab/ Applications for PhD students are due Dec 1st.

Our paper "Hierarchical organization of social action features in the lateral visual stream" led by @emaliemcmahon.bsky.social with Mick Bonner is now out in @currentbiology.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

One month until the deadline (Dec 1)! We're excited to read applications and get to know prospective students!

New paper by Zou et al. using the Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) to show that activity reinstatement in entorhinal cortex & CA1 predicts how well people remember when stimuli were first encountered (over months!) www.nature.com/articles/s41... #PsychPsySky #NeuroSkyence #Psychology