My lab is looking to recruit 1-2 paid summer interns to do wet lab work on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). You can apply here: forms.gle/b47WpSobjFjo...

A new and improved version of TheoryCoder, which learns to play video games in a human-like way by synthesizing both high-level abstractions and a low-level model of game mechanics: arxiv.org/abs/2602.00929

Fighting wins! www.nytimes.com/2026/02/02/u...

What's going on in aphantasia? Balaban and I recently argued it might be 'broken rendering'; but then why do normies bother rendering anything? Monzel, Zeman & co wrote an interesting response: www.cell.com/trends/cogni... ...and this is our response response: www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

now accepted at ICLR! 🐺🥳🐺 arxiv.org/abs/2506.20666

Amid the rise of billion-parameter models, I argue that toy models, with just a few neurons, remain essential—and may be all neuroscience needs, writes @marcusghosh.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/theoretical-...

Even as Atte Kadoma and Isaias Ghezae are immersed in demanding PhD programs at Harvard, being resident advisor brings balance to their lives and enriches both their student experience and their scholarly pursuits.

Super great opportunity!

new: Eric Bigelow @ericbigelow.bsky.social suggests the 2 main ways of controlling LLMs (prompting & steering) can be understood as changing model beliefs (as in Bayesian belief updating) "Belief Dynamics Reveal the Dual Nature of In-Context Learning & Activation Steering" arxiv.org/pdf/2511.00617

Thanks Alex for the opportunity to work on this project!

Another new paper from the lab: Predictive theories like the SR imply that navigators who navigate differently should have cognitive maps which differ in predictable ways. Here we show that this holds in mouse hippocampal CA1. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"abandoned teddy bears" category on wikimedia commons

Another fun project from @yangxiang.bsky.social. She asks the question: do people assign responsibility to personality traits in the same way that they assign reponsibility to people? The answer: sort of! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Officially out in the current issue of Trends in Cognitive Sciences: "Physics versus graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

it's not that i ever doubted that being a barista was a skilled position, but my year-long effort to try to produce a half-decent latte at home has convinced me that a good barista is easily more skilled than virtually every c-suite executive on the planet

overheard in coffee-shop convo now between two tech bros.: "I don't want to think about AI 24/7, you know? I want to think about other stuff! Like...like...stoicism, you know?"

NEW on our #DeeperLearning blog People balance being kind vs. being honest — and #LLMs should too. New research shows training choices often favor informativeness over kindness, but prompting can induce sycophancy. Read more: bit.ly/3Wqrtxl

#KempnerInstitute researchers find #ChatGPT’s guardrails are biased against certain users based on contextual information and inferences about the user. Research by Victoria Li, @yidachen.bsky.social & @nsaphra.bsky.social. Check out @theregister.com's article: bit.ly/47eaANa #AI #LLMs

Wow! This is incredibly cool!

Applications are now open for our #KempnerInstitute Research Fellowships! Postdocs studying the foundations of #intelligence or applications of #AI are encouraged to apply. Learn more and apply by Oct. 1: bit.ly/3UvpSpe #LLMs #NeuroAI #ML @shamkakade.bsky.social

whelp, they changed the link: news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

the Bayesian Models of Cognition book can teach you a lot about intuitive physics, e.g.:

Trans rights are human rights. Fresh work incoming: Here we quantitatively compare the representational geometry of mouse CA1 and human spatial memory during environmental deformations. Briefest TLDR: Human memory looks like a change-resistant version of mouse CA1. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

@cogscikid.bsky.social has cool new work, in collaboration with Honglak Lee and Sam Hall-McMaster, on how humans solve multitask reinforcement learning problems by preemptively simulating paths to counterfactual goals: arxiv.org/abs/2507.05561 He also shows that it works on challenging ML tasks.

Glad to be here :)

it's the 10 year anniversary of a very important study

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature! When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️ The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar bit.ly/3HvWSum

Out now in TiCS, something i've been thinking about a lot: "Physics vs. graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" (by Balaban & me) relevant for many people, related to imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, aphantasia, and more authors.elsevier.com/a/1lBaC4sIRv...

Pizza in triangles? Pizza in squares? Nah… triangularly-latticed pizza.

This framing is all wrong Our international students are not a “crucial funding source” They are our STUDENTS They are the reason we EXIST We teach STUDENTS

Some of the best parts of my education so far have been centered around international collaboration. This is heartbreaking.

“I didn’t forget your name… I just ended up in a local minima.”

In a recent podcast @dyamins.bsky.social argues: "We want to be able to use the model of the digital brain as a neurobiomedical discovery and diagnostic design platform." neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/buildin... - That view is popular and I believe that there is a fundamental logical error. Thread

Gotta make sure your results generalize to mascots! #uic

Kevin Ochsner wraps up his distinguished career award at #SANS2025 with a plea to talk about science to non-scientists and remind them that the cost of not doing science is far greater than the cost of doing it

This is what I've been fearing even more than loss of grants: www.politico.com/news/2025/04... Harvard has a huge number of international students (part of what makes it a wonderful multicultural place). It would be a tragedy if these students were forced to leave.

New! Read about how the Kempner Institute's Patrick Slade uses state-of-the-art techniques to understand neuromotor control and build devices to assist people with movement disorders. bit.ly/KempnerSlade #AI #ML #MedTech

Something weird with the “Trump vs universities” reporting: Everything is framed as “funding to Harvard”, not “funding to researchers at Harvard”. No mention that grants are awarded to researchers for specific research/training. Makes it seem like a pot of money handed to Harvard to do… whatever?

From mazes to bacteria-like structures, the Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion model reveals how small tweaks to diffusion rates (Du, Dv) and reaction parameters (F, k) produce different emergent morphologies. Mathematical beauty in action! Made with #python #matplotlib #mlx

📌📌📌

Super excited to share that one of our outstanding founding undergrad RAs @dahery.bsky.social will be headed to the Kempner postbac program at Harvard to work with @gershbrain.bsky.social after graduation! Congratulations David! You cannot be replaced, and I’m so proud and excited for you!

How does one rebuild a scientific funding infrastructure from scratch? Asking for a friend.

What is a #GPU and how does it advance #AI & machine learning? Our new #KempnerInstitute explainer from @DrYohanJohn.bsky.social offers a primer on GPU design & explains how GPUs are fueling AI advancement. Read more: bit.ly/KempnerGPUs #NeuralNetworks #ML #KempnerBytes

Really happy with how our lab t-shirts came out! My friend Alexis helped me design the front, and I designed the back using some of the 4 museums data from @sergiopecirno.bsky.social and @atkeinath.bsky.social! Might have added some saturation to show off the place fields on the back 🤠.

Our paper on key-value memory in the brain (updated from the preprint version) is now out in Neuron @cp-neuron.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/a/1kqIJ3BtfH...

Theta activity supports landmark-based correction of naturalistic human path integration Impressive 128 channel mobileEEG study with hmdVR: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...