How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬? We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do! Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience? Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as event familiarity increases. Fine-tuning predicts memory recall. Excited to share this work with Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

Here is a gift link. I know people have feelings about the times but this is free and reading this should make you very very mad and then you should do something:

New opinion piece! @amirtal.bsky.social and I argue that "wake reactivation" is not a scientifically useful construct; It encompasses nonconscious & conscious processes w/ varying levels of elaboration & diverging consequences, leading to conflicting results authors.elsevier.com/a/1lgli4sIRvW-LQ

Excited to present our new work reading minds! Ok, not *that* kind of mind reading, but we have created a deep learning method capable of using single neuron recordings from people watching episodes of TV that can predict when they recall specific memories from the episode. 1/6

For >5 years, the International Sleep Replay Workshops (ISRW) have brought together scientists studying sleep & memory. The next ISRW will be on March 6th in Vancouver (before @cogneuronews.bsky.social). Follow the link for details and to join the mailing list. isrw.bio.uci.edu Pls repost! #sleep

Suspension of all grants to UCLA www.latimes.com/california/s...

What's cool about looking back at the history of college protests is that 19 year old students have been right about every single American war, and the esteemed Harvard educated opinion writers at the New York Times have been wrong about every single American war.

Happy to announce that my lab @ Yale Psychology (actcompthink.org) will be accepting PhD applications this year (for start in Fall '26)! Come for the fun experiments on human learning, memory, & skilled behavior, stay for the best 🍕 in the US. Please reach out if you have any questions!

"this deal is unlikely to end the attacks. The federal government, and this administration, is simply too powerful and too arbitrary to be credibly bargained with." www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

The assault on higher education is not just about coastal elite schools. "Federal agencies terminated or were attempting to terminate more than 4,000 grants across over 600 institutions. These grants are worth between $6.9 billion and $8.2 billion combined." www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

🧪 BREAKING (good news): Senate subcommittee says NO! to Trump's proposed slashes to NASA & NSF funding. Today, the subcommittee said to keep NASA + NSF funding at $33.9 billion, the same as in FY24. See 7:15 below. Full Senate appropriations committee meets tomorrow about it. 🧵 1/3

🚨This is the most exciting step of my scientific career🚨 25 yrs ago I started a life long interest in navigation, maps & brains I've collected data from >4 m people in 195 nations in SeaHeroQuest In 3 weeks we set off on an ocean voyage to study the amazing spatial skills of Marshallese sailors:

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Our new paper with @chrismlangdon is just out in @natureneuro.bsky.social! We show that high-dimensional RNNs use low-dimensional circuit mechanisms for cognitive tasks and identify a latent inhibitory mechanism for context-dependent decisions in PFC data. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Terry Moran worked at ABC for 28 years. Now, for calling Stephen Miller “hateful,” (which he 💯 is per his own family), ABC fired him to appease an authoritarian hypocrite who ran on “free speech.” This will have a chilling effect on all journalists. Fourth Estate fails. Authoritarianism advances.

ngl this map of scheduled protests for this weekend is *wild*

I am in downtown Los Angeles right now and it is completely surreal to hear that Trump is sending Marines here. We are listening to mariachi music. People have dogs. There are teenagers here. It is utterly and completely peaceful. Please tell your friends.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic. Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come. But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget. Speak up now before it is too late. (inflation adjusted $-s below)

Sharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation. rdcu.be/el18q A short thread follows for those interested. 1/n

The worst happened. We were DOGE’d. Our NSF funding is gone. So now there’s nothing stopping me from sharing Expert Voices Together, a crisis response system for US-based researchers and journalists facing harassment. It's a true passion project. 🧵 1/ expertvoicestogether.org

Join us in beautiful Santa Barbara! We're hiring a full-time junior specialist/research technician to play a central role in data collection & analysis of brain imaging studies of pregnancy & menopause. Learn more & apply at: recruit.ap.ucsb.edu/JPF02974 Or help us spread the word 💫

It's 2015. President Barack Obama has accepted a "sky palace" jumbo jet from the Qatari government, which he'll own after he leaves office. "Everybody relax," he says in an interview with the New York Times. Everyone does. The networks then televise the military parade in his honor on his birthday.

“NSF watchers fear that a smaller, restructured agency could be more vulnerable to pressure from the White House to fund research that suits its ideological bent.” www.science.org/content/arti...

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.

new pope! *crowd goes wild* American pope! *crowd boos* woke for an American! *crowd goes wild* bad on protecting abusive priests! *crowd boos* hates JD Vance! *crowd goes wild*

Time to catch up on the past week’s news about science and medicine in the US. Whew. 1/10

Attending AERA (large ed research conf) was wild as NSF STEM ed grants were being axed on Friday. The #overhead at AERA was like... "[Person] is going to be cut from the lab because we lost all of our funding" Even still, finding that community was essential. See @jillbarshay.bsky.social story:

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

A new evolving outrage… Damaging of the NIH Rare Diseases Clinical Research Network

Not surprising that an administration that rose to power on the spread of bullshit and propaganda is terminating the funding of researchers studying these phenomena. We are just receiving word about funding cancellations re: existing grants to members of our team and our colleagues.

I was just cc-ed on an email where a Nobel prize winner and green card holder who's spent a lot of time in the US says he cannot risk coming back at this point for a visit. And I cannot blame him for this decision. We are witnessing absolute mad king behavior.

It is important now more than ever for scientists to share their work with the general public. I am pleased to have contributed to investNScience’s campaign which they are currently running across numerous social media platforms. It is a great initiative that makes science more relevant to everyone.

THIS IS ONE NEURON! Jaw dropping. It distributes a particular neurotransmitter (norepinephrine) across the mouse brain; it’s a locus coeruleus neuron. @jeremiahycohen.bsky.social and colleagues at the @alleninstitute.bsky.social are using new biotech to see things never seen before.

The Trump administration is saying that they can deny due process to anyone they want and deport them to dangerous foreign prisons. This isn’t even Project 2025. This is Nazi Germany 1933.

New, from me: Marco Rubio used to boast that he was banned from China, calling it a totalitarian state. Now he combines a) new surveillance capabilities to monitor and punish international students, with b) little accountability or due process. 🧵 donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-attack...

Scary Napkin Math: InsideHigherEd lists ~1000 student visas revoked now. (These students are here legally! And not criminals!) With no official reporting system, this must be an undercount. If the real # is 2x that, it approaches 1 in 500 intl students. What is the real goal here? #Academicsky

I reported on economics full-time in 2020. It taught me there are no incentives to have a baby in the US. Women in the US have to pay for pre-natal, medical and child care, earn less, do most of the parenting and chores, get promoted less, and are now at 27% higher risk of maternal mortality.

Announcing @sciforgood.bsky.social! #standupforscience #scienceforgood

Trump has signed an executive order targeting Susman Godfrey, the law firm that helped Dominion Voting Systems obtain its $787 million settlement from Fox for the network's 2020 election lies.

Solidarity with all those getting grant termination notices from National Endowment for the Humanities this week. 😞 While the humanities may not have the easy "we cure cancer" talking points that some sciences do -- HUMANITIES SCHOLARSHIP IS IMPORTANT TOO! Huge loss to our country. #Academicsky

New preprint! Excited to share our latest work “Accelerated learning of a noninvasive human brain-computer interface via manifold geometry” ft. outstanding former undergraduate Chandra Fincke, @glajoie.bsky.social, @krishnaswamylab.bsky.social, and @wutsaiyale.bsky.social's Nick Turk-Browne 1/8

There are salient updates to attend to BUT if you’re wondering how they organize your memory, here’s a review/simulation offering diff. roles of prediction errors in building & breaking our models of the world w/ @davidclewett.bsky.social @jameswardantony.bsky.social inspired by Sarah DuBrow (1/7)

The Memory Disorders Research Society (MDRS) has extended its deadline in seeking nominations for new members to next Wednesday (4/9)! Self-nominations welcome. Feel free to DM me if you have questions about the society or the membership process. Application link: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"Together, these leaders were in charge of US$9 billion in funding at the NIH." For comparison: The *entire* budget of NSF is $9 billion. So NIH just fired the leaders of an entire NSF's worth size of scientific investments.

Also, I’m doing a talk 3/30 1:30pm in Symposium 1: Creating the structure of ongoing experience, chaired by the one and only @jameswardantony.bsky.social. Also featuring talks by Janice Chen and New Investigator Awardee @esfinn.bsky.social. Hope to see some of you there!

This afternoon (Sun 1:30-3:30p) at #CNS2025, Zach Reagh @zreagh.bsky.social, Janice Chen, James Antony @jameswardantony.bsky.social, and I will be speaking in Symposium 1: Creating the structure of ongoing experience. Come by for a dose of narratives, events, causality etc @cogneuronews.bsky.social

The New York Times is the first to put out comprehensive estimates on the cost of a year without U.S.A.I.D. and they’re higher than I thought: - 1.65 million deaths from AIDS - 500,000 from lack of vaccines - 550,000 from lack of food aid - 290,000 from malaria - 310,000 from TB

This is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH

The @standupforscience.bsky.social DC rally is on. What we are hearing from around the country: "this is big!" "biggest rally I have seen around here in years and years" The public cares about medical research--and students, GenZ, and other people too are ready to stand up.