🔔 Our new preprint is out! Here we asked whether sleep spindles - a hallmark NREM rhythm linked to plasticity and memory - changes how well latent working memory representations can be accessed after a nap.

Great piece from @gregggonsalves.bsky.social on how destructive the proposed OMB rule will be to science and to Americans across the country. www.thenation.com/article/poli...

Alligator Alcatraz has officially closed. Good news does not get shared as much as bad news. Thank you to all who worked to shut this monstrosity down. abcnews.com/Politics/flo...

I thought people were kidding, turns out Elon really did axe the screwworm containment program back in March 25. fucking imbecile www.agri-pulse.com/articles/226...

After noticing another (significant!) drop in data quality this morning, I saw that Prolific is now recommending that participants be paid $48/hr

Kennedy canceled $500 million in mRNA research and announced no new mRNA projects will ever be initiated—killing the technology that produced the fastest vaccine rollout in human history.

So... I got more information about this plan. The most important points follow on the next posts. 1/3

Which factors are more vs. less important in predicting memory? We systematically investigated the contributions of image memorability, valence, arousal, attention, and test delay. Image memorability was the strongest predictor of memory. Proud of this work led by @hartwakeland.bsky.social!

I am thrilled to share that I will be joining the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at CU Boulder in January 2027, where I'll be starting the Affective Learning and Translational Memory (AltMem) Lab. I am also recruiting PhD students in the upcoming cycle (starting fall 2027)! altmemlab.org

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!

🔔 Preprint: “Hippocampal ripples evoke a stereotyped cortical response followed by spindle-mediated network synchronization.” Combining iEEG+scalp EEG during sleep, we show that hippocampal ripples leave a decodable cortical fingerprint and are followed by brain-wide spindle synchronization!

"openai.com" was once the personal homepage of a guy named glenn (2001), and "tiktok.com" was the quaint shared homepage of a couple as their relationship progressed from dating to married with a baby (2000). THREAD!!!

By all that is holy, if and when SCOTUS decides that birthright citizenship is protected in the Constitution, don't let the 3-3-3 numpties tell you this is a moderate, centrist court. Rejecting an a-textual stupid Hail Mary doesn't cash out to a push when it comes to eviscerating the VRA today.

Two postdoc opportunities @yale.edu in human neurophysiology. One position in my lab @wutsaiyale.bsky.social focusing on human cognitive neurophysiology. Details at helfrich-lab.com/news/ Plus a possible collab with anesthesiology 👇 #NeuroTwitter #NeuroJobs #neuroskyence #EEG Please share.

Breaking: Trump has fired the membership of the National Science Board, which is oversees NSF. I have confirmed separately with multiple now-former members of NSB.

this admin is an act of treason against the US constitution and that is all of how it will be remembered

Still feel like "Musk and his crew of incels destroyed a bunch of stuff they didn't understand and thereby hastened the deaths of millions of children" did not get the public attention it warranted.

How does blood flow relate to brain activity? We discovered that it reflects two neural populations affected oppositely by arousal. Together, they explain neurovascular coupling in all brain regions and brain states! Out today in Nature: rdcu.be/fdC2A @uclbrainscience.bsky.social

You have more in common with the people of Iran than you do with anyone in this administration, any member of the technocracy, anyone who is profiting from this war, or any billionaire. When you see Iranians forming human chains outside key infrastructure sites, you should feel a sense of kinship.

Academic friends, It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region. A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions. Please read & sign if you agree: sites.google.com/view/protect... #IranWar

⚠️ If you are in the Pentagon today working to JUSTIFY a target list including clearly civilian infrastructure, you are complicit in war crimes. You swore an oath. You have a duty to say "no." The consequences will be rough, but obeying will be worse.

Imagine being a moderate Republican and getting outflanked on decency, morality, and basic humanity by these four nutters

I'm getting nauseous from pingponging between joy and wonder at the Artemis mission and rage and horror at the threats of a leader who is clearly too unhinged and unstable to be in a position of power, but whose party continues propping him up because they love power more than reason or humanity

Being an American is absolutely mortifying. I am so sorry we live in a country of morons, racists, misogynists and bigots who voted for this man. I don’t know what to do. We screamed for a decade about Trump being an unhinged psychopath and they did not listen.

Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit. You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?

The NSF 2027 budget has noted that they will close out the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Science Program (SBE). This is not a good thing. nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/FY-202...

Arson: “At an internal all-hands meeting on Friday, NSF leaders announced that they would dissolve the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate based on the budget request, according to two NSF staff members who shared information anonymously in order to speak freely”

We’re hiring a full-time Research Coordinator in the Preston Lab at UT Austin (start May/June 2026). Work on behavioral + fMRI studies of how memory & decision-making develop from childhood to adulthood. Learn more & apply: preston.clm.utexas.edu/news/join-th... Please repost!

This should be the biggest weather and climate news on your radar today. You can send an email today to say why dismantling NCAR is a bad idea for everyone: [email protected]

Congratulations to Judith Ellen Fan @judithfan.bsky.social, recipient of the 2026 Lila R. Gleitman Prize. Dr. Fan's research reflects the broad scope of modern #CogSci, bridging #psychology, #neuroscience, vision science, and #education. Learn more at cognitivesciencesociety.org/gleitman-prize/

Quietly, the Trump administration is now ending even the life-saving aid that they had promised would be preserved Reporting from @hana-kiros.bsky.social www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions rdcu.be/eRVUk

Excited to share a new paper spearheaded by the wonderful @baror-shira.bsky.social: tinyurl.com/bd8xdcum @erc.europa.eu @nathumbehav.nature.com We test the link between serial dependence (as an index of continuity) and event boundaries (indexing segmentation). A few key findings in the thread:

This is Minneapolis. Literally every corner along Lake St. packed with people holding candles, many singing, honoring a person who by all accounts was an absolute gem of a human, whose life was tragically stolen by a fascist, paramilitary occupation force.

This is Alex Pretti.

A video of Alex Pretti reading out the final salute of an unnamed veteran he cared for until the end of his life in the ICU, posted to Facebook by his son.

Beyond helping establish DHS itself in 2003, Mr. Mitnick was a senate-confirmed Trump choice for General Counsel for DHS in his first term. I've talked with him a few times, and he's not a man for hyperbole. So bear that in mind when you see him calling out DHS's "lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty."

man the stuff i am seeing on IG from the most normie, i don’t really talk about politics accounts suggests something different

This is a five alarm fire. If you dont think this impacts you, think again. Public health is in grave danger www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

So I have the cover story in next month's TNR. I interviewed the heads of police groups; immigration defense attorneys, ex-judges and ex-prosecutors; former DOJ and DHS officials, and the former head of Border Patrol. They're all horrified at what we've seen, and they all fear what's coming.

We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team! More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join... Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...

I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com

Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com! We applied graph theoretic analyses to fMRI data of participants watching movies/listening to stories. Integration across large-scale functional networks mediates arousal-dependent enhancement of narrative memories. Open access link: rdcu.be/eKKAw

You learn better when you test yourself on an answer before you study it? Even more counterintuitive, our findings showcase that there is not one direct mechanism to this effect. Thank you @charan-neuro.bsky.social , @xiaonanl.bsky.social , and @jameswardantony.bsky.social ! doi.org/10.1037/xlm0...

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