The Toronto Blue Jays have the opportunity to do the funniest thing to the United States in 2025, and I am 100% here for it.

I would obviously prefer a resounding “no” in favor of sticking to our principles, but I suppose it is worth acknowledging that a university such as ours - located in a place subject to deeply conservative politics - is not in the easiest position one could imagine. In the end, I’ll take it.

Traveling from the US to Canada for a conference next week, and Air Canada just emailed me warning me how risky it is to be in the United States right now 🫡

If you're interested in the cognitive neuroscience of memory feel free to email me! I do experimental psychology, brain imaging (fMRI and MEG) and a bit of modelling. Lab is doing stuff on forgetting, aging, schemas, and event boundaries, but we're not limited to that. #psychscisky #neuroskyence

Should I start telling students to get degrees in AI instead of cognitive neuroscience? Asking for a field.

🌟 Excited to share that I'm recruiting PhD students in Psychology for my new lab at Rice University this cycle (Signal boost appreciated!) To learn more, check out the Learning & Behavior Change Lab website: www.sinclairlab-rice.com Applications are due Dec 1st: psychology.rice.edu/graduate/pro...

Another new-ish paper: Events in the stream of behavior Maverick Smith, @jzacks.bsky.social, and I discuss how the brain (esp. the Default Mode Network) represents event models, leveraging different information domains and scales of information processing. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Next up, from @atabk.bsky.social and @wouterkool.bsky.social: Free recall is shaped by inference and scaffolded by event structure. In sum, Ata stuck hidden (and shifting) rules into a word list learning task, creating "events" that influenced the structure of recall. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

I'm a behind on shouting out new papers! From Angelique Delarazan: Narrative Coherence Warps the Timeline of Recalled Naturalistic Events. In sum, when recalling stories, people systematically deviate from temporal organization to follow the narrative threads. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Check out a new preprint from Adi, postdoc working with me and Jeff Zacks. I’m *extremely* excited to finally, officially get this out into the world 🙂

I just got NOAs on an NSF grant and an R01 in the same week, and I cannot begin to put into words the bizarre combination of relief, exhaustion, elation, and survivor’s guilt I am currently feeling.

What a fun and surreal day. Huge congrats to @atabk.bsky.social for defending his dissertation. I couldn’t be more proud ❤️

I’m just sitting here looking at the list of grant applications I had planned to work on this summer, and struggling to avoid the conclusion that it will be a huge waste of time.

You might have seen this pup in some of my papers and presentations. This is Maddie, and she was my best friend in the whole world. We had 16 wonderful years together. This past week has been incredibly hard, but it’s helped me refocus on what really matters amidst all the chaos in the world.

Much needed physical punishment and mental replenishment. Druid Arch in Canyonlands National Park.

My lab is full of deeply unserious people, and I love them

Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!

Awful things were happening *before* wealthy people started losing money today.

This is SUCH a cool study. Know that one effect event boundaries have on temporal order memory? The impairment they cause? Turns out that effect depends on the “events” being arbitrary. Things look very different when you test order memory for meaningfully-associated events.

Hey friends! Come say hi to folks from my lab and from @jzacks.bsky.social lab at #CNS2025. We have a bunch of in-progress stuff this time, including a “sketchpad series” by @raynatang.bsky.social. Also, Veronica and June (with @alexbarnett.bsky.social) were undergrads when they did their projects 🙂

Save the date! If you're going to CNS, stop by my poster on Sunday evening to get the whole story about what hippocampal timescales can tell us about memory and aging! Poster C42 #CNS2025

Two months into the new US presidency, I’m struck by how quickly we collectively acquiesced to being told what was acceptable for universities to do and to study. Instant acceptance of thought policing from a culture that will tell anyone who listens (and those who would rather not) how free we are.

Apropos of nothing, do y’all remember when a not-perfectly-secure email server practically ended Hillary Clinton’s career? Yep, apropos of nothing at all. Ha.

Maddie is well-liked enough in the lab that @atabk.bsky.social fights through his pet dander allergy to pay tribute 🙂

The lab party took a turn for the silly

Standing up for science with @jzacks.bsky.social at the Missouri State Capitol

My best bud of nearly 16 years landed a cancer diagnosis. She’s still happy and okay for the moment, but it’s tough to know the clock’s ticking. I’m thankful she’s had such a full life, and I owe her so much (as I said in the dedications page of my dissertation). Maddie, you’re the very best person.

About to go give feedback to grad students and postdocs on their proposals in an NIH grant writing course, and let’s just say I have complicated feelings about that right now.

Apropos of nothing, today I realized that my love of African coffees Trojan Horsed me into a growing affinity for tea.

Help get the word out about importance of NIH, NSF, and IES and the role that these agencies serve to support health, improve education, and advance the economy in their states. @fabbs.org is hosting advocacy office hours for 3 key states, WV, LA, ME, if CNS members want to sign up: 🧪

I don’t meant to imply any sweeping generalizations here, but I think we’re going to have to reckon with educational decline.

It feels odd sharing a positive story right now, but I figure that’s energy worth putting into the world. I’m about 3 weeks out of surgery to treat carpal tunnel issues. I suddenly realized my fingers didn’t feel numb at any point today, for the first time in well over a year. I cried happy tears.

Psychologists and psych-adjacent folks concerned about NIH indirect costs reduction: APA has a petition and request you contact your reps. This means APA has decided to pursue this, so I think we should too: www.votervoice.net/Shares/BAAAA...

James S. Murphy highlights the financial impact of NIH funding for each state: jamessmurphy.com/2025/02/09/t... And there's more: Each grant dollar is estimated to generate $2.46 in new economic activity: www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/annual-econo... Let your elected officials know.

Endorse 👇 We can be apathetic at times. We can *afford* to be apathetic at times. This is not one of those times. Scientists have not done the best job of communicating the value of our everyday work to people. We must urgently change that. Research in the United States depends on it.

My wish: That every scientist who is passionately advocating for science here will take their same message and also broadcast it in some other venue. We need to get the message out to those who haven’t yet heard it (and are not yet convinced). Please consider it 🙏

The NIH overhead cut doesn't just hurt universities. It's deadly to the US economy. The US is a world leader in tech due to the ecosystem that NIH and NSF propel. It drives innovation for tech transfer, creates a highly-skilled sci/tech workforce, and fosters academic/industry crossfertilization.

Question for fMRI people: have you ever seen tSNR *strongly* correlate with a behavioral measure? Why would that happen? What we’re seeing is that tSNR during movie viewing correlates with a legit, a priori, tabulated tally of recalled details. We’re regressing out motion and WM/CSF signal. WTF?

Whoa, how could anyone have possibly seen that coming?

I am probably preaching to the choir but please spread the word-massive NIH reforms could effectively kill US biomedical research and most medical and nursing schools. Alzheimer's Cancer Flu etc. don't care about who you voted for. We need to get the word out. www.npr.org/sections/sho...

Having to get surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome at 35 is some real millennial shit.

Merry Xmas from my blind dog, who thinks ramps are slides actually.

I’m pretty sure I would never encounter the word “woke” if I didn’t occasionally log into that other app out of morbid curiosity.

We are now up to 78 accounts on our Black In Neuro starter pack! Be sure to check back and make sure you have everyone added 🤗 Please let us know if we missed you! #BlackInSTEM #Neuroskyence #Psychology #AcademicSky 🧪 go.bsky.app/F8PpdPe

Love me an @aidanhorner.bsky.social talk 🫡

If you are at #psynom24 and are interested in temporal order memory in narrative reading, please come and check out my poster tonight at 7:45! 🧠⌛️

Hi! I’ll be at #psynom24 tomorrow rambling about how event representations in the brain overemphasize a few particularly meaningful moments. Swing by the Event Cognition session and show us speakers (including the likes of @jzacks.bsky.social and @karampbell.bsky.social) some love 🙂

I heard people were posting dog pics on here 🫡