Just a reminder that I am available for commencement speeches, birthdays, and Bar Mitzvahs. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/speech PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

🧠 When you watch a movie, your brain blends sight, sound, and speech into a single experience. Should models of the brain blend them too, or keep the senses separate until the very end? We built MIRAGE to find out. It sets a new SOTA for predicting whole-brain fMRI from movies. 🧵

New research show biological invasions disrupt the relationship between size spectrum and trophic interactions in freshwater fish communities🌍 🐟️ 📈 🔎 Read more: buff.ly/9RvuSYJ

Everything is weakly correlated in LLMs

Congratulations to the PhD Veronica Pinelli! Chance, necessity, and ecosystem functioning.

I've seen some wild pseudoscience charts in my time but WOW this one killed me. Brain astrology paulkedrosky.com/chart-of-the...

A paper in Nature Health reports on a sample of 500,000 conversations between users and Microsost Copilot from January 2026 on health-related topics, showing nearly one in five conversations involved personal symptom assessment or condition discussion. go.nature.com/4eqgK07 🧪

We've posted a new group-based lexical-semantic brain viewer! You can now inspect cortical conceptual maps at the group level (24 participants), vertex-by-vertex. Check it out! gallantlab.org/viewer-stori...

I remember when this preprint came out about a year ago. Unbelievable.

#AcademicSky @dingdingpeng.the100.ci (Julia Rohrer) is a true breath of fresh air that our field needs. www.the100.ci/2026/04/13/s... "Slipshod science should not be worthwhile." Worth a read. Worth seriously considering her proposal for restructuring reward initiatives in science.

In the context of the FY27 PBR it helps to go back to Robert Wilson’s famous testimony to Congress about funding for the NAL(Fermilab) in FY1970 and ask the natural question, why are there some people so hell-bent on tearing down so much of what makes this country worth defending?⚛️🧪

rs-fMRI methods question for the hive mind: What’s your practical cutoff for excluding a whole resting-state run due to motion? Using FD > 0.3 mm as the threshold, at what % of contaminated frames do you usually drop the run?

Perceived #sleep depth is generally thought to reflect reduced brain activity. @giuliobernardi.bsky.social &co show this relationship weakens during #dreaming, suggesting that dreaming helps sustain the subjective experience of deep sleep @spacelabimt.bsky.social @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/4v8OxkH

Proud of our community #cogsci2026

So thrilled to see this work out. the stomach rhythm modulates brain wide electro physiological rhythms in resting wakefulness. It’s been a real privilege to collaborate with brilliant @teresaberther.bsky.social and @danlikesbrains.bsky.social in this project. hopefully first of many

I'm excited to share that this paper was accepted at ICLR 2026! We show that language models encode one of the most basic ingredients of a world model: the ability to distinguish plausible from implausible states. Check out the paper for more details! See you in Rio! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.12553

We are thrilled to announce that, thanks to the support of our institutional subscribers, all Royal Society subscription journals will be open access in 2026 through #S2O. Researchers can read all articles and publish #OpenAccess in our eight subscription journals for free buff.ly/4Lu9VpW

We’ve loved having Dr. Matias Arim with us this week! 🙌 Super inspiring visit, great chats about what we’ve done so far #funMETANET and what’s coming next🚀... and thanks for jumping in to help with the field sampling too 😉🌿 @greco-udg.bsky.social @iea-udg.bsky.social

🧠 The Paris Brain Institute is launching a Call for Junior Group Leaders, inviting early-career scientists to establish their own independent research groups within one of Europe’s most dynamic neuroscience research centers. 👉 More information: parisbraininstitute.org/news/paris-b... #Hiring #AI

So… IS the Essence of a Journal Portable? Checking in on _NeuroImage_ and _Imaging Neuroscience_ scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/02/11/s...

Why did consciousness evolve at all? A superb special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org brings together experts across disciplines to explore the functions of consciousness and why it emerged in some species but not others. @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Novel study: Emergence of Phonemic, Syntactic, and Semantic Representations in Neural Networks. Joint work with P. Diego supervision: Y. Lakretz, E. Chemla, Y. Boubenec, @jeanremiking.bsky.social We explore the emergence of 3 linguistic structures in Neural Networks. Arxiv: arxiv.org/abs/2601.18617

🚨Scientists 🚨: Tired of come-ons from journals & conferences that may or may not be predatory? A new tool called Aletheia-Probe could help. 🧪 By @silverjacket.bsky.social @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New paper! In arxiv.org/abs/2601.20834 we study how language models representations of things like factuality evolve over a conversation. We find that in edge case conversations, e.g. about model consciousness or delusional content, model representations can change dramatically! 1/

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

Just started doing new data analysis and I know I keep saying this, but: I really, really don't think people appreciate how much this moral panic was a deliberate and extremely expensive invention.

Could not be more excited about Colton's @coltoncasto.bsky.social work! A deep dive into the linguistic cerebellum, and a discovery of an area remarkably functionally similar to the core left-hemisphere language areas, including in its selectivity for language. Go Colton and team!

I am no expert in geopolitics, but I came across this piece which seems extremely plausible to me about what comes next if the US actually invades Greenland. brentmolnar.substack.com/p/the-suicid...

Who did this> 🤣

Mon nouveau livre "Le rectangle de Lascaux : et Homo sapiens inventa la géométrie" sortira en libraire le 28 janvier. J'y aborde l'origine des mathématiques depuis la préhistoire jusqu'à nos jours ; c'est un peu la suite de mon tout premier livre, "La Bosse des Maths". Quelques explications:

📄Very happy to share our new pre-print!! 🧠 We introduce a homeostatic inhibitory plasticity rule into the Dynamic Mean Field (DMF) model which stabilizes firing rates and expands the model’s dynamical repertoire—for example, enabling slow-wave activity. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... ⬇️⬇️⬇️ 1/5

remember that much of this damage was done by Doge, run by Elon Musk FRS

Would love to hear expert views on this paper. It appears to show that the operationalization of brain activity the field has relied on for 3 decades—the BOLD response—is not actually a sensible measure of brain activity. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Since it's a tense time of year 🫠

New preprint on prosody in the brain! tinyurl.com/2ndswjwu HeeSoKim NiharikaJhingan SaraSwords @hopekean.bsky.social @coltoncasto.bsky.social JenniferCole @evfedorenko.bsky.social Prosody areas are distinct from pitch, speech, and multiple-demand areas, and partly overlap with lang+social areas→🧵

The last chapter of my PhD (expanded) is finally out as a preprint! “Semantic reasoning takes place largely outside the language network” 🧠🧐 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... What is semantic reasoning? Read on! 🧵👇

🚨 New paper out! "Environmental drivers of calling activity in a southern subtropical anuran assemblage: insights from passive acoustic monitoring" by Paula Pouso @almadana.bsky.social y Clara Nieto Methol 🐸🎶🌡️☀️ www.tandfonline.com/eprint/XIK2E...

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

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard

The value of knowledge is in having done the work. The value of research is in having done the research. The value of a summary is in having summarized the information. The value of writing is in having done the writing.

if you see this post, your actions are: - if you have a spare buck, give it to Wikipedia, then repost this - if you don't have a spare buck, just repost your action is mandatory for the world's best source of information to survive

Save the date! The 2026 *gasp* Australasian MathPsych conference will be in Singapore -- looks to be a great one :) @ozmathpsych.bsky.social

sociedadneurociencias.uy/2025/05/15/m... Organizan: Álvaro Cabana. Facultad de Psicología, UdelaR @almadana.bsky.social Juan Carlos Valle Lisboa. Facultad de Ciencias, UdelaR @lentobio.bsky.social Sociedad de Neurociencias de Uruguay @socneurouy.bsky.social Apoya: @ibroorg.bsky.social

sociedadneurociencias.uy/2025/05/15/m... Organizan: Álvaro Cabana. Facultad de Psicología, UdelaR @almadana.bsky.social Juan Carlos Valle Lisboa. Facultad de Ciencias, UdelaR @lentobio.bsky.social Sociedad de Neurociencias de Uruguay @socneurouy.bsky.social

Desde IMAGINA abrimos la convocatoria 📢 a becas IMAGINA+CZI 2025 para realizar pasantías en laboratorios 🦠🧪🫁💻🧮🔬🧬🧫 de bioimágenes en Latinoamérica. 🏁Cierra el 21Abr/2025 +info y registro: iie.fing.edu.uy/investigacio... @cziscience.bsky.social @iibceuy.bsky.social @latambioimaging.bsky.social

-You see, I'm microdosing. -Oh.. LSD, psilocybin, MDMA? -Nutella.

🚨 New Paper! Can neuroscience localizers uncover brain-like functional specializations in LLMs? 🧠🤖 Yes! We analyzed 18 LLMs and found units mirroring the brain's language, theory of mind, and multiple demand networks! w/ @gretatuckute.bsky.social, @abosselut.bsky.social, @mschrimpf.bsky.social 🧵👇

Definición de ironía:

🚨Job alert (Please RT) What: masters internship and/or PhD positions Where: Rothschild Foundation Hospital (Paris, France) Topic: AI and Neuroscience Supervised by: Pierre Bourdillon and myself Apply here: forms.gle/KKnea2QAjhAe... Deadline: Feb 5th