Why isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science or neuroscience? Starting a substack (infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-m...) by writing down my thoughts on that question: as part of a first series of posts giving my current thoughts on the relation between these fields. 1/3

Go @tamaregev! Tamar systematically characterized prosody-processing🧠areas using precision fMRI. The overlap between the prosody and language areas connects beautifully with her computational findings of high mutual information between words and prosodic features! Such a cool research program. :)

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→🧵

Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!

Yup I realized that when one of his New Yorker articles discussed his great idea that the brain might have a special region for face recognition, all presented as his idea long after this had been widely published.

Incredible piece on Oliver Sacks. If you were ever awed at his supposedly true stories (I remember being stunned by the account of the autistic twins who rattled off large prime numbers), read this. He told wonderful stories, but they were in large part fiction. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

How does cortisol tune brain networks to form strong emotional memories? Excited to share new work led by amazing former RA Flory Huang w collabs Rajita Sinha and @toddc.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

‪@neuranna.bsky.social‬ and @evfedorenko.bsky.social tackle with neuroimaging a phenomenon identified in the 1970s by the pioneering work of the great Molly Potter: conceptual information processing common to pictorial and verbal input. Thrilled to have played a small part in this exciting work.

If you are an MRI researcher interested in moving to 🇨🇦 for $500k a year or $1M a year for 8 years with a possibility of renewal at a reduced rate, take a look at our equipment cfmm.uwo.ca and this program www.canada.ca/en/impact-pl... . MSK, neuroscience, cardiac, cancer applications all encouraged!

Great work led by Daria & Greta showing that diverse agreement types draw on shared units (even across languages)!

How do LLMs process syntax? Do different syntactic phenomena recruit the same model units, or do they recruit distinct model components? And do different languages rely on similar units to process the same syntactic phenomenon? Check out our new preprint (to appear at ACL 2026)! shorturl.at/QWU81

Now out in @pnas.org: a tour de force co-led by Sammy Floyd and Olessia Jouravlev (also with @moshepoliak.bsky.social, Zach Mineroff and Ted Gibson): www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Led by amazing MIT undergraduate Daria Kryvosheieva and in collaboration with @andreadevarda.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social ! 💫 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2512.03676 Code: github.com/dariakryvosh...

Thrilled to be among this fantastic cohort of AI2050 Fellows. This is a great recognition of the transformative potential of #NeuroAI and our lab’s work in this space 🧪🧠🤖. Many thanks to @schmidtsciences.bsky.social for the support!

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

New preprint w/ @evfedorenko.bsky.social, @neuranna.bsky.social , Chandler Cheung, Matthew Siegelman, Alvincé Pongos, @hopekean.bsky.social , Alyx Tanner

fun pre-print for your start of week reading: "People Make Graded Judgments About The Inconceivable" (by Hu, Sosa, and me) doi.org/10.31234/osf...

One week left to apply to the EPFL computer science PhD program www.epfl.ch/education/ph.... It's an amazing environment to do impactful research 🧪 (with unparalleled compute)! My NeuroAI group is hiring 🧠🤖. Consider this review service by our fantastic PhD students: www.linkedin.com/posts/spnesh...

Thanks @quantamagazine.bsky.social for covering our group’s work!❤️

🚨Job Alert plz RT! Johns Hopkins Psych & Brain Sciences is looking for a new colleague using behavioral or computational approaches to study cognition! We are excited about many areas of (esp higher) cognition in human adults, children, or nonhuman animals Open-rank apply.interfolio.com/178146

Imagine a brain decoding algorithm that could generalize across different subjects and tasks. Today, we’re one step closer to achieving that vision. Introducing the flagship paper of our brain decoding program: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... #neuroAI #compneuro @utoronto.ca @uhn.ca

🚨I am looking for a POSTDOC, LAB MANAGER/TECH and GRAD STUDENTS to join my new lab in beautiful Madison, WI. We study how our brains perceive and represent the physical world around us using behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging methods. paulunlab.psych.wisc.edu #VisionScience #NeuroSkyence

The special issue celebrating John Duncan's retirement is now out! Check out all the gem articles here: sciencedirect.com/special-issue/10QN6R7VQSM and the editorial (see next figure in the thread for an entertaining analysis) doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

What a privilege and a delight to work with @coltoncasto.bsky.social @ev_fedorenko and @neuranna on this new speculative piece on What it means to understand language, nicely summarized in this Tweeprint from @coltoncasto.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757

Goes immediately to the top of the "To Read" list ⬇️

If you enjoyed The Verge essay, a new paper just dropped that further explores how our brains connect language to our broader understanding of the world. Shout out to @coltoncasto.bsky.social @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social & @nancykanwisher.bsky.social for derailing my Wednesday.

It has been so so fun to think with some of my favorite scientists about what it means to understand!

What does it mean to understand language? We argue that the brain’s core language system is limited, and that *deeply* understanding language requires EXPORTING info to other brain regions. w/ @neuranna.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social @nancykanwisher.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2511.19757 1/n🧵👇

(1/2) ICoN Fellow Andrea de Varda @andreadevarda.bsky.social and Ev Fedorenko @evfedorenko.bsky.social have revealed that AI reasoning models & humans struggle with the same tough problems—and take longer on them in parallel ways. Article 🔗 news.mit.edu/2025/cost-of...

Our paper “The cost of thinking is similar between large reasoning models and humans” is now out in PNAS! 🤖🧠 w/ @fepdelia.bsky.social, @hopekean.bsky.social, @lampinen.bsky.social, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social Link: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... (1/6)

Friends (and friends-of-friends) in LA: Please help spread the word! On Saturday, November 15th 2p, @mameister4.bsky.social and I will be in conversation at the Burbank Library discussing bottlenecks and next steps for brain research. It's free! Register here: burbank.libnet.info/event/14639190

A heartwarming write-up in the Harvard Gazette about my recent visit to @harvardbookstore.bsky.social to discuss Elusive Cures. I'm grateful for these opportunities to spread the news about all the exciting developments happening in brain & mind research. news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Pandas, snow leopards...and bacteria. A newly formed team of scientists is setting out to conserve the world's diversity of microbes. Here's my story: nyti.ms/47vEfRC

Here's the newest piece in the @nytimes.com "Lost Science" series. @emilyanthes.bsky.social talks to a scientist who was learning about the minds of elephants--and how to use those insights to help the animals coexist with farmers. Gift link: nyti.ms/3KXVSAG

Why do brain networks vary? Do these differences shape behavior? If every 🧠 is unique, how can we detect common features of brain organization? @rodbraga.bsky.social and I dig in, in @annualreviews.bsky.social (ahead of print): go.illinois.edu/Gratton2025-... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #MedSky 🧵👇

📣 New preprint from the Braga Lab! 📣 The ventral visual stream for reading converges on the transmodal language network Congrats to Dr. Joe Salvo for this epic set of results Big Q: What brain systems support the translation of writing to concepts and meaning? Thread 🧵 ⬇️

UT Austin Linguistics is hiring in computational linguistics! Asst or Assoc. We have a thriving group sites.utexas.edu/compling/ and a long proud history in the space. (For instance, fun fact, Jeff Elman was a UT Austin Linguistics Ph.D.) faculty.utexas.edu/career/170793 🤘

🧠 This paper is a part of my first brain project, and I had a lot of fun working on it with the amazing @gretatuckute.bsky.social, @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Ashley Malkin, and @evfedorenko.bsky.social! Paper link: arxiv.org/abs/2508.11536 Code+data: github.com/ryskina/conc...

All of us (@kanishka.bsky.social @kmahowald.bsky.social and me) are looking for PhD students this cycle! If computational linguistics/NLP is your passion, join us at UT Austin! For my areas see jessyli.com

As our lab started to build encoding 🧠 models, we were trying to figure out best practices in the field. So @neurotaha.bsky.social built a library to easily compare design choices & model features across datasets! We hope it will be useful to the community & plan to keep expanding it! 1/

The compling group at UT Austin (sites.utexas.edu/compling/) is looking for PhD students! Come join me, @kmahowald.bsky.social, and @jessyjli.bsky.social as we tackle interesting research questions at the intersection of ling, cogsci, and ai! Some topics I am particularly interested in:

Excited to share new work with @hleemasson.bsky.social , Ericka Wodka, Stewart Mostofsky and @lisik.bsky.social! We investigated how simultaneous vision and language signals are combined in the brain using naturalistic+controlled fMRI. Read the paper here: osf.io/b5p4n 1/n

Brown’s Department of Cognitive & Psychological Sciences is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor, working in the area of AI and the Mind (start July 1, 2026). Apply by Nov 8, 2025 👉 apply.interfolio.com/173939 #AI #CognitiveScience #AcademicJobs #BrownUniversity

A fantastic piece by two of my favorite linguists!

📣@futrell.bsky.social and I have a BBS target article with an optimistic take on LLMs + linguistics. Commentary proposals (just need a few hundred words) are OPEN until Oct 8. If we are too optimistic for you (or not optimistic enough!) or you have anything to say: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience. #neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

‪@benhayden.bsky.social‬ @tyrellturing.bsky.social‬ @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social‬ @pessoabrain.bsky.social I see a lot of talk on here about how we should avoid "x does y" talk because the brain is "a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system". But this does not follow. A thread...

Harvard University won a crucial legal victory in its clash with the Trump administration on Wednesday, when a federal judge said that the government had broken the law by freezing billions of dollars in research funds. Gift link: nyti.ms/41CEOWy

Let’s talk @storiesofwin.bsky.social. I’m flattered to be among their profiles (coming soon) & I want to elevate the team behind this terrific effort. /1 www.storiesofwin.org