Michael Sainato: Workers who fall for ‘corporate #bullshit’ may be worse at their jobs, study finds. New study finds that employees impressed by corporate speak may be least equipped to make effective decisions #corporations https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/mar/23/corporate-speak-study

We put out this preprint a couple months ago, but I really wanted to replicate our findings before we went to publication. At first, what we found was very confusing! But when we dug in, it revealed a fascinating neural strategy for how we switch between tasks doi.org/10.1101/2024.09.29.615736 🧵

A new paper suggests that grant terminations from the NIH over the past year may have further punctured the so-called "leaky pipeline" because women were more impacted by grant terminations than men www.statnews.com/2026/03/23/n...

"when you criticize our work, don't you think about the feelings of the trainees?" "yeah i do, alot. but i don't just think about your trainee, i think about the trainees of the entire field, and beyond too. especially the potential trainees who are yet to join the field."

happy to announce the official release of my first R package on CRAN! 🎉 building on the Hmetad toolbox by @smfleming.bsky.social, the hmetad package allows users to fit the meta-d' model of confidence ratings using a familiar brms/lme4-style formula syntax

NIH Fellowship awards for FY2025 by race drugmonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/19/n...

Our paper on double decisions in working memory tasks is now published in Computational Brain and Behaviour! When you give people a second chance, it reveals a lot about the contents of their memory. Led by @paulmgarrett.bsky.social @psychunimelb.bsky.social rdcu.be/e8SLX

The Mind’s Eyes: Distinct Neural Correlates of Spatial and Object Imagery www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #neuroskyence

The "decoupling of information and energy" is a major point of divergence between biological and artificial computers. Energy consumption is the biggest bottleneck in scaling AI. To address this, we need an "energy-aware theory of computation." This work is an attempt to that end. [1/11] 🧵 🧠🤖🧠📈

A (for us) novel point from our exchange: specialization does not imply segregation. Even if area X is selective for color, the network can still processes color and shape together — information is not segregated at the network level. Selectivity ≠ isolation.

They argue that if the pretraining is strong enough, randomly sampling small weight perturbations often yields specialists that outperform the base model on different tasks, and simply selecting and ensembling these guesses (RandOpt) can rival standard post-training methods.

Linking neural manifolds to circuit structure in recurrent networks www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

A new Department of Cognitive Science is being created at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy. Here is the call for a cluster hire (for around 10 faculty) in all areas of cognitive science, at both junior and senior levels: www.unibocconi.it/en/faculty-a... Deadline: May 4th, 2026

Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness - philarchive.org/archive/LERTAF my own metaphysical stance is metascientific; i know there are arguments for all sorts of stuff, but i just go w/ whatever that tends to work well in science i also see why DeepMind may like this (for ethics)

Can we prevent Alzheimer’s disease within a decade? today.usc.edu/can-we-preve... #Alzheimers #dementia #science #neuroscience #NeuroSkyence

Are we born with a sense of space? 🧠 A new preprint from the #MoserGroup suggests that the brain’s internal navigation system 🍩 begins forming before young animals actively explore the world. 🧵(1:5) Have a look at the preprint here 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧠 Resting-state fMRI is often treated as the gold standard for studying the brain’s intrinsic organization. But is it actually the best way to estimate functional architecture? We tested this directly. 🧵1/8

“Area 10m is the only common ‘driver’ of both pgACC and sgACC” New connectomic scale understanding of ACC from Daulton Myers and Julie Fudge. #mustread #neuroskyence www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Japan provisionally approved stem-cell treatment for Parkinson's. Sumitomo Pharma’s Amchepry: Parkinson's disease treatment that transplants stem cells into patient's brain. Study: 4/7 improved by injecting donor cells changed to precursors of dopamine-producing brain cells. #NeuroSkyence #MedSky

Tau Blood Biomarkers May Signal Faster Cognitive Decline in Women beingpatient.com/tau-blood-bi... #Alzheimers #dementia #WomensHealth #science #neuroscience #NeuroSkyence

How does uncertainty transmit from one head to another? Our new paper out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social reveals how public communication alters private confidence. w/ Einar Andreassen & @cdfrith.bsky.social @birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk 🧠📈

We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1). If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!

Tragic. Please pass this along to US Chairs and Deans, and consider it when you sit on promotion committees. This, combined with the review backlog, is dire - especially for our early career researchers.

And yet there are plenty of “legitimate” scientists that voluntarily go on @hubermanlab.com podcast implicitly promoting exactly this grift!

What are cell types good for, computationally? Encoding innate behavior! In this 2-parter, I break down the relationship between cell types—which I had, in years prior, dismissed as mere implementation detail—and computation. I changed my mind! www.neuroai.science/p/cell-types...

www.openculture.com/2015/10/mich... psychologists/neuroscientists, if you need an antidote for physics-envy disorder, this may help

Broad peer review is crucial for a healthy scientific literature, but neuroscientists turn down review requests too often. Simple math suggests that small groups of scientists can significantly bias the literature, writes @jvoigts.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/publishing/l...

Orbitofrontal cortex drives predictive filtering of sensory responses www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

The Chinese University of Hong Kong is searching for an assistant professor in AI Humanities. Application deadline March 29.

my employer is restricting my access to all 2FA systems until i re-watch videos abt "smishing" (SMS-phishing) & social engineering. same videos every year. no "test out" option. how much $$ is wasted? $50/hr (avg across provosts, student workers) x 1 hr x 34k faculty/staff = $1.7M wasted annually.

📢New paper out today in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social! Does the value of an unchosen option — inferred through counterfactual reasoning — spread to related items in memory, similar to how the value of a chosen option — acquired through direct experience — does? In short, yes!

Explore the fascinating world of brain-computer interfaces! 🧠💻 Check out our latest blog post on monitoring the visual cortex: https://innovirtuoso.com/technology/monitoring-visual-cortex-through-brain-computer-interface #BCI #Neuroscience #TechInnovation

📢We're thrilled to announce the first-ever #IRCA Conference on #Aphantasia! Call for abstracts is open, deadline: 17 April 2026 sites.google.com/view/irca-co... This 3-day interdisciplinary conference aims to consolidate current knowledge and draw a future plan for aphantasia research.

New lab paper in #ScienceAdvances: we identify a modality-common selective-attention signal in noncholinergic #BasalForebrain (BF) “bursting” neurons, distinct from the modality-specific attention signals typically described in corticothalamic circuits. 1/n www.science.org/doi/full/10....

A half-century old question may have its final answer. Using high-resolution #Mini2P microscopes, we find no evidence of local topography in #PlaceCells. Place fields of neighbouring cells are no more similar than those of randomly selected cells. 🧠🗺️ Out now in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The revised version of our paper on the impact of top-down feedback is now out @elife.bsky.social: doi.org/10.7554/eLif... tl;dr: we show that using human-brain-like feedback/anatomy in a deep RNN leads to human-like visual biases! This work was led by @tmshbr.bsky.social #NeuroAI 🧠📈 🧪

#JNeurosci: Kuo et al. show that computational models of neural population responses can reconcile findings between mouse and primate, demonstrating how common computational principles allow for direct translation between their visual systems. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1133-25.2025

An Efficient Computing Theory of Prefrontal Structured Working Memory Representations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.16.706126v1

New MemLab publication led by Will Duckett finds that only trial-by-trial measures reveal links between subjectively experienced vividness and objective memory accuracy in younger and older adults, and people with aphantasia www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Pavlov would have been shocked and stoked by this study! It meticulously shows that what matters most for cue-reward learning is the duration between rewards: the longer this duration, the fewer the number of trials needed for behavioral and DA learning www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In y/n detection tasks, the internal signal and noise distributions have unequal variance. Instead of using d', we should be using dₐ. dₐ is usually estimated from confidence ratings, but this paper shows (in visual tasks) that it's possible to get dₐ from reaction times. Good news!👏 Will surely try

NSD-synthetic, the out-of-distribution companion dataset of NSD consisting of 7T fMRI responses to 284 artificial images, is now published. #NeuroAI #CompNeuro #neuroscience #AI doi.org/10.1038/s414...

CARTOON OF THE DAY 😕 (From @andertoon.bsky.social )

a while back i threatened to share this. finally online for detection tasks we often systematically estimates sensitivity wrong. we need to control for unequal variance in models, but we often don't coz it needs extra data now there's a virtually 'free' way to do it www.cell.com/iscience/pdf...

so Ned Block just wrote an excellent review on a book, by a journalist, on consciousness, partly based on interviews w/ "gurus, novelists, and cultural figures", w/ some "eccentric arguments" & views www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... i suppose Ned was invited to do it. but why should Science care??

Excited to share our new preprint! A massive (~400k trials) multi-site effort to test "subjective inflation," the influential but under-tested idea that subjective experience in the unattended periphery can be inflated beyond what objective performance would suggest www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Individual differences in artificial neural networks capture individual differences in human behavior https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.10.705061v1

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

My first paper is out in #SociologicalScience! With Jörg Stolz and Ruud Luijkx, we found robust evidence of ideological #bias in #secularization research: researchers' own religiosity is correlated with their probability of finding evidence of religious decline in their publications. Read more: 👇

LLMs good performance on medical exams does not translate to accurate performance in real-world settings (preregistered n~1,300 study). This can't be explained by current standard benchmarks for medical knowledge & simulated patient interactions. www.nature.com/articles/s41...