Seeing a lot of fiction in academic Bluesky over the break. Here is a paragraph I like from Brandon Sanderson’s “Tress of the Emerald”:

Hate: Myself for getting old enough to think my hot takes matter. What a conundrum, because that is a hot take.

Hate: when people design their tasks around a computational model, as opposed to designing their model to a task. This is real progress because I used to use to just hate computational models…..

Hate: Bayesian chauvinism, not to be confused with Bayesian enthusiasm which I love.

Hate: Overextending claims about psychology/cognitive neuroscience based on resting-state fMRI

This new year my resolution is to try to be more positive. So until then I will list a bunch of things I hate to get it out of my system. Hate: the intersection of toxic masculinity, podcasts, and neuroscience

If Congress is so concerned with defining athletes by genetics (sex assigned at birth), why stop there? Height, lung capacity, and muscle fiber type are genetic too — maybe we should ban athletes over 6 feet to “level the playing field.” I’m so disappointed. Also wtf that I align with Ted Cruz.

We're thrilled to announce the publication of our newest paper in @plosone.org 🎉 "Aging and episodic memory specificity: Evidence challenging a domain-general pattern separation decline" Read Dr. Youm's full paper here: doi.org/10.1371/jour... @melaniecohn.bsky.social #Memory #Psychology #Aging

Coming from a conference… PSA: Let’s stop using sanity check with your data. I think it low key undermines mental health inclusivity. I like validation check as an alternative. Not a PSA, but a personal thing: I have never found data sexy and never will.

My current mantra: If mini-backpacks came back, one day government funding will too.

Strong endorse. Nina is the best and at the cutting edge of multiple fields all at once!

Excited to share that my TEDx talk is finally available online. I loved sharing what the science shows us: that it's time to reframe adolescence - from problem to ✨ potential ✨ 1/ www.youtube.com/watch?v=wr8V...

Great, I come back from Canada to see that Trump ruined poop jokes.

Last Friday, Curtis Phills and I ran our first conference! Introducing CODES. The Consortium of Oregon Diversity and Equity Scholars! We were excited to bring together folks across Oregon who do diversity science work. We need community more than ever. Hope we can continue this in future years...

I promised my nieces we would make moonbeam ice cream when I came to visit. Hivemind, what should that mean. I am currently thinking ice cream, mini marshmallows, and silver sprinkles.

The great thing about AOL instant messenger was that you knew when your friends were free to chat. I wish my cell phone contacts had that.

2026 @jocn.bsky.social Travel Fellowship @jocn.bsky.social and Cog. Neurosci. Soc. to offer a stipend of $3000, plus waived conf. reg. and waived poster submission fee to attend www.cogneurosociety.org/annual-meeti... , to one trainee based at an institution located in each of five regions:

New review paper with Maverick Smith on improving memory for stuff people actually want to remember: doi.org/10.1177/0963...

Tenure Pro-Tip: If you are ever worried about your ego inflating, take a U-Jam dance class at the YMCA that has far too many windows.

Umm my non-science friend wanted to roast me, and fed my papers into chat GPT. I would have guessed that deeply hurtful comments would have to come from people that know me well, but ouch.

Tenure pro tip: Playing Mars, Bringer of War during an automatic car wash really elevates the experience.

Good news! My lab isn’t a failure 🤷🏾 . Jkjkjk they are the best!

Resistance is hard. It is likely better for my mental health to dissociate from the constant threats to my identity as a researcher and queer man. But dissociating also undermines my authenticity as a person. Maybe the solution is continued resistance but fostering joy and silliness along the way.

When an eyewitness shares a memory, what might make a jury perceive it as accurate? 👩🏽⚖️ A recent #psynomPBR paper by Martinez et al. suggests that certain communication styles shape how accurate a memory seems, regardless of its actual accuracy. Post by Alyssa Asmar. buff.ly/S4SeOyo

Not all voting has to be bad and malicious (Re: big stupid bill). Psychonomic Society voted two of my favorite researchers for mid-career awards! Congrats Jason Chein and Shayna Rosenbaum!!! @mindimager.bsky.social

Advice for junior colleagues: If you are feeling old bike to graduation in regalia and everyone will tell you congratulations and you can pretend you are 28 getting your PhD.

Where were the minions on January 6th? That’s what I want to know.

Advice for junior colleagues: If you get a large matcha smoothie you can use it’s a microphone to sing Break Free by Ariana Grande. I didn’t learn this til post tenure.

Oh man, what a self-own. A govt lawyer brought up DEI in passing, Judge Young was Not Happy: "If putting these words together, DEI, is somehow offensive... does that mean our policy is homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion? Are you going to stand there and tell me that's now the policy of the NIH?"

Remember when science social media could be fun. Real housewives research taglines go. I’m like consolidation, your fear makes me stronger.

One student *did* write a cognition haiku at the end of their exam! “Saccades, to and fro Attend to the relevance Select, remember.” I love it! #CogSciSky #PsychSciSky

Status update: Billie Eilish is everything!

"Scientists might also be realizing that there’s little safety in silence." #SpeakOut www.science.org/content/arti...

I'm looking for a new full-time research assistant ("junior specialist"). It's not quite "lab manager" because I have someone who takes care of the administrative tasks, and here I'm looking for someone to help us get research done! Info is below, please pass on to any talented candidates, thanks!

NIH IRTA program resumes recruitment. Good sign!

A helpful read on some of the legal avenues for appeal. What the new administration is doing to #NIH (& other HHS orgs like #CDC, #FDA) is not only economically wasteful but blatantly, morally bankrupt. People will be more sick and die needlessly as a result of these actions, now and in the future.

Are you at CNS: hot* symposia alert featuring myself, @aaronbornstein.bsky.social, @chelseahelion.bsky.social, and @iancballard.bsky.social talking about uncertainty resolution across learning, memory, social cognition, and decision-making. See you Monday at 10:00 AM. *I sweat a lot giving talks

That feeling when you realize you can’t survive 5 days without reading glasses, so you buy them in the airport and feel super old, and then put them on and immediately have your hand wrinkles magnified. See you at CNS!

Hey everybody! #CNS2025 bleepstorm incoming! 9 POSTERS! I work with an amazing group of scientists, celebrating them this weekend in Boston is makes me so excited and hopeful (and I usually abhor the use exclamation points!) (All posters available on the lab website): mnemology.org/conferences/...

The MAC lab is hiring a full-time lab manager to start in June! You will have the opportunity to conduct research projects relating to long-term memory and concept knowledge (methods include online and in-person behavioral experiments, fMRI, TMS). Apply by March 26 careers.drexel.edu/cw/en-us/job...

My lab’s latest paper, with @vpmurty.bsky.social. Memory for a scary real-world event (a haunted house) is reflected in the “authenticity” of expressed memories, but listeners mistakenly think accuracy is reflected in how “analytic” the expressed memory is - oops! link.springer.com/article/10.3...

MY WASHING MACHINE HAS BEEN INFECTED BY DEI

Today I cut off all of my hair while singing Iggy Azalia’s hook “I have one less problem without you”. I think I am officially losing it.

I’m proud to be affiliated with a department with a massive strength in Diversity Science, and am going to start placing words like diversity and equity in my emails/website to help produce some noise into the system that is trying to systematically erase them.

I think we are asking the wrong question. It isn’t is this the end of the world, but which dystopian sci fi novel best captures this end of the world scenario? Post pandemic I thought Oryx and Crake, but now I am feeling 1984.

Oh no. I told my graduate student that I would have AI generate pictures of an N-armed bandit, and then went to post it here and saw that all the NIH study sections have been cancelled. Is there still room for levity?

Did we decide we are going to ignore seeing the Teslas are colleagues are driving? Asking for a friend….

New paper with Johanna Jarcho, Isabel Leiva, and Sam Reisman looking at distortions in perceived liking and its relationship with bullying (in adults!). Don’t worry we collected memory data for future analyses! www.jmoodanxdisorders.org/article/S295...

New paper out! Memory for object features is warped according to their role in a category, w/ features shared across category-mates misremembered as more similar. We explored the phenomenon in our NN model of the hipp. w/ @annaschapiro.bsky.social & @codydong.bsky.social doi.org/10.1162/opmi...

Anyone want to collaborate on teaching children to Dab to cover their mouth to stop the spread of flu?