Dimensionality reduction is how the brain acquires knowledge. Cool new paper from the late, great, Mark Stokes. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Me this morning: I welcome and praise the rain gods for cooling the world Me this afternoon: I curse the rain gods for making everything humid as well as hot

Ok, look, what's been particularly infuriating about the redundancies at Exeter (and Nottingham and Newcastle and and and) is this weird idea that it only affects those individuals and institutions. It harms us all because we are so closely interconnected.

Finally out at @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social. Everything I think I know about word meanings. Particular focus on words that are unfamiliar or ambiguous. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Off to Durham to celebrate the life of the incredible Simon James. The fact that a cognitive neuroscientist is attending because of how much he influenced them is a testament to the wider positive effect he had on so many people across fields and walks of life. Genuinely one of the good guys

The real winner tonight is Micah Richards and his fashion sense

Weekend bake

As far as I can tell London is 1.1 I knew London was safe, but I didn't realise how safe it was relative to these cities

Enjoying how the Monstera in our bedroom has gone a bit wild of late

Open Mind, the free OA competitor to Cognition (El$evier) founded by Richard Aslin, has nearly caught up to it impact-factor-wise Submit your best work! It's a great journal with fast and constructive review, a great ed board, and lots of cool work Open Mind is the future of cogsci journals!

Love it when you get asked to review a paper that from the title and abstract you are genuinely excited to read

Favourite bit of last night, apart from the convincing win, was Emma Hayes scrawling tactics on a blackboard. Not polished in front of the TV, but refreshing to actually have someone who knows what they are talking discussing tactics in more detail than normal

⚽▶️🏠

Mid-Career in academia can be a difficult time to pursue research due to other pressures. I'm pleased to say we've opened the call for @britishacademy.bsky.social Mid-Career Fellowships with funding for 6-12 months to complete a major piece of research www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

Oh my, that Mbappe goal just now straight after Senegal scored is ridiculous

At the end of the term I asked my college creative wriing students to submit anonymous thoughts on AI. No real surprises: Mood ranges from resignation to despair, capitulation from embittered erosion of standards to total, feelings of betrayal from deep to furious. 1/

Finally out in Psychological Review (psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/...), our update to Signal Detection Theory. We show that contrary to the prevailing Gaussian assumption, evidence distributions in recognition memory are likely minimum extreme Gumbel!

The massive 7T-fMRI Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) has been extended to Neuropixels recordings in macaques! Exciting resource for inter-species comparisons by Li et al. @natneuro.nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Also nice News & Views by Kay and colleagues! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Wait, so the problem with social media isn't the inappropriate content, lack of oversight, horrific behaviour of some individuals etc (which could plausibly be tackled), but *checks notes* it is that they enable social interaction?!

Why is the universities crisis being ignored? Essential piece by @gsoh31.bsky.social for Arguably on the “grim dribbling away of one of Britain's great triumphs and economic advantages” – and why so few politicians seem to care. www.arguably.uk/p/the-quiet-...

Older daughter wanted to make pizzas for a birthday sleepover, so we made pizzas! Please accept in lieu of my more typical weekend bake (pizza dough still includes sourdough)

Postdoc position available at postlab.psych.wisc.edu. Pls send cv to [email protected]

Interested in a Postdoc on how brains/ANNs learn and represent visual/semantic concepts in Osaka, Japan? Check out the JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowships (up to 2 yr). I'd be happy to host postdocs to come work in my lab at CiNet, Osaka! Info🧵👇 Please repost! #neuroskyence #psychscisky #mlsky 🧠💻 /1

Since life is keeping me busy I don't have time to do much writing and what not now, so just to keep my blog active I fired off a quick post about the latest report on the humanities. sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2026/06/the-...

Love it when a student who has had their struggles suddenly starts enjoying uni and their studies. You can see their confidence grow and it is a wonderful thing to witness.

Belfast last night is the future for the U.K. some people want. The political voices condemning it so far seem to be mild and weak. We need a wall of outrage from people of influence to make it crystal clear that this is not who we are and will not be tolerated.

Happy to announce this work has been published www.nature.com/articles/s44... People can view the same event and recall it differently. Here we asked if two participants recall events similarly, where in the brain do they share event representations both at encoding and recall?

Closing in two days!

Weekend double bake

Join us at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig as a fully funded 4-year postdoc position (m/f/d) in Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience (Area: Social Cognition). Excellent infrastructure with a leading scientific network. Apply by 13 July: recruitingapp-5218.de.umantis.com/Vacancies/44...?

Nice to see a proper comparison. We've been using the same system YNiC @yorkpsychology.bsky.social for a couple of years now and get very similar SNR to our old cryogenic system. Super impressed so far!

Paying peer reviewers works. Expanded Fast & Fair experiment @biologyopen.bsky.social: • 5.5 vs 37.7 working days to decision with reviews • ~3 vs ~9 reviewer invitations per manuscript • no reduction in editor-assessed review quality • similar acceptance rates www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New perspective piece with @mandanas.bsky.social: We argue, based on LLMs and old connectionist theories, that schemas shouldn't be viewed as distinct from semantic or episodic memories. They're just one end of a detailed-to-abstract memory spectrum: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... #NeuroAI 🧠📈 🧪

Monday cake baking

I worked for UKRI for seven years and in my experience, the short timescales were 100% because of delays in central government. Usually because of delays in sign off by a minister; in the worst cases, due to number 10 comms teams insisting we hold back so the PM could announce it or whatever. 1/3

If you'll indulge me, I thought I would take this opportunity to discuss open research. I'm wary of doing this, as I think we've had too many researchers telling us how to do research "properly" all in the name of open research

Great @cogscisci.bsky.social conference today. Always interesting to hear how teachers are embedding cognitive science into the classroom. Amazing talks allround, including the awesome @chloebrunskill.bsky.social talking about our recent work on narratives and learning #cognition #psychscisky

Very happy to see our lab's commitment to open research recognised in this way. Thanks to all the amazing lab members past and present for going above and beyond what I had ever envisaged!

We have extended the deadline on this until June 8 when I'm back from holiday - please pass along to anyone you think would be interested! I've got email with me so drop me a line if you would like more details

Check out our latest profile! Dr. Megan Peters (@meganakpeters.bsky.social) studies how the brain represents & uses uncertainty and she also co-founded the online summer school, Neuromatch Academy. Learn more at the link below! #WomenInNeuroscience #StoriesOfWiN www.storiesofwin.org/profiles/202...

📢 New paper out in @nathumbehav.nature.com: we identify a previously undescribed fast thalamic oscillation (~19–45 Hz) in rare intracranial human recordings that appears specifically during wakefulness and REM sleep — but disappears during NREM sleep. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

If you're at APS in Barcelona this week, please go check out Mattia's tour de force on object typicality!

ANOTHER assistant professorship available in my department. Focus on contemporary neuroimaging applications to neuropsychology and psychopharmacology. #NeuroJobs vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric...

Very pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Open Research Awards, celebrating innovation, advocacy and good practice in open research across all disciplines at York! 🎉🏆 We will post about each our 9 awardees over the course of the week. You can read a summary of their projects on the wiki 👇

Weekend views not bad

Not far off preprinting some new behavioral work on schemas by the awesome @adamjcurtis.bsky.social. Stay tuned!

Join the ICOM mailing list to get updates on submissions, registration etc. 🧠 #ICOM2027

We've now highlighted all our amazing confirmed keynote speakers! Please sign up to our email list as this will be the main way we will communicate. Stay tuned for news about submissions, registration, and lots more! icom-memory.org #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition #ICOM2027 #philosophysky 🧪

Our last keynote speaker to highlight is Prof Lynn Nadel!!! icom-memory.org #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition #ICOM2027 #philosophysky 🧪