Very excited to share our latest paper led by @nbinish.bsky.social in @natneuro.nature.com We demonstrate how a communication subspace channels higher-dimensional PFC dynamics into lower-D motor activity to enable efficient behavior using human iEEG. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics. It turns out I was wrong. Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future. rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...

The 6x US memory champion – Nelson Dellis – can memorize a deck of cards in 40 seconds and knows the first 10K digits of pi. To figure out how, he let us peak inside his brain. Here is what we learned in our precision brain mapping study www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... youtube.com/shorts/MryMq...

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

Kudos to the Brown University students who are posting continuous live updates, spaced just minutes apart, on the campus shooting. A lot of grace and professionalism under immense pressure. www.browndailyherald.com/article/2025...

Ellis starting the day off by reading out Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago" in its entirety.

New paper from the lab: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A brief thread (1/10)

I made a video about the shutdown, and why this government worker won’t be a pawn. When the president and Supreme Court are both acting lawlessly, Congress must stand up and stop it. US science is collapsing and Congress needs to act. 🧪 Full video here: www.instagram.com/reel/DP1tXXE...

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

I'd like to commend the lawyers who wrote this complaint on behalf of the professors and employees of the University of California against the Trump administration. It's a sober legal document with strong claims, but also, this is a fight for public opinion, and this reads like the writers know it.

Want to know the behind the scenes of the "Disuse-driven plasticity in the human thalamus and putamen" paper? discover @ndosenbach.bsky.social and I interview by @cp-cellreports.bsky.social www.cell.com/cell-reports...

I will always be grateful for the immense -- and unique -- contribution the Swartz Program made in supporting theoretical neuroscience over the past 30 years. Its closure leaves a profound void. doi.org/10.53053/FPR...

via Benedicto.Uribe on TikTok

The conditions that have led to what’s happening in the US today exist in democracies around the world. They are an inevitable outcome of our collective failure to adapt to fundamental changes in the information ecosystem on which our democracies were originally built.

It's a demoralizing time to be a US scientist but that is part of their strategy. My friend Jeff Dangl just emailed our faculty reminding us that NSF and NIH grant review panels are still being held and staff there want us to keep submitting. Stay engaged and keep fighting! 1/n

Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com, we show how cognitive maps in the hippocampal system could solve the general problem of representing and relating multiple alternative action plans.  doi.org/10.1038/s414... With @doellerlab.bsky.social, Patrick Haggard, @vigano.bsky.social, Daniel Reznik

we're crowd-sourcing a searchable repository of tangible benefits stemming from federally-funded research. Come enjoy the great stories; or send in an idea; or volunteer to join the team. publicusaresearchbenefits.com please share and re-share so we get more great stories in there!

New work by @liushuze.bsky.social establishes an empirical link between policy complexity and neural dimensionality: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

An open letter supporting the international bachelor’s psychology programs threatened for cuts. Proceeding with these cuts would damage some of the most important and impactful psychology departments globally. #supportdutchpsychology openletter.earth/against-lang...

Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!

I got an email yesterday afternoon that my NSF SPRF Postdoctoral Fellowship was terminated. My grant focused on testing interventions to address online misinformation and I was 8 months into a two year appointment.

beautiful, heartbreaking words in this judge's rejection of trump's request The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.

Discussions this weekend made it clear that folks don't necessarily realize that our existing "scientific pipeline" of federal funding for basic research didn't just happen. The entire approach was deliberately designed to work this way, on purpose Meet Vannevar Bush

MANY PROPOSALS WERE WITHDRAWN BY NIH ON THIS CYCLE FOR SIMILAR REASONS. Is this yet another mechanism to avoid funding research? I don't know. Chime in here if you know of other cases.

We're disappointed to see Ben Barres's powerful book "The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist" among the ~400 titles removed from the Naval Academy Library. Needless to say, we're proud to have published his book and will keep it — and his memory — alive.

Seeing a lot of anger over people in ICE detention having to eg file habeas claims on their own. There are existing efforts to support these folks: not just full legal rep, but partial assistance (easier to scale). Here’s one volunteer network (full disclosure: my org) immigrationjustice.us

When a person is abducted, there's a number to call to report & identify. A habeas petition challenging the abduction is electronically filed in that district, by a lawyer admitted in that district, within 30 minutes of the call. Anywhere in the country, 24 hours a day. Nothing else is good enough.

Sackets Harbor, NY school principal Jaime Cook speaks to a reporter about protesting today for her three students who were abducted by ICE: www.wwnytv.com/2025/04/04/7...

Please circulate this free gift article widely. This is an incalculable loss to our country; a nightmare with generational consequences put in place by the stupidest of people who have no idea what they are doing and wouldn’t care if they did

Science is under threat in the US. @elife.bsky.social have commissioned a series of articles discussing the implications and what we can do. The first three articles are now live. More to follow: elifesciences.org/articles/106... elifesciences.org/articles/106... elifesciences.org/articles/106...

I gave a talk Wed on the "Grand Plan," and I ended it by describing why this paper is such a big deal. If you are interested in individual variability, precision medicince, or the RDoC agenda writ large, this is a terrific example of emergine ways to measure what we've never been able to before.

1/7 Our paper on individual variability in decision-making is finally out in @nature.com! Inspired by the classic work by Mante and Sussillo, we trained many rats to solve context-dependent decision-making, and we found that different brains use different neural mechanisms to solve the same task!

This is a PhD student in *epidemiology*

I always hated the "this is the greatest country in the world" refrain, but it is striking to me that the things they are killing in government — an unrivaled scientific research enterprise, incredible public lands, etc — are some of the only things that made such a statement vaguely defensible.

This is horrible to post, but I may as well post it. We are essentially shutting down research operations in my group, which is focused on treatments for pediatric brain cancer. I’m a well funded investigator, and there’s no choice. Science can’t function without the stability of NIH

Thank you very much @hhmijanelia.bsky.social and @hhmi.org for inviting me to give a seminar! That talk was supposed to be today, Tues Mar 11th. I would have talked about @lafosse.bsky.social's work on neural activation functions (con't below)... But I had to cancel due to the NIH travel ban. 🧪 1/

When OMB head Russ Vought talks about deliberate efforts to put federal employees "in trauma" and make them quit their jobs, he's talking about people like Michelle, recently fired by Musk/Trump. www.sfgate.com/california/a...

Bluetorial: The path to a new pain medication with little potential for addiction Perhaps a good story to share with folks who want to learn about how biomedical research works and where advances come from.

what happens when we slash US public funding for a biomedical field, & increase the availability & significance of private funding, when the media generally become less restricted by traditional/expert regulations? unfortunately, i may know the answer, based on some related experiences 1/

Last night I found out that the NSF math postdoctoral fellowship I applied for is being deleted because it does not comply with Trump’s executive orders on DEI in the federal government. I’m going to answer some FAQs and share some thoughts about this ordeal in this thread 1/n

The Internet Archive has to date downloaded 500 terabytes of US government websites, which it crawls at the end of every presidential term. The whole archive is fully searchable. This effort's housed by a donation-funded nonprofit, not a branch of the US government. blog.archive.org/2024/05/08/e...

Hi, Vox reporter here: If you've had a study section, NIH travel, or other NIH-related meeting cancelled (or not), raise your hand! Reply or DM me, and repost for visibility if you're able. #academicsky @drugmonkey.bsky.social

Three new CDML publications to start off 2025! First up: research on multidimensional control from @davideghez.bsky.social in @naturehumbehav.bsky.social! Across three behavioral experiments and with computational modeling, Davide shows that people adapt control in a distractor-specific fashion.