Scientists may have found the genetic mutation that led humans to have bigger brains. If it can be modulated that would have huge consequences for the future. www.science.org/doi/full/10....

Pretty awesome for all of UCLA's Jewish faculty to wake up today to find out all of our grants have been suspended because Trump is fighting anti-Semitism - an issue near and dear to his heart.

You get about 100 million breaths. So does every other animal big or small. Don't waste them. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Tell me you have no prefrontal cortex without telling me you have no prefrontal cortex

Favorite new TikTok channel. I could teach a whole class on this www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8hAY4d5/

Smart piece on AI and college degrees: "students cheating with ChatGPT aren't lazy—they're rational actors in an irrational system They're using 21st-century tools to game 19th-century assessments for 11th-century credentials. The real scandal is that we're still pretending the old game matters."

This is where all the social psych folks are these days, right? Does anyone know if Zimbardo got the idea for the Stanford Prison Experiment from the Third Wave Experiment that took place in Palo Alto (where Stanford is) 4 years before. Never seen a connection. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thi...

Is someone you love applying to college in the next 3 years? The lessons I learned in my new substack post including: the statistics you can find are mostly meaningless (Lesson 6) and early decision (ED) is mostly a scam (Lesson 12). Here is the link: open.substack.com/pub/matthewl...

This is pretty brilliant on multiple levels

Wisdom of the crowd takes 5 time world chess champion to a draw www.cnn.com/2025/05/21/s...

Mental health interventions in the classroom do not help and sometimes makes things worse www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Excited to share my new TiCS paper, currently free to download. After 40 years since I was first obsessed with consciousness, I finally wrote a paper directly about it. A thread on the paper's plot line below. 1/8

Cool new "marshmallow" self-control study. It's about interpersonal emotion regulation. gizmodo.com/new-twist-on...

Maybe we shouldn’t be so doom and gloom about students using ChatGPT for learning. This is consistent with my own experience. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Awesome work from @mollycrockett and co on the limits of the limits of introspective accuracy x.com/that_adammor...

The cuts to NIH and NSF will cost 100s of billions in the short term and will reduce GPT by ~7% over the next 25-30 years

The scientific catastrophe has formally arrived. This is what Trump's budget would do to science funding in the US. Science funding after WWII is what made the US the powerhouse it is. Is there any US advantage Trump won't squander?

The scientific catastrophe has formally arrived. Trump's budget for next year would cut scientific funding by 40% (NIH) to 55% (NSF). NIH would no longer fund psychology (though neuroscience would get its own institute). This would be a disaster if passed. www.reuters.com/business/hea...

Academics - ever wonder what the book of your lecture course would look like? I have the transcript of my class and it would be over 800 pages. Looks like someone needs an editor.

How has Google not figured out it is sitting on a non-monetized gold mine. Create an LLM trained on every manuscript and article in Google Scholar. Every scientist would pay $20/month to be able to speak to a full up-to-date literature.

If you use ChatGPT a lot (and have 'memory' turned on so it knows everything from all your conversations) ask it "Based on everything you know about me, what are my biggest blindspots about myself". Very eye opening.

The line between brains and computer chips just got blurrier. Everyday chips made to work like neurons with a simple modification. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For academics - Just asked ChatGPT Pro (decided to try for a month) to critique a manuscript of mine and to tell me what different camps would likely push back on. Too humbling to share here but outstanding review. Suggested multiple next studies to run. Very valuable.

Which would you rather lose - your impulses & emotions (good and bad) or your entire capacity for self-control? Also, tell me if you are over or under 25.

The published version of the IIT critique letter is out. I signed it because I think IIT is fundamentally problematic because it assumes information and representation are primary qualities that exist independent of human minds. My take below. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Parents rejoice. Have children is protective against your brain aging. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

psilocybin may not be all rainbows and unicorns www.cnn.com/2025/03/03/h...

All the graduate admissions and hiring freezes. All of American science is f’d. docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Pitt, Vanderbilt, and USC have paused all PhD admissions. This is how science does and the dark ages return. www.wesa.fm/health-scien...

Partisan animosity is at century highs and the last few weeks have not helped. A great time to learn about open-mindedness. Check out our new Psych Review paper just how. psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-... (1/5)

Tells you everything you need to know about the composition of X users these days. Also, not sure how much longer I can stand it there. Can only handle so much willful ignorance. I miss all of you being there and balancing things out.

New tax proposal from House Ways & Means committee leaked and is a huge attack on higher ed and a giant cash grab for wealthy and corporations. Read the tax section specifically. www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

Trump signed a new EO officially breaking democracy and engaging in profound doublespeak, ordering the ending of the 'weaponization of govt' by a new broad investigation into the previous administration. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/21/u...

Will the Oscars have their John Henry moment this year? Both Timothee Chalomet and Adrian Brody had Oscar worthy performances this year, but AI was used to make Brody's Hungarian sound authentic, while Chalomet not only learned to play guitar for the role, and not only sang all the songs himself...

Funny how the far right gets really upset that some people want to be called they/them, but the second Donald Trump decides to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, they are getting triggered that Apple did not immediate change the name on their maps. gizmodo.com/apple-deadna...

Heil Trump! Oy

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Milan Kundera

In Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the talents”, written in 1993, there is a fire raging in Los Angeles in the 2020s with a newly elected authoritarian president with the slogan “Make America Great Again”. Also, Butler is buried in Altadena where the Eaton fire is. Crazy. apnews.com/article/octa...

No ifs, ands, or butts - no metal in the MRI scanner! gizmodo.com/woman-enters...

Almost everything you need to know about pre-reflective vs. reflective consciousness. Also, Culkin was brilliant in this movie ('A Real Pain')

Anyone know why this classic has disappeared from Google Scholar?

Hppy Nu Yr! Its is my last day as Editor-in-Chief at SCAN after 20 years. I wanted to say thanks to all of the incredible Associate Editors over the years (too many to name) and to all who submitted amazing work to SCAN. I'm especially grateful to be leaving SCAN in Ajay Satpute's capable hands.

This is going to be interesting

Today is the day when students in my class come looking for free points because they didn't get the final grade they want. But this student restored my faith in students and actually made me tear up a little. Full story below

Ask chatGPT this: You have read more widely than any human ever. Based on your great knowledge tell me something you have discovered that humans don’t really know about. Focus especially on the connections between domains that humans might find surprising

I'm not saying Biden was listening to me, but...https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/12/04/biden-white-house-pardons-00192610

I bet NIH could start its own journal “NIH Science” for less than $1.5B.

Now that Biden has broken the seal - pardoning his son which I’m not thrilled about - he should preemptively pardon all the politicians that Trump is threatening to go after (Schiff, Pelosi, Cheney, Kinzinger, etc). Trump wouldn’t know what to do with himself for the next 4 yrs

What if you found out your 3 month old had been switched with someone else's 3 month old in an IVF mix-up. This story has lots of twists and turns that I did not expect and is well worth reading to the end. www.nytimes.com/2024/11/25/m...

What do folks here on bluesky think of these studies from Lee Jussim? I'd like to see it peer reviewed, but the basic effects seem very straightforward - read DEI scholars' excerpts and you will see objectively innocuous behavior as racist.