Very interesting and helpful data/paper on slower speech modulations by @ayeletlandau.bsky.social lab, with Maya Inbar and Eitan Grossman. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 🧪

Geometric properties of musical scales constitute a representational primitive in melodic processing. osf.io/preprints/ps... If you like music, music theory, cognitive science, and new ideas, this merits a look @omriraccah.bsky.social, Michael Seltenreich, Claire Pelofi, plus Fred Lerdahl & me

This 2021 paper by @benjamingagl.bsky.social and colleagues is full of important findings and ideas about the temporal structure of reading and speech. I keep coming back to these data. Eye movements during text reading align with the rate of speech production www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Will there be midterm elections? Mayoral elections in big blue cities? Will "THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER" fuck with all elections? Are we just gonna watch?? www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/o...

Yikes!

Just revisiting this paper that itself revisited *ooold* papers of mine (2001, 2003). This reanalysis and review shows clearly what remains right / plausible and what is unclear / dodgy about the AST hypothesis. Thanks, coauthors, for making me take a new look. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We’re hiring! 🥳fully funded PhD and postdoc positions in human cognitive neuroscience @mpicybernetics.bsky.social M/EEG and brain stimulation methods to study timing/ prediction/ attention/ oscillations tinyurl.com/5dku4du9 @timingresforum.bsky.social @gtc-tuebingen.bsky.social please repost 🙏

Another job here at Michigan - this one in Linguistics! Part of a cluster of hires with a focus on Cognitive Science and AI. Happy to chat to interested folks. apply.interfolio.com/171006

a seemingly general electrophysiological phenomenon: once you have to process stimuli, low-frequency rhythms disappear, spectrum becomes flatter & sometimes an increase in broadband gamma activity. we also found this for visual memory encoding in #iEEG data: doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2404-24.2025

A United States Senate investigation has identified more than 500 credible reports of human rights abuses in US immigration detention since January, including alarming allegations of mistreatment of pregnant women and children.

Happy Birthday Gary Larson, 75 years old today. A perfect excuse to celebrate his tireless efforts documenting major breakthroughs in science, including this pivotal moment for language research:

Uh oh.

Just looked through this paper again - and I still think these results are cool (and less obvious than one might think) :-) "Syllables and their beginnings have a special role in the mental lexicon" Yue Sun providing a nice perspective on phonology and the lexicon. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

The rumors are true! #CCN2026 will be held at NYU. @toddgureckis.bsky.social and I will be executive-chairing. Get in touch if you want to be involved!

Just saw a terrific Tosca and Sunday in the Park w George at the excellent Glimmerglass Festival @ggfestival.bsky.social In addition to the first-rate music, I appreciated the important reminders about our responsibility and citizenship given the dangerous direction the US is taking.

Five under the radar things Trump snuck into his "Big Beautiful Bill": - Delivers tax breaks to Big Oil - Defunds Planned Parenthood - Raises drug prices for seniors (Big Pharma giveaway) - Hikes monthly student loan payments - Makes ICE the biggest federal law enforcement agency

Not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions.

🍾🙌 Congrats to Cas Coopmans for winning the Otto Hahn medal for his terrific PhD thesis (2023)! Clever experiments, very thoughtful ideas, analyses & discussions - and important topics. Congratulations to Cas (next to Peter Hagoort). (And I am happy to work with Cas as a postdoc now 👍)

Good list for new students in neurobiology of language by @wmatchin.bsky.social jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/m213u2uh...

The Sound of Emotional Prosody: Nearly 3 Decades of Research and Future Directions A summary and perspective by Pauline Larrouy-Maestri, with Marc Pell & me. journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

Terrific lab - with excellent research facilities. Rosanne is a great supervisor.

Three *really* different and just terrific books I'm reading. Congrats M Chirimuuta, @jpeelle.bsky.social & @amypoeppel.bsky.social A philosophical analysis, a textbook, and a novel - all super entertaining and enriching.

For auditory processing aficionados: new from Y Sun, O Ghitza & G Michalareas tracking rate of periodicity is achievable without sharp acoustic edges or consistent phase alignment to envelope. consistent with assuming distinct processes for phase and rate tracking www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2...

War in the Middle East may well have called the president away from the G7 in Canada abruptly, but he also strikes me as the kind of person terrified of using someone else’s toilet.

No kings in New York City! That’s one ginormous protest! #nokings #newyorkcity #nyc

Gutsy and important www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...

Nice to see this PLoSBio paper out, by @ycabral.bsky.social and Molly Henry! journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Absolutely

If you want to do something fun Monday the 9th: come to @amypoeppel.bsky.social book release party at The Strand! www.strandbooks.com/events/event... Writer, producer & actress Jennifer Westfeldt will interview Amy. Good event to take the edge off and hang out with wonderful people.

Imagine how much worse things good get with TrumpElsevier

Disgusting

New study from my PostDoc Emily Cunningham! We used ECoG with stimulation of the STG to test for direct (potentially monosynaptic) A-to-V connections in humans. 112 out of 231 visual electrodes (across 19/23 patients) exhibited early responses to STG stimulation (as early as 18ms after stimulation).

This important lecture provides a clear and compelling analysis - based on several truly depressing cases. Deserves to be watched and shared. We can and must do better. media.ccc.de/v/eh22-84-th...

Our Interspeech2025 contrib (for geeks) arxiv.org/pdf/2505.23509 Audio DNNs: impressive performance on machine listening tasks. But most representations are computationally costly & uninterpretable. Let's try something different:

This important lecture provides a clear and compelling analysis - based on several truly depressing cases. Deserves to be watched and shared. We can and must do better. media.ccc.de/v/eh22-84-th...

It's fantastic for the Big10 universities to step up. I bet many Americans are more moved by Big10 schools-because they know and trust them, and really like sports-than by the (important & legitimate) efforts by Ivy L schools + their aspirational peers. Lets see some SEC universities as well!

Lead story in WSJ — there is no invasion, no rebellion , zero pretext at all for Trump invocation of 18th and 19th century laws for suspension of due process or deployment of combat troops for domestic purposes. www.wsj.com/world/americ...

So misguided to disband the committees… ugh. Scientists from all over the country pretty much volunteer their expertise and time to support the NSF. A very low cost and effective way to get advice (and criticism). I served on the SBE committee and the discussions were robust and hopefully helpful

RIP Such fun and smart novels!

Thomas Hobbes had prescient commentary on Trump: (his behavior is) nasty, (his temperament is) brutish, (his fingers are weirdly) short, (his incarceration will be long and) solitary, and (he shall die) poor.

really enjoying this new song by Wilmah (learned about it from alex poeppel, who produced it). give these guys a listen and support new music! open.spotify.com/album/4AhylM...

An FDA worker confirms what I've seen out there. CDC's entire FOIA office is gone. The FDA's communications and web office were cut. "The FDA as we know it is gone."

Thoughtful and generative piece on lateralization by @basilpreisig.bsky.social and Martin Meyer. An important perspective on issues that remain complex. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Public Statement on Supporting Science for the Benefit of All Citizens docs.google.com/document/d/1...

"It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies." Noam Chomsky

Pierre Paul Broca (1824-1880) is famous for advancing ideas of language localization in the brain. One of my favorite papers is from Dronkers and colleagues (2007), who used MRI scanning to re-examine Broca's two most famous cases. #neuroscienceoflanguage (1/5) 🧪🧵 academic.oup.com/brain/articl...