White House proposes new rules giving political appointees final approval of research grants These proposed Office of Management and Budget regulations would render the federal research grant review process opaque www.scientificamerican.com/article/whit...

Yosef Grodzinsky's new book, mitpress.mit.edu/978026205200... Chomsky, the Brain, and the AI Fantasy (MIT Press), provides helpful comparisons between LLMs and human language representation and processing, and outlines important points for both research directions (linguistics, AI).

New paper that merits a read (Im totally unbiased...not). Simple, straightforward, impactful message. Prediction a la LLM is nice. Constituent-constrained prediction is nicer. @jiajiezou.bsky.social and Nai Ding show brain, behavioral, MEG, ECoG data. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

Cool new data. Please check it out.

This conference is going to be so cool! Good science good people good location. Register ASAP! #neuroskyence www.fens.org/news-activit...

This will be a terrific meeting in a lovely location!

I played around with building a bluesky labeler for neuroscience methods. subscribe to: neuromethods.bsky.social and like the corresponding post to have a shiny methods label appear in your profile.

Please tell friends & colleagues about our unique course “Genetics & Neurobiology of Language” July 27-Aug 3 2026. Expert tutors, interactive talks, panel discussions, all in a beautiful setting. Scholarships available: meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx... @cshlnews.bsky.social @cshlbanbury.bsky.social

Great opportunity for important work and training! I hope to collaborate closely with Nina and Pierre on this innovative cog sci/ cog neuro project. #neuroskyence

every single goddam crisis happening right now is self imposed

Amazing work by star postdoc Francisco Garcia Rosales in collaboration with @davidpoeppel.bsky.social . Happy reading :)

For aficionados of timing, prediction, psychophysics-and anyone who wants to look at something other than the news to be distracted-a new study by Matthias Grabenhorst and Georgios Michalareas: The anticipation of imminent events is time-scale invariant www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.... #neuroskyence

share.google/images/38xwq... I hope not.

A friendly little back and forth with Rosas and colleagues to clarify some concepts about research strategies in neuroscience. Check out Rosas1 - then van Bree - then Rosas2. Maybe useful. Maybe. Hope springs eternal.

Why stop at 8? Hopefully a useful short exchange, in any case.

My colleague, friend, former PhD/postdoc @xiangbin-teng.bsky.social and his colleagues argue for (yet) another interesting attribute of music listening. journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Surprise visit in our seminar. We were discussing Reflections on Language (Chomsky 1975), and guess who stopped by?

Greg's new book. CONGRATS! Finally! A *must-read* for everyone interested in brain and language. Full of important (old/classical & new) stuff, exceptionally clear, integrative, provocative, carefully argued. This will stimulate lots of new experiments, models, ideas.

Origins of language, one of humanity’s most distinctive traits, may be best explained as a unique convergence of multiple capacities each with its own evolutionary history, involving intertwined roles of biology & culture. This framing can expand research horizons. A 🧵 on our @science.org paper.🧪1/n

OMG don’t tell our deans and chairs!

A very useful review and update on the anatomic infratstructure for language: "Brain structural networks underlying language" by Angela Friederici journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1...

I really like the cogsci thinking and music in this paper. Happy that it's finally out! Thanks @omriraccah.bsky.social and Michael Seltenreich for leading this project. Geometric properties of musical scales constitute a representational primitive in melodic processing www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

I'm incredibly honored to receive the Bernice Grafstein Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Mentoring. This makes me very sentimental! I'm so proud of the wonderful, super sharp students and postdocs that I have had the privilege and pleasure to work with. ❤️ Thank you!!!

The psychology program at NYU Abu Dhabi has open rank open area positions in cognition-perception-cogneuro. Wonderful colleagues, excellent research infrastructure (incl MRI, MEG, EEG), close ties to NYU New York. Superfast growing part of the research world apply.interfolio.com/175417 #neuroskyence

CogNeuroLanguage: new by @lauragwilliams.bsky.social & @jeanremiking.bsky.social (w Alec Marantz & me) shows how the brain maintains-updates continuously unfolding lang hierarchy during comprehension, anchoring ling theories to biological implementation www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #neuroskyence

BREAKING The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Maria Corina Machado for “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

A #BlueskyLullaby for tonight: Just a couple days ago, these two Swedish musicians—classical guitarist Emil Ernebro and harmonicist Filip Jers—released this cover of the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." It's jammin' and it's lovely. See you around. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAmh...

This from @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social is just amazingly good. Turns out you can be wildly successful at politics while still being smart, thoughtful, and aware of history. I hope politicians all over will use this as a role model.

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....