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...
How does this stim protocol compare to what is used in human studies?
Ellis starting the day off by reading out Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago" in its entirety.
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...
I'm really curious what factors drive var(nTc). Both from basic perspective, but also from practical -- of someone that wants to put these dynamics under tighter experimental control / to have more certainty about what's happening when :)
It is so interesting that the nTc is so variable across trials.
But this is also sobering: clearly, time-aligned trial averaging has *deep* flaws -- yet so much of human cog neuro relies on it, due to unavailability of high-SNR recordings...
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.
You sound like an all-American to me !
post-script: "all-american upbringing" seems to preclude this usage
i think it could have a variety of connotations (see other comments), but one dominant usage is in reference to being competitive in athletics or academics on national scale, a la en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-Ame...
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...
…Btw I do not mean to suggest there is no worth to mixed-selective perspectives, or that they are wrong! Personally I have just struggled when thinking about how exactly to provide strong positive evidence for them. And curious to hear your perspective.
You can’t be, until you find one :) Its existence is not guaranteed. The same I do not think is true for the mixed basis case. IMO, this is what often makes it compelling when an interpretable factorized basis is identified.
What appears mixed and non-linear from one basis could be sparse & factorized from another. When you see mixed selectivity, how can you be confident that your basis isn't just wrong?
doi.org/10.1038/s415...
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...
What is this, a fitness test for Presidents?
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.
Fully agree. Our story feels incomplete to me without those things, but we simply had to get it out the door. But, I think Todd & co. are working on those follow-ups now!
of course, don't mean to imply that one method is better or more sensitive in general than the other (that depends on exp design & theoretical questions). just that they can be sensitive to different neural features.
:) Borne mostly from reflecting on reactions from family/friends ("you're STILL in school/a student?!") --- yes, aren't we all?
(...but correct me if i'm misremembering)
So the decoders we used didn't require the neural signatures to be aligned across subjects, but only across sessions w/in subject. Seems likely that at finer spatial scales, multi-subj decoders would lose sensitivity more quickly than subject-specific ones.
hey thanks for mentioning David! Interesting ideas in this thread. Yes we were able to identify relatively reliable signatures at the region level. One potentially relevant difference btw our studies: our decoders were subject-specific, whereas yours were fitted on data from multiple subjs, IIRC.
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!
