mike freund

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!

Neural and behavioral signatures of policy compression in cognitive control Making context-dependent decisions incurs cognitive costs. Cognitive control studies have investigated the nature of such costs from both computational and neural perspectives. In this paper, we offer...

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

Against Language Barriers: A Call to Protect International Education in Dutch Academia

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.

was it at least a good anova?

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.

Pardons tho

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.

The Coming Out of a Transgender Scientist "I know that I am making the right decision because whenever I think about changing my gender role, I am flooded with feelings of relief."

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 Under Threat in the United States: How scientists and institutions should respond Individual researchers and university leaders need to make the case for science to their elected representatives and to the public at large.

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.

Individual variability of neural computations underlying flexible decisions - Nature Behavioural experiments to study decision-making in response to context-dependent accumulation of evidence provide testable models that are consistent with the heterogeneity in neural signatures among...

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