Elliot Smith

A group photo of the team after the first stem cell surgery for epilepsy.

Incredible news!

Shervin Rahimpour, MD, has joined the Neurona trial for the implantation of stem cells to treat drug-resistant epilepsy.

Although still experimental, this transformative trial represents a huge step forward in care without removing or ablating part of the brain.

Ask a Scientist! Is there a question you've always wanted to ask a scientist but haven't had the opportunity to do so? Now's your chance! This month, Your Neighborhood Scientist is taking all your science questions, f...

At Your Neighborhood Scientist, we believe public understanding starts with listening. What science question do you want answered? Maybe it's something you’ve seen online and aren’t sure about?

Submit it here and we'll answer it: forms.gle/wPyPUVcZ2LbG...

#SciComm #STEM #YourNeighborhoodScientist

Where you look next isn’t arbitrary.
In our new paper, we model human eye movements in immersive visual search as reinforcement learning under cognitive constraints. 🧵

Everybody still on there convinced that they are a special flower unaffected by propaganda.

3) social media is not only for advocacy, but for interaction. Even the bigger accounts that are ostensibly doing science advocacy over there are still looking at X, which at this point is an informational dumpster fire. Maybe just my feed, but I doubt it.

2) empirically, the biggest accounts are staying on twitter. Is it because they have a deep commitment to advocacy in adversarial spaces, or they have a lingering attachment to their following? Are marginalized perspectives promoted in this case? Is that good for sci comms?

1) the cost function of social media is to increase engagement by promoting the most inflammatory posts. Not ideal for science comms.

So you all are still looking at X? I totally agree that it’s super important to advocate for science everywhere, but I think it’s a little more complicated than that, based on how social media works. 3 quick points:

My friend & colleague, @bkundu.bsky.social, is hiring for a super interesting & well-paid position:

neurojobs.sfn.org/job/39531/le...

#neurojobs

@summerfieldlab.bsky.social and I are very happy to share this paper! Building on work by @scychan.bsky.social, we show that how people learn depends on the distribution of examples they see, and changes in a way that’s very similar to transformer models.

I am looking to hire 2-3 post-docs over the course of the next few months to work on questions related to cognitive control in humans, broadly construed. EEG, TMS, DBS, sEEG, fMRI or related methodological experience preferred.
Apply here:

jobs.uiowa.edu/jobSearch/po...

Lab website: wessellab.org

Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain - Nature Communications How humans process competing information when making multi-alternative decisions remains unclear. Here, the authors show that the brain resolves the trade-off between “evaluating within” and “comparin...

New paper alert 📣 #Neuroskyence

"Rhythmic sampling of multiple decision alternatives in the human brain" @natcomms.nature.com

together with @ycaoneuro.bsky.social @maryamtohidi.bsky.social @donnerlab.bsky.social @ktsetsos.bsky.social

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
🧵1/

If you work at the intersection of computational neuroscience and machine learning, consider applying for this postdoc position (January 2027 start date):
academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/15868
An opportunity to work with a great group of people across Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks.

@zuckermanbrain.bsky.social
@flatironinstitute.org
@kempnerinstitute.bsky.social

1/14

Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 09 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-025-02371-7Vaziri et al. examined how humans detect changes in auditory pitch, revealing that listeners rely on correlations in sound intensity over frequency and time, processing that is reminiscent of visual motion detection.

Humans can use positive and negative spectrotemporal correlations to detect rising and falling pitch

We’re hiring! The Suthana Lab @ Duke is looking for a Research Assistant to join our team studying human memory & real-world 🧠 dynamics using wearable tech & intracranial recordings.

Apply: careers.duke.edu/job/Durham-C...

You can also email suthanalab@duke.edu with CV/questions. Please share!

The fact that nobody wants to come to the US now does technically make the border more secure…

The unexpected sight: improvement of visual function following intracortical microstimulation of the human occipital cortex Alfaro et al. report the case of a blind individual who participated in a clinical trial involving intracortical microstimulation of the visual cortex. Fol

A blind person recovered low vision within a few days of being implanted with a Utah array and receiving electrical stimulation in the visual cortex.

An unexpected and exciting discovery by @umh.es researchers 👀🧠

doi.org/10.1093/brai...

Very nice! Congrats!

Misspecified models create the appearance of adaptive control during value-based choice - Communications Psychology In a new computational analysis of previous work, this study shows that a control-free mechanism better accounts for value-based decisions than an account that assumes top-down control invigorating th...

Final paper of my PhD 🤗

www.nature.com/articles/s44...

There is growing interest in how cognitive control may improve value-based decision making.

However, we find that a recent paper overestimated the role of control in their task, leading to erroneous interpretations of dACC recordings.

senior folks: please do this for your trainees!

Preprint alert!!! We recorded directly from the human ventral tegmental area (VTA), the principal source of cortical dopaminergic innervation, while patients performed an instrumental learning task. 🧵👇

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 #CCN2026 Proceedings submissions are open!
CCN 2026 again features an 8-page Proceedings track (alongside extended abstracts). Accepted papers will appear in CCN-Proceedings (CCN‑P) with DOIs on OpenReview.

Using artificial neural networks to reveal the human confidence computation Author summary Human decisions are accompanied by a sense of confidence which reflects the decision accuracy. Conventionally, human confidence has been studied using two-choice tasks with simple stimu...

How do people compute a sense of confidence? This question is usually addressed using very simple images because we don't know how complex stimuli are represented internally. In a new paper, we addressed this question using artificial neural networks (ANNs).

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

US science after a year of Trump: what has been lost and what remains A series of graphics reveals how the Trump administration has sought historic cuts to science and the research workforce.

A year into Trump’s second presidential term, Nature presents a series of graphics that reveal the impact of his administration on science. 🧪

A comprehensive framework for statistical testing of brain dynamics - Nature Protocols This protocol covers a package for running statistical testing on the temporal dynamics of neural activity data obtained from various functional neural recording modalities.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻?
"High-resolution activity maps of PFC did NOT align with cytoarchitecturally defined subregions."
Key tenet in neuroscience is that cytoarchitectonic boundaries correspond to functional ones.
NB: study in the mouse
#neuroskyence
doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Aperiodic 1/f noise drives ripple activity in humans - Nature Communications How aperiodic 1/f noise drives ripple activity in human brain and impacts on ripple detections is not fully understood. Here authors show that ripple detections should be driven by the 1/f noise, whic...

Ripple oscillations are central for memory and sleep.

But ripple detection in humans remains challenging. Here we introduce a simulation approach in @natcomms.nature.com as common ripple detectors mainly pick up 1/f noise and not genuine oscillations

👇
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#neuroskyence

New preprint from the lab, led by post-doc @cheolsoh.bsky.social and former post-doc Mario Hervault (now Asst Prof at UGrenoble).

The boys used synchronous intracranial recordings from the human subthalamic nucleus & EEG to study β bursts during global & selective response inhibition.
Details in 🧵

Frontotemporal bursting supports human working memory Cortical neural activity varies dynamically during memory periods, when relevant information is not present in the environment. But how those dynamics…

Frontotemporal beta & gamma bursting in the human brain correlated with working memory functions.

Congrats to Walt et al. & @bkundu.bsky.social

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...