The Viking (Gunnar Blohm)

Of interest to our Neuromatch community! Check out this webinar from @comm4rigor.bsky.social

💙 @kordinglab.bsky.social @gunnarblohm.bsky.social & Jordan Matelsky

Register for free ➡️ www.c4r.io/blogs-news/p...

Financial stewardship. Sustainable growth. Apply to serve on the Neuromatch Board of Directors, as Treasurer

Open Call: volunteer Treasurer on Neuromatch Board of Directors.

Applications close 27 March 2026

💼 Read the full position description: drive.google.com/file/d/1t-k3...

➡️ Apply: airtable.com/appBGDTJHkIq...

#BoardOpportunity #NonprofitBoard #NonprofitLeadership #NonprofitVolunteer

😱

NEW: Hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4,400 times since October that President Donald Trump’s administration is detaining immigrants unlawfully, a Reuters review of court records found.

The government keeps doing it nonetheless.

www.reuters.com/legal/govern...

CIHR funding rate: 13.6%.
Early 2000s: 30%+.

Canada’s new $1.7B Impact+ program recruits talent — but without increased Tri-Council base funding, we risk further strain on an already stretched system.

We’re calling for $1B over 5 years.
Support here: tinyurl.com/33c5av46

I and millions of Americans believe exactly the same thing Kasparov does.

Too many troops, too many new prisons, too much money not under Congressional supervision.

We're not just witnessing a mass deportation scheme anymore.

This is something significantly bigger and scarier.

Wtf?

This job has become the ultimate case study for why AI won’t replace human workers | CNN Business Radiology has come up multiple times as an example of a field that’s been impacted by AI without replacing the need for human workers.

www.cnn.com/2026/02/09/t...

Exciting research from our new postdoc member, Amin Jalali! His GEEGA method advances brain-computer interfaces through graph-based learning of EEG representations. Accepted to ICASSP 2026, validated across three datasets with significant improvements in BCI performance!
arxiv.org/abs/2512.07820

📝 New paper: Towards Multi-Brain Decoding in #Autism

🤨 How do we scale #hyperscanning when multi-brain datasets are small?

💡Our team introduces a self-supervised learning on large single-brain EEG data to improve multi-brain decoding.

#SocialNeuroAI #Neurotech link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Antivaxxer trigger warning: even more evidence suggesting shingles vax is extremely effective at reducing incident dementia: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
See also www.brainpizza.com/p/beyond-mag... where i summarise other recent evidence
#vaccineswork #vaccine #dementia #neuroskyence

Hybrid neural–cognitive models reveal how memory shapes human reward learning - Nature Human Behaviour Using artificial neural networks applied to human data, Eckstein et al. show that good models of reinforcement learning require memory components that track representations of the past.

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

Health Advice From A.I. Chatbots Is Frequently Wrong, Study Shows

Remember last week how Dr. Oz called AI the best solution for rural healthcare shortages?

Well, a new study finds that when patients turn to chatbots for health advice, they end up taking the wrong steps and getting the wrong diagnosis more than half the time.

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/w...

This is so cool!

So many papers in every single field do this... 🙄

Often especially "big" labs. But dare pointing this out and omg the backlash... 🫣😱

Two-Eyed Seeing and other Indigenous perspectives for neuroscience - Nature Combining Indigenous insights with neuroscience methods through Two-Eyed Seeing can broaden the understanding of brain function and mental wellbeing by merging reductionist and holistic perspectives a...

See also:

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

Indigenous epistemologies, Two-Eyed Seeing, and the philosophy, practice, and applications of brain sciences Understanding the complexity of human brains and minds is among the most significant challenges to be undertaken by “Western” science. Together, the v…

See also:

www.sciencedirect.com/science/chap...

Epistemic fragility and epistemic arrogance If, as suggested, humility is more often born of confidence than is arrogance, what are we to make of the aggressively negative reactions of some Western scientists to proposals involving the inclusion of Indigenous epistemologies? In this, the concept of “epistemic fragility” introduced by Skopec et al. (2021) is informative, which they define as “an effortful reinstatement of an epistemic status quo, as a reaction against introducing ideas, narratives and research associated with decolonizing the higher education curriculum”. Skopec et al. (2021) modeled the notion of epistemic fragility on the concept of “white fragility” (DiAngelo, 2011, 2018), which describes the defensive or dismissive reaction of white individuals when challenged to confront issues such as systemic racism, implicit bias, privilege, or the ongoing legacy of white supremacy of which they are beneficiaries whether they recognize it or not. In the case of epistemic fragility, “challenges to one’s conceptualization of knowledges and knowledge hierarchies elicit defensive moves” (Skopec et al., 2021). Similar connections have been made between white and male fragility and “epistemic arrogance” (e.g., Mitchell, 2019). Again, epistemic humility and epistemic pluralism do not undermine the importance or efficacy of science, and they do not create a permissive environment for any and all ideas to be taken as equally valid.

Nevertheless it is not difficult to find very strong objections to any notion that other ways of knowing besides Western science might also have merit. Take, for example, Dawkins (1995) who argues: “Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes built according to scientific principles work. They stay aloft, and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications, such as the dummy planes of the cargo cults in jungle clearings or the beeswaxed wings of Icarus, don’t. If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there—the reason you don’t plummet into a ploughed field—is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right.” Dawkins (1995) considers this a “knock-down argument” against cultural relativism, and I myself recall being reassured and emboldened by it as a science student in the mid-1990s. More recently, Dawkins (2023) has made it clear that he considers this critique applicable to Indigenous knowledge systems writ large, having expressed his vocal opposition to initiatives aimed at teaching Māori ways of knowing to students in New Zealand, which he calls “adolescent virtue-signaling” because “there is only one way of knowing: science”.

On the one hand, it would indeed be hypocritical for an extreme cultural relativist to argue that any and all claims about the physical world are equally accurate while cruising at 30,000 feet. On the other hand, I surmise that there are very few academics whose education in Western science would allow them to survive unaided in the Arctic, the Australian outback, the Amazon rainforest, or anywhere else where Indigenous knowledge, practices, and technology have proved their practical utility over the course of tens of thousands of years. If long-distance travel is to be the metric by which the validity of knowledge systems is judged, then it bears noting that Indigenous technology and wayfinding methods enabled exploration of land and sea long before European mariners ever set sail for distant shores (e.g., Lewis, 1972; Davis, 2009; Abulafia, 2019; Thompson, 2019). Finally, one wonders whether those who hold the view that “there is only one way of knowing” avoid hypocrisy by refusing to partake of the ∼40 % of Western pharmaceuticals “borrowed” from Indigenous traditional healing systems (World Health Organization, 2023; see also Fabricant & Farnsworth, 2001), crops domesticated by Indigenous agriculturists (Janick, 2013), or technologies inspired by the works of Indigenous inventors (Kiger, 2019; Yasinski, 2021; Gumbo & Williams, 2023; Havistock & Kay, 2023).

I thought you might enjoy this, dear friends.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/chap...

Worth watching
www.instagram.com/reel/DUXMaLm...

🇨🇦university leaders take note.

Okay, I see this stuff about OpenClaw (née Clawd, then Moltbot for a bit) has escaped its bounds and is now getting glowing reviews in normal media.

DO NOT INSTALL THIS.

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.

Addressing climate change without the ‘rules-based order’ Everyone who cares about climate action must now grapple with how climate politics can function in a new world of uncertainty.

theconversation.com/addressing-c...

Iranians are experiencing a collective trauma. Thousands have been killed/injured in recent events, the economy is crippled & the threat of a wider conflict is real. This is especially difficult for those living in Iran, as many have lost (or fear losing) loved ones. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thank you, Allie! 💙

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Chatbots already crippling MTurk…
link.springer.com/article/10.3...
(Heard someone call this an “existential crisis for the behavioral sciences”).

Now implications for public opinion research in contested environments… watch out.

Resist and Unsubscribe

Deleted Prime, Audible, ChatGPT, Instagram.

www.resistandunsubscribe.com

Today's dinner: Paella! 😋

😲