David Poeppel

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.

A universal of speech timing: Intonation units form low-frequency rhythms | PNAS Intonation units (IUs) are a hypothesized universal building block of human speech [W. Chafe, Discourse, Consciousness and Time: The Flow and Displ...

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

Eye movements during text reading align with the rate of speech production - Nature Human Behaviour Speech is produced and perceived at a rate of 4–5 Hz. Gagl et al. show that the temporal structure of our eye movements during reading is similar (3.9–5.2 Hz), suggesting a temporal link between readi...

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...

Opinion | Would You Trust This Man With Your Elections?

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!

Asymmetric Sampling in Time: Evidence and perspectives Auditory and speech signals are undisputedly processed in both left and right hemispheres, but this bilateral allocation is likely unequal. The Asymme…

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...

PhD and Postdoc Positions (m/f/d) in Human Cognitive Neuroscience of Dynamic Cognition – M/EEG, brain stimulation Job Offer from August 11, 2025

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

Senate Probe Uncovers Allegations of Widespread Abuse in ICE Custody Led by US senator Jon Ossoff, the investigation cites hundreds of reports since January, including accounts of miscarriages, child neglect, and sexual abuse at ICE detention centers in dozens of state...

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.

Single-panel cartoon drawn by Gary Larson. Standing in the street is a bearded man with glasses, white coat and a clipboard. He is wearing a helmet with flashing coloured buttons and multiple different types of antennae. In the street there are also several dogs, including one rearing up at a fence and another chasing a car. Speech bubbles show the dogs are saying "Hey! Hey! Hey!", "Heyyyyyyy", and "Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!". Caption underneath: Donning his new canine decoder, Professor Schwartzman becomes the first human being on Earth to hear what barking dogs are actually saying.

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 👍)

Neurobiology of language: the top 15 most influential papers (to me)

Good list for new students in neurobiology of language by @wmatchin.bsky.social
jocnf.pubpub.org/pub/m213u2uh...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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....

The Trump administration pushed out a university president – its latest bid to close the American mind | Robert Reich Demanding that the University of Virginia’s president resign is taken from the Viktor Orbán playbook of authoritarianism

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Terrific lab - with excellent research facilities. Rosanne is a great supervisor.

Three *really* different and just terrific books I'm reading. Congrats M Chirimuuta, @jpeelle.bsky.social & @amypoeppel.bsky.social
A philosophical analysis, a textbook, and a novel - all super entertaining and enriching.

Complex Impact of Stimulus Envelope on Motor Synchronization to Sound The human brain tracks temporal regularities in acoustic signals faithfully. Recent neuroimaging studies have shown complex modulations of synchronized neural activities to the shape of stimulus envel...

For auditory processing aficionados: new from Y Sun, O Ghitza & G Michalareas
tracking rate of periodicity is achievable without sharp acoustic edges or consistent phase alignment to envelope. consistent with assuming distinct processes for phase and rate tracking
www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2...

“Why Are We Funding This?” Long-standing myths about “silly science” have contributed to the reckless slashing of government-supported research.

www.americanscientist.org/article/%E2%...

War in the Middle East may well have called the president away from the G7 in Canada abruptly, but he also strikes me as the kind of person terrified of using someone else’s toilet.

No kings in New York City! That’s one ginormous protest!

#nokings
#newyorkcity
#nyc

Bethesda Declaration — STAND UP FOR SCIENCE Support NIH Staff Now!

Gutsy and important
www.standupforscience.net/bethesda-dec...

Sensory stimuli dominate over rhythmic electrical stimulation in modulating behavior Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) modulates entrainment to rhythmic auditory stimuli, but the details of this interaction are not clear. This study shows that the effects of tACS dep...

Nice to see this PLoSBio paper out, by @ycabral.bsky.social and Molly Henry!

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...