David Poeppel

I played around with building a bluesky labeler for neuroscience methods. subscribe to: neuromethods.bsky.social and like the corresponding post to have a shiny methods label appear in your profile.

Group photograph of faculty and participants of the very first Cold Spring Harbor summer course on Genetics and Neurobiology of Language in 2014, taken as the sun was going down at the Banbury Campus, Lloyd Harbor.

Please tell friends & colleagues about our unique course “Genetics & Neurobiology of Language” July 27-Aug 3 2026. Expert tutors, interactive talks, panel discussions, all in a beautiful setting. Scholarships available: meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx...
@cshlnews.bsky.social @cshlbanbury.bsky.social

Great opportunity for important work and training! I hope to collaborate closely with Nina and Pierre on this innovative cog sci/ cog neuro project. #neuroskyence

every single goddam crisis happening right now is self imposed

Amazing work by star postdoc Francisco Garcia Rosales in collaboration with @davidpoeppel.bsky.social . Happy reading :)

For aficionados of timing, prediction, psychophysics-and anyone who wants to look at something other than the news to be distracted-a new study by Matthias Grabenhorst and Georgios Michalareas:

The anticipation of imminent events is time-scale invariant
www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....

#neuroskyence

share.google/images/38xwq...

I hope not.

A friendly little back and forth with Rosas and colleagues to clarify some concepts about research strategies in neuroscience. Check out Rosas1 - then van Bree - then Rosas2. Maybe useful. Maybe. Hope springs eternal.

Why stop at 8?

Hopefully a useful short exchange, in any case.

Eye blinks synchronize with musical beats during music listening Human movements are known to synchronize with rhythmic patterns in music. This study expands our understanding of embodied music perception, by revealing that spontaneous eye blinks also align with mu...

My colleague, friend, former PhD/postdoc @xiangbin-teng.bsky.social and his colleagues argue for (yet) another interesting attribute of music listening.

journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

Surprise visit in our seminar. We were discussing Reflections on Language (Chomsky 1975), and guess who stopped by?

Greg's new book. CONGRATS! Finally! A *must-read* for everyone interested in brain and language. Full of important (old/classical & new) stuff, exceptionally clear, integrative, provocative, carefully argued. This will stimulate lots of new experiments, models, ideas.

What enables human language? A biocultural framework Explaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of l...

Origins of language, one of humanity’s most distinctive traits, may be best explained as a unique convergence of multiple capacities each with its own evolutionary history, involving intertwined roles of biology & culture. This framing can expand research horizons. A 🧵 on our @science.org paper.🧪1/n

OMG don’t tell our deans and chairs!

Brain structural networks underlying language | Physiological Reviews | American Physiological Society The unique human ability to process complex language requires the interaction of multiple brain areas located in the inferior frontal and posterior temporal cortex connected by white matter fiber trac...

A very useful review and update on the anatomic infratstructure for language:
"Brain structural networks underlying language" by
Angela Friederici
journals.physiology.org/doi/abs/10.1...

Geometric properties of musical scales constitute a representational primitive in melodic processing Music; Cognitive Psychology; Cognitive Science

I really like the cogsci thinking and music in this paper. Happy that it's finally out! Thanks @omriraccah.bsky.social and Michael Seltenreich
for leading this project.
Geometric properties of musical scales constitute a representational primitive in melodic processing

www.cell.com/iscience/ful...

I'm incredibly honored to receive the Bernice Grafstein Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Mentoring. This makes me very sentimental! I'm so proud of the wonderful, super sharp students and postdocs that I have had the privilege and pleasure to work with. ❤️ Thank you!!!

The psychology program at NYU Abu Dhabi has open rank open area positions in cognition-perception-cogneuro. Wonderful colleagues, excellent research infrastructure (incl MRI, MEG, EEG), close ties to NYU New York. Superfast growing part of the research world
apply.interfolio.com/175417
#neuroskyence

Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the human brain | PNAS Speech comprehension involves transforming an acoustic waveform into meaning. To do so, the human brain generates a hierarchy of features that conv...

CogNeuroLanguage: new by @lauragwilliams.bsky.social & @jeanremiking.bsky.social (w Alec Marantz & me) shows how the brain maintains-updates continuously unfolding lang hierarchy during comprehension, anchoring ling theories to biological implementation
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... #neuroskyence

BREAKING

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Maria Corina Machado for “her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

YouTube video by Filip Jers Music ”While My Guitar Gently Weeps” - harmonica and guitar cover by Filip Jers & Emil Ernebro

A #BlueskyLullaby for tonight: Just a couple days ago, these two Swedish musicians—classical guitarist Emil Ernebro and harmonicist Filip Jers—released this cover of the Beatles' "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." It's jammin' and it's lovely. See you around.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAmh...

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