David V. Smith

What does “Dow 50,000” actually tell you—anything about the economy, or just that a number got bigger? Dow 50,000 is a milestone, not a measurement. The level of the Dow is basically arbitrary: it’s… "Dow 50,000" Sound Nice. Until Justin Wolfers Shows You That U.S. Markets Are Coming 21st Out of 23.

The Dow was at 43,488 when Trump took office. It just hit 50,000.

So if you had invested $43,488 in the US, you would now have $50,000. But if you had invested the same amount in the rest of the world, you would now be worth $60,000.

Lemme do a expla-youtube-nation
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYL5...

we shall see

Something big is happening in AI — and most people will be blindsided | Fortune It’s not like a light switch... more like the moment you realize the water has been rising around you and is now at your chest.

“Dario Amodei, who is probably the most safety-focused CEO in the AI industry, has publicly predicted that AI will eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years. And many people in the industry think he’s being conservative.”

fortune.com/2026/02/11/s...

Attention Dynamics: Antecedents to Consumer Choice This chapter reviews four decades of research on consumer attention and decision-making, focusing on how visual information influences preferences, attitudes, and choice. It traces methodological adva...

The new book, "Neuroeconomics: Core Topics and Current Directions" is out! Here is my chapter on consumer attention. 👀Thanks to @dvsmith.bsky.social @thepsychologist.bsky.social @dfareri.bsky.social for their excellent leadership as editors.
#science #attention #eyetracking #marketing

The Role of Memory in Temporal Discounting A widely observed phenomenon in intertemporal choice is temporal discounting; people prefer to have rewards sooner rather than later, even if the delayed rewards are larger. Despite the universality o...

So excited that this textbook, edited by @dfareri.bsky.social @dvsmith.bsky.social & @thepsychologist.bsky.social is out now! And so happy to have been invited to contribute. Here’s my chapter on the role of memory, esp. semantic memory, in temporal discounting: link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

New work from the lab! With @jameswyngaarden.bsky.social

Ketone body beta-hydroxybutyrate restores neuronal Tau proteostasis via ketolysis-independent mechanism https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.30.702936v1

Emotion and Choice: The Integral Role of Emotion in Constructing Value In the centuries-long history of decision-making research, emotion’s role in choice has only been investigated relatively recently. Early theories of decision-making, which conceived of emotions...

Check out @orielf.bsky.social & I's chapter "Emotion and Choice: The Integral Role of Emotion in Constructing Value" in the new volume, Neuroeconomics: Core Topics and Current Directions, edited by @dvsmith.bsky.social @thepsychologist.bsky.social & @dfareri.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1007/978-...

Decomposing Economic Choices with Drift-Diffusion Models Many decisions arise from a dynamic process of information accumulation and comparison. Thus, to fully understand decision-making, we must decompose the choice process into its parts. Here, we review ...

Chapter 📖 "Decomposing Economic Choices with Drift-Diffusion Models" with @krajbichlab.bsky.social and Xiaozhi (Taro) Yang is out in, "Neuroeconomics: Core Topics and Current Directions" edited by @dvsmith.bsky.social, @thepsychologist.bsky.social, @dfareri.bsky.social
tinyurl.com/yey56tup

New discovery! Value-based decisions reorganize neural state space. Options are first encoded in orthogonal subspaces Then the selected option rotates into a "readout subspace".
Neural subspace reorganization reflects value-based decision making.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
#neuroscience

📣 New book chapter

Excited to see my chapter "The Neural Mechanisms of Strategic Decision-Making" finally out in a new book, "Neuroeconomics: Core Topics and Current Directions", edited by @dvsmith.bsky.social, @thepsychologist.bsky.social, and Dominic Fareri.

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya talks 'replication crisis' at Duke panel, omits funding cuts Throughout the second Trump administration, the NIH has frozen billions of dollars in research funding to universities. Those cuts were not the topic of discussion at a Duke Clinical Research Institut...

~1 yr into the NIH Director’s term, he mentioned the same talking points from his ongoing media tour. Disappointed that these talking points were not supported with programs or operational updates from the past year in this role.

Moreso claims about ideology.

www.dukechronicle.com/article/duke...

This is an important paper on social class barriers among faculty in academia.

First-generation college grads earn less and are placed at lower prestige institutions despite being just as productive as other faculty.

Faculty from upper class backgrounds are overplaced for their research records.

Feedback-induced attitudinal changes in risk preferences Nature Communications - Normative theory predicts that feedback should not affect decisions under risk, but past findings disagree. Here, the authors show that feedback shifts risk-taking by...

🧵 New paper in @NatureComms
Feedback-induced attitudinal changes in risk preferences
Nasioulas, Potier, Cerrotti, Lebreton & me (2026)
Does feedback really improve risky decision-making? Short answer: no! it changes attitudes, not learning. 👇
rdcu.be/e0VcO

Dissociable neuronal substrates for positive and negative valence stimuli in the nucleus accumbens https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.24.701496v1

Opinion | What Are We Thinking?

Neuroscience is moving away from a modular view of the brain because the brain is not modular. It is network of murmuring neurons. Great metaphor by @pessoabrain.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/o...
#neuroscience

Department Chair, Duke Neurobiology - Duke University, Durham job with Duke University - School of Medicine | 12852576 The Duke University School of Medicine (SOM) seeks a distinguished neuroscientist to serve as the next Chair of the Department of Neurobiology.

My department, Duke Neurobiology, is searching for a new chair. Ad below. Come work with me, @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social @ennatsew.bsky.social @jorggrandl.bsky.social @jnklab.bsky.social @sbilbo.bsky.social @neurocircuits.bsky.social and many other amazing folks! @dukemedschool.bsky.social

SANS 2026 deadline has been extended by a week to **next Monday Jan 19th 23:59 PT**!

We encourage all current and prospective members of the SANS community to take advantage of the extended deadline and submit their work for consideration as either an individual poster or oral presentation!

Want to get into one of the fastest growing tech fields today? The CMU Neuroscience Institute and Department of Biomedical Engineering have teamed up to offer a suite of masters programs in Neural Technologies, tailored to your long term career goals.

Spread the word!

Congress Is Reversing Trump’s Steep Budget Cuts to Science

This is a HUGE win…and one that happened because we ~collectively~ said “NO!”

But AAAS coming in and saying on record to the NYT “Science is doing ok. Things are not bad at all…” is baffling.

If things are hard for you as a scientist, please share in the comments.

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/s...

Interested in research on depression in youth? New opening for a full-time research assistant in our lab (webbslab.com) to work on a range of projects focused on the causes & treatment of depression in teens. Come join our growing lab. Please RT and share! Apply⬇️
webbslab.com/job-postings

per my point about the mercator projection being the root of this whole thing

Fresh off the press from all-star post-doc Blake Elliott: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

We show that the HPC supports coincidence detection across VTA and lPFC in service of novelty-evoked invigoration. Stay-tuned for how these circuits are altered in psychosis risk.

When I explain to people what is involved with writing a successful grant, they simply don’t believe me.

I explained it once to a famous person from Pixar, and he looked me square in the eye and said: You mean all the cancer and Alzheimer’s grants work that way? You’ve gotta be &$%#ing kidding me!

Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization Nature Neuroscience - Parcellation of the cortex into functionally modular brain areas is foundational to neuroscience. Here, Hayden, Heilbronner and Yoo question the central status of brain areas...

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵

rdcu.be/eVZ1A

Cognition varies across the calendar year in multiple large-scale datasets | PNAS Children’s cognitive abilities vary across short and long timescales, from circadian fluctuations to year-by-year developmental changes. “Summer sl...

“These results demonstrate a generalizable small-magnitude effect of lower cognitive performance aligning with school vacation even after adjusting for socioeconomic status or ADHD diagnosis.”

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

AI-assisted coding: 10 simple rules to maintain scientific rigor These guidelines can help researchers ensure the integrity of their work while accelerating progress on important scientific questions.

AI-assisted coding: 10 simple rules to maintain scientific rigor www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-i... - my latest in @thetransmitter.bsky.social

🧠💸 Launching the RewardSignals feed

RewardSignals is a custom feed collecting posts about reward processing and decision making.

To appear in the feed, tag your post with #RewardSignals.

You can find and pin the feed from the Feeds tab as “RewardSignals”.
#RewardSignals

Very excited to hear about this! We find Bayesian multi-level modeling at the ROI level super helpful (e.g. www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... ), will be nice to not have to artificially carve the data into parcels a priori!

It's time to remove laptops from classrooms.

24 experiments: Students learn more and get better grades after taking notes by hand than typing. It's not just because they're less distracted—writing enables deeper processing and more images.

The pen is mightier than the keyboard.