Stephen J. Gotts

After preparing for a full year together with @neurosteven.bsky.social and all other amazing organizers
of @cogcompneuro.bsky.social, #CCN2025 is finally here!

While I'm proud of the entire program we put together, I'd now like to highlight my own lab's contributions, 6 posters total:

"Get it all on record now. Get the films. Get the witnesses. Because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened."

– Dwight D. Eisenhower, Germany, 1945

a canva graphic that says "How it works Step 1: Go to SkypeAScientist.com Step 2: Click “Sign Up” then “Scientist Sign Up Form” Step 3: Tell us about yourself Step 4: Get matched with a classroom Step 5: Connect with the teacher Step 6: Make a kid’s day isn't that great? @SkypeAScientist"

Scientists!

@skypeascientist.bsky.social matches scientists with classrooms, libraries, & more for virtual Q&As! It's easy and fun!

We are looking for 750 more volunteers by 8/15

If you're down to chat with 1-5 classrooms this semester, sign up here
www.skypeascientist.com/sign-up.html

Rapid decoding of neural information representation from ultra-fast functional magnetic resonance imaging signals High spatio-temporal resolution is crucial for neuroimaging techniques to improve our understanding of human brain function. While the fMRI signal is slow and shows a spread in latencies over space, t...

Nice work by @yoichimiyawaki.bsky.social showing the fMRI hemodynamic response contains enough info to decode stimulus type within 2sec. Happy to have helped with this project.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We now have a Society for the Neurobiology of Language Bluesky account @snlmtg.bsky.social! Follow for updates on the meeting. I'm really excited for our fantastic lineup of speakers!

#SNL2025

The Neuroscience Dept at American University is hiring for a tenure-track position at the Assistant level with expertise in Computational Neuroscience. Apply by Sep 15:
american.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/AU/job/Main-...
#FacultyJobs #AcademicJob #Neuroscience #CompNeuro #AI #ComputationalPsychiatry

The entire business model of R1 public universities rests on 4 revenue sources:

1. Federal grants
2. Private gifts/endowments
3. Tuition (esp. from foreign students)
4. State $

For decades, 📈 in 1-3 offset a secular 📉 in 4. Now, 1 & 3 are being decimated & 4 ain't coming back. The math is clear.

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions.

Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy

arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

One thing I would like more people, and I mostly mean my fellow men, to understand is that no matter how smart you are, other people are also smart and some of them have tried to work on the same problems you’re working on. If a simple solution hasn’t been found yet, there probably isn’t one.

Working with AI: Measuring the Occupational Implications of Generative AI∗ Kiran Tomlinson1 , Sonia Jaffe1 , Will Wang1 , Scott Counts2 , and Siddharth Suri1 1Microsoft Research 2Microsoft Abstract Given the rapid adoption of generative AI and its potential to impact a wide range of tasks, understanding the effects of AI on the economy is one of society’s most important questions. In this work, we take a step toward that goal by analyzing the work activities people do with AI, how successfully and broadly those activities are done, and combine that with data on what occupations do those activities. We analyze a dataset of 200k anonymized and privacy-scrubbed conversations between users and Microsoft Bing Copilot, a publicly available generative AI system. We find the most common work activities people seek AI assistance for involve gathering information and writing, while the most common activities that AI itself is performing are providing information and assistance, writing, teaching, and advising. Combining these activity classifications with measurements of task success and scope of impact, we compute an AI applicability score for each occupation. We find the highest AI applicability scores for knowledge work occupation groups such as computer and mathematical, and office and administrative support, as well as occupations such as sales whose work activities involve providing and communicating information. Additionally, we characterize the types of work activities performed most successfully, how wage and education correlate with AI applicability, and how real-world usage compares to predictions of occupational AI impact.

Table 3: Top 40 occupations with highest AI applicability score. Job Title (Abbrv.) Coverage Cmpltn. Scope Score Employment Interpreters and Translators 0.98 0.88 0.57 0.49 51,560 Historians 0.91 0.85 0.56 0.48 3,040 Passenger Attendants 0.80 0.88 0.62 0.47 20,190 Sales Representatives of Services 0.84 0.90 0.57 0.46 1,142,020 Writers and Authors 0.85 0.84 0.60 0.45 49,450 Customer Service Representatives 0.72 0.90 0.59 0.44 2,858,710 CNC Tool Programmers 0.90 0.87 0.53 0.44 28,030 Telephone Operators 0.80 0.86 0.57 0.42 4,600 Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks 0.71 0.90 0.56 0.41 119,270 Broadcast Announcers and Radio DJs 0.74 0.84 0.60 0.41 25,070 Brokerage Clerks 0.74 0.89 0.57 0.41 48,060 Farm and Home Management Educators 0.77 0.91 0.55 0.41 8,110 Telemarketers 0.66 0.89 0.60 0.40 81,580 Concierges 0.70 0.88 0.56 0.40 41,020 Political Scientists 0.77 0.87 0.53 0.39 5,580 News Analysts, Reporters, Journalists 0.81 0.81 0.56 0.39 45,020 Mathematicians 0.91 0.74 0.54 0.39 2,220 Technical Writers 0.83 0.82 0.54 0.38 47,970 Proofreaders and Copy Markers 0.91 0.86 0.49 0.38 5,490 Hosts and Hostesses 0.60 0.90 0.57 0.37 425,020 Editors 0.78 0.82 0.54 0.37 95,700 Business Teachers, Postsecondary 0.70 0.90 0.52 0.37 82,980 Public Relations Specialists 0.63 0.90 0.60 0.36 275,550 Demonstrators and Product Promoters 0.64 0.88 0.53 0.36 50,790 Advertising Sales Agents 0.66 0.90 0.53 0.36 108,100 New Accounts Clerks 0.72 0.87 0.51 0.36 41,180 Statistical Assistants 0.85 0.84 0.49 0.36 7,200 Counter and Rental Clerks 0.62 0.90 0.52 0.36 390,300 Data Scientists 0.77 0.86

Microsoft just released a study w/ the 40 jobs most and least likely to be replaced by AI.

On the most likely: Mathematician, political scientist, and journalist.

Sorry to the authors.
But anyone who thinks these fields will be supplanted (helped) by AI knows little abt both these fields, and AI.

The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making Author summary Breathing is more than just a vital process for survival — it influences how we perceive and interact with the world around us. Recent research suggests that the rhythm of breathing, fr...

🧠 New paper on breathing and the brain, out now
@plos.org Computational Biology! 🫁
"The respiratory cycle modulates distinct dynamics of affective and perceptual decision-making"
doi.org/10.1371/jour...
We show how respiratory 'tidal computations' alter our decisons!

Farm to faculty: How federal research funding changes lives and boosts Minnesota's economy When I was growing up on a farm near Cambridge, I never met a scientist. I didn’t know what scientific research was or how people became scientists. I graduated from

From farm to faculty. Writing home to his community in Minnesota, Prof Jim Magnuson explains that the powerhouse behind U.S. research is the infrastructure, paid by “indirect costs”. “This system has made U.S. science the strongest in the world.” 🧪🏠

www.hometownsource.com/county_news_...

Almost missed that this is out! Former postdoc Liz Necka led this long overdue FMRI study formally comparing two types of pain modulation: Placebo analgesia & predictive cues. TLDR: these are NOT the same! Placebo analgesia reduced cue effects, & brain mechanisms were nearly all dissociable. 1/4

Odds of winning NIH grants plummet as new funding policy and spending delays bite Funding multiyear grants up front will sharply cut number of investigators receiving awards

There is no gain in defunding early career scientists, making cancer research harder, cancelling vaccine science etc.. We all lose. The dismantling of the American scientific enterprise will go down in history as the most short sighted thing and destructive decision.
www.science.org/content/arti...

So for the hell of it, I went poking around on the FEC website about a high text PAC, and learned they had almost $6 mil in donations so far this year that appears to have been largely generated by small donors.

Amount they have donated to races or to DCCC, DSCC etc.? $212,000.

3.5% of total.

UW-Madison research drives startups. Federal science cuts stall our mission. | Opinion Academic science is fertilizer of the economy. It creates soil where innovation thrive. Some who don’t know about how things grow think it’s manure.

www.jsonline.com/story/opinio...

The Long and Short of Longevity: Why More Might Be Less Despite increased understanding in how to modify human aging, longevity as a wellness trend sidesteps questions of societal inequities and what makes a good life.

Longevity seems to be everywhere, with acolytes and enthusiasts abounding. Some cautionary comments. The Long and Short of Longevity: Why More Might Be Less | Psychology Today www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brai...

Scale-Free Properties of the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Signal during Rest and Task It has been shown recently that a significant portion of brain electrical field potentials consists of scale-free dynamics. These scale-free brain dynamics contain complex spatiotemporal structures an...

Check this one out, from Biyu He. Looks at both task and rest in fMRI:

www.jneurosci.org/content/31/3...

Graph of maternal mortality rate against year for the UK. Rate bounces until and down around 500 deaths per 100,000 births until about 1940, when it falls sharply. It’s been very low (~1–3 per 100,000) ever since.

This graph is astonishing. The people that bang on about “natural birth” and “women have been doing this forever without help” need to be forced to stare at this until their eyes water.

Cooperative thalamocortical circuit mechanism for sensory prediction errors - Nature Experiments in mice show that a cortico-thalamic circuit generates prediction-error signals in primary visual cortex that amplify visual input that deviates from animals’ expectations.

Pairs well with www.nature.com/articles/s41...

“Our results indicate that individual V1 neurons do not signal how the actual visual input deviates from the animal’s predictions, as postulated within the predictive coding framework”

Thrilling to see a major theory get tested!

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

One reason some people are fine with destroying NSF and NIH is they think that AI will replace scientists soon.

This is wrong, and this big error is setting back cancer and Alzheimer’s research right now.

how the world’s top trading partners have changed, 2000 v 2024

Repetition-related reductions in neural activity support improved behavior through increases in oscillatory power https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.06.663291v1

New work from our lab investigating the relationship between repetition suppression, repetition priming and increases in oscillatory power in simultaneous fMRI-EEG. Induced power increases are strongly associated with priming magnitude, supporting a mix of the synchrony and facilitation models.

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Junhong Yu, Yi-Sheng Wong, and Charly Hugo Alexandre Billaud:

Thought contents during rest account for functional connectivity-behavior associations

doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

🚨 Postdoc Opportunity!!!
The Toronto Early Cognition Lab (@UofT) is hiring a postdoc to study early optimism in infants & young children.
Work w/ multi-method approach, amazing undergrads & grads.
Start: Fall 2025 or later.
Details: jessica.sommerville@utoronto.ca
RTs appreciated 💫

Twelve years ago today, the Supreme Court struck down the coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act.

They ripped out one of the central features of the most successful civil rights laws in American history.

The result has been a disastrous growth in the turnout gap
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

After seeing what Elon did to Twitter, my confidence in a Tesla-run taxi service is about the same as my confidence in an drive-thru orthopedic surgery start-up run by Arby’s.

if Cuomo loses today and goes ahead with a 3rd party run in the general "No means no" as the counter message is right there