Preston Thakral

What behavioral relevance is (not) We are thankful for the thoughtful commentaries of our colleagues. In our discussion article, we argued for a course correction to how the field approaches the organization of visual function in oc...

Our reply to 11 commentaries on our article ("Rethinking category-selectivity in human visual cortex") is out in Cognitive Neuroscience! Thanks to @susanwardle.bsky.social @maryamvaziri.bsky.social Dwight Kravitz @cibaker.bsky.social and all who contributed! 1/x www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Kat For Illinois Valentine to send to a friend (or more than a friend ;) that reads: "Looking forward to walking down the IL-09 with you." with a photo of a Kat volunteer holding a wagon of yard signs and campaign lit.

Kat For Illinois Valentine to send to a friend (or more than a friend ;) that reads: "You're my primary candidate." with a photo of a 'Cat For Kat' sporting a KFI sticker.

Kat For Illinois Valentine to send to a friend (or more than a friend ;) that reads: "BE MY VOTER!" with a photo of Kat.

New preprint by @sarahehenderson.bsky.social. The *real* blood, sweat, and tears of her PhD - trying to develop an intervention to improve episodic memory in older adults under naturalistic conditions.

"Event tagging" is simple, but holds real promise. #PsychSciSky #memory
doi.org/10.31234/osf...

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world:
gershmanlab.com/textbook.html
It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class.

My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Aligning eye tracking and free recall time series, we found that increased saccades predict episodic (vs. non-episodic) by 0.5 s.

Just out in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social, led by Ryan Barker with the inimitable @drjenryan.bsky.social.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A few days after the presidential election one year ago, we went to Fordham Road in the Bronx.

It was a little different last week.

Traveling Through Space and Time With our Memories A person wearing headphones and a red hoodie walks through an airport with a suitcase, gazing at a boarding gate sign marked C7 with a French flag. Thought bubbles depict the Eiffel Tower and a map of...

PhD student Nina Curko and I wrote a short article about the superpowers of memory! Now published in Frontiers for Young Minds: kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10....

Why I left academia and neuroscience Don't worry, this isn't yet another story of rage-quitting.

Michael X Cohen on why he left academia/neuroscience.
mikexcohen.substack.com/p/why-i-left...

Out today!

www.cell.com/current-biol...

Temporal dedifferentiation of neural states with age during naturalistic viewing - Communications Biology Movie fMRI data reveals age-related lengthening of neural states in visual and prefrontal regions, reflecting reduced temporal differentiation while preserved alignment with perceived events suggests stable coarse event segmentation.

The brain represents the world around us as a series of neural states - stable patterns of activity that change as we move from one event to the next.

New paper by @selmalugtmeijer.bsky.social showing that neural states get longer as people age. #PsychSciSky

nature.com/articles/s42003-025-08792-4

This is awesome. Drag and drop a brain MRI scan into the window and it does tissue segmentation in the browser (in about 8 seconds), then creates a 3D mesh suitable for 3D printing. This has been an hours-to-days long process for us in the past, all in a couple minutes. 🤯 brain2print.org

Susan, I hope I look as good as you at 102!

1/ Something surreal happened to me recently 🍀

I ordered “A Feeling for the Organism” — Evelyn Fox Keller’s biography of #BarbaraMcClintock, the 1983 Nobel prize winner who discovered “jumping genes.” 🧬

Our new lab space @smith-college.bsky.social! Decked out with an embedded force plate, motion-tracking cameras, EMG, IMUs, and fNIRS equipment, the HuMAN Lab is ready for research 🙌

Human Motion Analysis & Neuroimaging Lab (Dr. Jones & Dr. Helmich)

#fNIRS #Concussion #MotorCognition #Neuroscience

thinking about the time someone tried to impersonate our Department Chair on July 4th

Neural and behavioral reinstatement jointly reflect retrieval of narrative events - Nature Communications When people recall a movie, their eye movements and brain activity resemble those observed during the viewing. These behavioral and neural reactivations are linked through a common process, likely ref...

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory!

We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414...
🧵1/9

A neural mechanism for aesthetic experience - PubMed Aesthetic experience associated with viewing art has been hypothesized to depend on both low-level sensory processing and high-level conceptual processing. To test these hypotheses, we used functional...

You might find this interesting and related:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22357395/

The cover of Time Magazine. Zohran fixes his tie and looks into the camera. The headline reads, "The Meaning of Zohran Mamdani."

It's a surreal experience to find myself on the cover of Time Magazine but it's truly a reflection of what we have built together over these past ten months.

Read the story: time.com/7308924/zohr...

...and sign up to canvass: zohranfornyc.com/canvasslaunch

Evidence for dlPFC contribution to #memory suppression using #TMS! Now accepted @jocn.bsky.social. Great team effort and collaboration with Gesa Hartwigsen’s lab @mpicbs.bsky.social‬. We also had an exemplary experience at the journal with editors @barense.bsky.social‬ & @bradpostle.bsky.social‬.

This @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social video is absolutely INCREDIBLE. The numbers he cites, the strategy and results they produced — it’s the future. When have you heard *any* campaign talk about this, ever? (Video split in 2 to fit in Bluesky’s limits)

I couldn't NOT do this.

getting a review request from an editor while waiting on that editor to get back to you with reviews

a tweet that shows a cat sitting on a trash can with the caption “I have two jobs: 1. calm my humans when they are stressed. 2. stress my humans when they are calm.”

Listened to the first two episodes of @catherineloveday.bsky.social's new podcast while rowing this morning. It's insightful, warm, moving and informative, with practical tips to help families of people with memory loss. If you're in this situation, or might one day be, it's well worth a listen.

The same day she's getting endorsed by David Ortiz, Mayor Wu throws a heater of a statement at challenger Josh Kraft

I invented a game. It’s called 4 x 3.

It’s like connections except that there are three words in each category, there are four categories, and one word is in all four categories.

Easy mode is when you know the special word. Hard is when you don’t.

Not science fiction. Wonderful work by Adrian Owen and crew. 🧪 🧠 #neuroskyence

I just watched Jurassic Park again with my kids and there were lots of great PI moments.

Rich guy asks scientists to come with him to his Island.
Scientists say they're too busy with research.
Rich guy says he'll fund them for the next 3 years.
Scientists say okay when does the plane leave?

I love that he looks directly into the camera...he is proud of what he has done : )