James Antony

The Trump Administration Is Ending Aid That It Says Saves Lives The State Department will let lifesaving projects expire because “there is no strong nexus between the humanitarian response and U.S. national interests,” according to an internal email.

Quietly, the Trump administration is now ending even the life-saving aid that they had promised would be preserved

Reporting from @hana-kiros.bsky.social

www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/...

Building compositional tasks with shared neural subspaces Nature - The brain can flexibly perform multiple tasks by compositionally combining task-relevant neural representations.

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions

rdcu.be/eRVUk

Excited to share a new paper spearheaded by the wonderful @baror-shira.bsky.social:
tinyurl.com/bd8xdcum
@erc.europa.eu @nathumbehav.nature.com

We test the link between serial dependence (as an index of continuity) and event boundaries (indexing segmentation). A few key findings in the thread:

A group, one of many, holding candles in honor of a community member executed by an unaccountable paramilitary invasion force

This is Minneapolis.

Literally every corner along Lake St. packed with people holding candles, many singing, honoring a person who by all accounts was an absolute gem of a human, whose life was tragically stolen by a fascist, paramilitary occupation force.

This is Alex Pretti.

A video of Alex Pretti reading out the final salute of an unnamed veteran he cared for until the end of his life in the ICU, posted to Facebook by his son.

John Mitnick @JohnMitnick I helped to establish DHS in 2002 and 2003 and later had the homeland security portfolio as a White House Counsel and served as General Counsel of the Department. I am enraged and embarrassed by DHS’s lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty. Impeach and remove Trump—now. George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸 @gtconway3d The deadly shooting in Minneapolis today was a straight-up execution of a protester by Trump's federal brownshirts. The thugs wrestled him to the ground. They pistol-whipped him, then shot him multiple times. They murdered him.

Beyond helping establish DHS itself in 2003, Mr. Mitnick was a senate-confirmed Trump choice for General Counsel for DHS in his first term. I've talked with him a few times, and he's not a man for hyperbole. So bear that in mind when you see him calling out DHS's "lawlessness, fascism, and cruelty."

man the stuff i am seeing on IG from
the most normie, i don’t really talk about politics accounts suggests something different

U.S. overhauls childhood vaccine schedule, recommends fewer shots The U.S. no longer broadly recommends vaccines for flu, hepatitis A and B, and RSV. Health officials say the guidance aligns with that of peer countries.

This is a five alarm fire. If you dont think this impacts you, think again. Public health is in grave danger www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/...

here's the 60 minutes cecot video part 1 of 5 - recorded/uploaded by and all credit to @jasonparis.bsky.social

I just reduced background noise, chopped the 14 minutes into 3 minute segments each compressed under 100 mb for bsky's limits, cropped and rotated a few degrees for easier viewing on here

Trump’s Immigration Nightmare: It Is Happening Here With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. And the experts agree: It’s all going to get much, much worse.

So I have the cover story in next month's TNR.

I interviewed the heads of police groups; immigration defense attorneys, ex-judges and ex-prosecutors; former DOJ and DHS officials, and the former head of Border Patrol.

They're all horrified at what we've seen, and they all fear what's coming.

We are recruiting a lab manager/research assistant to start in early 2026! The successful candidate will conduct awake infant fMRI, meet cute babies, and join a fun team!

More details (e.g. responsibilities): soc.stanford.edu/people/#join...

Apply here: careersearch.stanford.edu/jobs/social-...

I will be recruiting 🌟PhD students🌟 for my newish lab! If you're interested in learning & memory mechanisms applied to individual, interactive & collective behavior using computational modeling, real-world experiments and fMRI, email me! RTs much appreciated 🙏 rouhanilab.com

Out now in @nathumbehav.nature.com! We applied graph theoretic analyses to fMRI data of participants watching movies/listening to stories. Integration across large-scale functional networks mediates arousal-dependent enhancement of narrative memories. Open access link: rdcu.be/eKKAw

You learn better when you test yourself on an answer before you study it? Even more counterintuitive, our findings showcase that there is not one direct mechanism to this effect.
Thank you @charan-neuro.bsky.social , @xiaonanl.bsky.social , and @jameswardantony.bsky.social !
doi.org/10.1037/xlm0...

A neural network with episodic memory learns causal relationships between narrative events Humans reflect on past memories to make sense of an ongoing event. Past work has shown that people retrieve causally related past events during comprehension, but the exact process by which this causa...

How does the brain🧠 make causal inferences and use memories to understand narratives🎬?

We built an RNN🤖 with key-value episodic memory that learns causal relationships between events and retrieves memories like humans do!

Preprint www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

w/ @qlu.bsky.social, Tan Nguyen &👇

Repeated Viewing of a Narrative Movie Changes Event Timescales in The Brain Many experiences occur repeatedly throughout our lives: we might watch the same movie more than once and listen to the same song on repeat. How does the brain modify its representations of events when...

How do the brain’s event representations change as we gain familiarity with an experience?

Brain regions’ representations can become coarser or finer as event familiarity increases. Fine-tuning predicts memory recall.

Excited to share this work with Narjes Al-Zahli & @chrisbaldassano.bsky.social!

In Trump’s Federal Work Force Cuts, Black Women Are Among the Hardest Hit

Here is a gift link. I know people have feelings about the times but this is free and reading this should make you very very mad and then you should do something:

New opinion piece!

@amirtal.bsky.social and I argue that "wake reactivation" is not a scientifically useful construct; It encompasses nonconscious & conscious processes w/ varying levels of elaboration & diverging consequences, leading to conflicting results

authors.elsevier.com/a/1lgli4sIRvW-LQ

Excited to present our new work reading minds!

Ok, not *that* kind of mind reading, but we have created a deep learning method capable of using single neuron recordings from people watching episodes of TV that can predict when they recall specific memories from the episode. 1/6

For >5 years, the International Sleep Replay Workshops (ISRW) have brought together scientists studying sleep & memory. The next ISRW will be on March 6th in Vancouver (before @cogneuronews.bsky.social). Follow the link for details and to join the mailing list.
isrw.bio.uci.edu

Pls repost! #sleep

Trump freezes $200 million in UCLA science and medical research funding, citing antisemitism The Trump administration has frozen roughly $200 million in National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health and other federal agency-funded research at UCLA, citing allegations the school d...

Suspension of all grants to UCLA www.latimes.com/california/s...

What's cool about looking back at the history of college protests is that 19 year old students have been right about every single American war, and the esteemed Harvard educated opinion writers at the New York Times have been wrong about every single American war.

Happy to announce that my lab @ Yale Psychology (actcompthink.org) will be accepting PhD applications this year (for start in Fall '26)!

Come for the fun experiments on human learning, memory, & skilled behavior, stay for the best 🍕 in the US.

Please reach out if you have any questions!

Opinion | Columbia’s Administrators Are Fooling Themselves

"this deal is unlikely to end the attacks. The federal government, and this administration, is simply too powerful and too arbitrary to be credibly bargained with."

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/o...

Feds Axed Grants Across Red, Blue States, Report Finds The Center for American Progress says the Trump administration has targeted for termination more than 4,000 grants across over 600 institutions. Adjusting for statewide enrollment, South Dakota is hit...

The assault on higher education is not just about coastal elite schools. "Federal agencies terminated or were attempting to terminate more than 4,000 grants across over 600 institutions. These grants are worth between $6.9 billion and $8.2 billion combined." www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

Subcommittee Markup of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act | United States Senate Committee on Appropriations United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

🧪 BREAKING (good news): Senate subcommittee says NO! to Trump's proposed slashes to NASA & NSF funding.

Today, the subcommittee said to keep NASA + NSF funding at $33.9 billion, the same as in FY24.

See 7:15 below. Full Senate appropriations committee meets tomorrow about it.

🧵 1/3

🚨This is the most exciting step of my scientific career🚨

25 yrs ago I started a life long interest in navigation, maps & brains

I've collected data from >4 m people in 195 nations in SeaHeroQuest

In 3 weeks we set off on an ocean voyage to study the amazing spatial skills of Marshallese sailors:

Summary Table of the massive defunding of biomedical research in the United States
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Our new paper with @chrismlangdon is just out in @natureneuro.bsky.social! We show that high-dimensional RNNs use low-dimensional circuit mechanisms for cognitive tasks and identify a latent inhibitory mechanism for context-dependent decisions in PFC data.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...