Ev Fedorenko

Coming March 17, 2026!
Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.

Evidence from Formal Logical Reasoning Reveals that the Language of Thought is not Natural Language Humans are endowed with a powerful capacity for both inductive and deductive logical thought: we easily form generalizations based on a few examples and draw conclusions from known premises. Humans al...

Is the Language of Thought == Language? A Thread 🧵
New Preprint (link: tinyurl.com/LangLOT) with @alexanderfung.bsky.social, Paris Jaggers, Jason Chen, Josh Rule, Yael Benn, @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social, ‪@spiantado.bsky.social‬, Rosemary Varley, @evfedorenko.bsky.social
1/8

The language 🧠 areas are selective for language relative to many forms of reasoning (arithmetic, social, semantic, etc.).
@hopekean.bsky.social has now shown that even formal logical reasoning—the domain that is perhaps the closest to language—neither engages nor requires the language system!

Science Funding Process =====Written July 11 2025====== Hi all, Just wanted to share some information that is likely relevant to a lot of us, but not always easy to understand, about federal science budget procedure (feel f...

Just sent this as an email to my department but figured I'd share more broadly in case it is useful. This describes the procedure happening now for science funding in Congress (@davidimiller.bsky.social can correct me if I got this wrong). Importantly, there are still actions that can be taken.

Thanks for the opportunity, Because Language! 👇

🚨 New Preprint!!

Thrilled to share with you our latest work: “Mixture of Cognitive Reasoners”, a modular transformer architecture inspired by the brain’s functional networks: language, logic, social reasoning, and world knowledge.

1/ 🧵👇

NEUROCOG 2025 is taking place in Brussels Nov 17–18!

The theme: AI and the Human Brain 🤖 🧠

We’re thrilled to welcome 6 amazing invited speakers:
@evfedorenko.bsky.social, @nicoschuck.bsky.social, @summerfieldlab.bsky.social, @jeffreybowers.bsky.social, @irisgroen.bsky.social & @mtoneva.bsky.social

Harvard president receives standing ovation during commencement.

OECS thematic collections.

If you haven't been looking recently at the Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (oecs.mit.edu), here's your reminder that we are a free, open access resource for learning about the science of mind.

Today we are launching our new Thematic Collections to organize our growing set of articles!

Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science The Open Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science is a new, multidisciplinary guide to understanding the mind: a freely-available, growing collection of peer-reviewed articles introducing key topics to a bro...

Thank you, ‪@mcxfrank.bsky.social‬ and @asifamajid.bsky.social‬ for making the OECS happen, and
Marina Bedny for section editing! Here is an article on the neuroscience of syntax: doi.org/10.21428/e27...

NIH killed grants on orders from Elon Musk’s DOGE Court documents and internal correspondence show the cost-cutting force has broad control over the world’s largest public biomedical funder.

NIH killed grants on orders from Elon Musk’s DOGE. Story by @maxkozlov.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Judge Blocks Trump Effort to Bar International Students at Harvard

Breaking News: A judge blocked a Trump administration move to bar Harvard University from admitting international students, hours after the school filed suit.

This is fucking insane

Despite everything going on, I may have funds to hire a postdoc this year 😬🤞🧑‍🔬 Open to a wide variety of possible projects in social and cognitive neuroscience. Get in touch if you are interested! Reposts appreciated.

Welcome to Save The U.S. National Science Foundation A Girl Looking at a Physics Model TAKE ACTION Save NSF is a coalition of concerned scientists and allies who are working to save funding for scientific grants through the U.S. National Science Foundation. Our mission is to support and advocate for the continuation of vital research and innovation in various scientific fields. NSF funding is critical to this work. Join us in our endeavor to ensure a sustainable future for scientific exploration and discovery.

I am so heartened to this seriously AWESOME #SaveNSF website go up today!!!!

Has a take action toolkit with:

1. Press outreach templates
2. Social media toolkit
3. Elected official outreach
4. Talking points

Check it out and share widely!!!! Likely more to come.

www.savensf.com

❤️

oh wow wow wow. Wow.

It's officially out, after many years:

"Loopholes: A window into value alignment and the communication of meaning"

authors.elsevier.com/c/1k~vV_Ebvv...

Read on for a brief summary, but I encourage you to read the thing itself.

While I would say my research is part of #NeuroAI, I don't actually thing it's very useful to define a research field as a constellation of methodologies. We should organize primarily around questions, and then use whatever methods best answer them.

The signatories include many leading figures in autism research. Among their key points: focus on what's unknown; don’t waste resources on questions that are already answered; acknowledge role of genetics; preregister the proposed study and invite expert comment; and don’t demean people with autism.

YouTube video by MIT Quest for Intelligence Prof. Judy Fan: Cognitive Tools for Making the Invisible Visible

This is a spectacular talk by my colleague @judithfan.bsky.social 🧠 🎨 🤖

"Cognitive tools for making the invisible visible"

🎬: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF3X...

We have made some amazing discoveries (quantum mechanics), but we're still very bad at understanding animals. Read our paper in Ecology Law Quarterly for a discussion of legal ramifications that understanding animal communication brings.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Such a fun event!! 🙂

Discriminating image representations with principal distortions Image representations (artificial or biological) are often compared in terms of their global geometric structure; however, representations with similar global structure can have strikingly...

We are presenting our work “Discriminating image representations with principal distortions” at #ICLR2025 today (4/24) at 3pm! If you are interested in comparing model representations with other models or human perception, stop by poster #63. Highlights in 🧵
openreview.net/forum?id=ugX...

Language

Thanks to Evan Kidd, @mcxfrank.bsky.social & @asifamajid.bsky.social (Eds) for organizing the awesome *Open* Encyc. of Cog. Sci. and entrusting me with/ the honor of penning the entry on "Language" (in < 3500 words, so do see other entries for much, MUCH more!)
oecs.mit.edu/pub/ho9e9c80...

I might be able to hire a postdoc for this fall in computational linguistics at UT Austin. Topics in the general LLM + cognitive space (particularly reasoning, chain of thought, LLMs + code) and LLM + linguistic space. If this could be of interest, feel free to get in touch!

NIH moving to ban all future grants to universities with DEI programs or Israel boycotts, document suggests NIH appears to be preparing to prohibit the awarding of new grants to institutions that have DEI programs or boycott Israeli companies

NIH moving to ban all future grants to universities with DEI programs or Israel boycotts, document suggests. Story by @aniloza.bsky.social www.statnews.com/2025/04/21/t...

The cerebellar components of the human language network The cerebellum's capacity for neural computation is arguably unmatched. Yet despite evidence of cerebellar contributions to cognition, including language, its precise role remains debated. Here, we sy...

New paper! 🧠 **The cerebellar components of the human language network**

with: @hsmall.bsky.social @moshepoliak.bsky.social @gretatuckute.bsky.social @benlipkin.bsky.social @awolna.bsky.social @aniladmello.bsky.social and @evfedorenko.bsky.social

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

1/n 🧵

Today House Republicans, cheered on by the richest person on Earth, passed a budget framework that will cut support for the poorest people in our country.

All while cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, and massively increasing the deficit.

Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger | CNN Dr. Ardem Patapoutian says he watches “with deep sadness as the United States’ remarkable scientific enterprise, which took generations of hard work and national investment to build, faces a concerted...

Published an op-ed for @cnn.com: “Nobel laureate: I owe America my success. Today, its scientific future is in danger.”
A personal reflection on what’s at stake as science funding gets slashed. I’d be grateful if you could amplify both in and beyond the science world.
www.cnn.com/2025/04/09/h...