Eddie Ester

Sour grapes for NIH. If you're going to filter and triage grants based on AI, at least let me use equivalent technology to flood the zone and test the limits of your filtering algorithms!

And if one of my grants gets through, pay up.

Important point!

Subcompact or hatch, because masochism?

Virtually everyone who has come and would like to come to this country is escaping a government with a comprehensive vision of the state.

The political leadership in this country is now articulating a comprehensive vision of the state and that is what needs to be vigorously challenged.

PhD position — Rademaker lab

Curious about the visual human brain, a vibrant and collaborative lab, and pursuing a PhD in the heart of Europe? My lab is recruiting for a 3-year PhD position. More details: www.rademakerlab.com/job-add

"Configurator" is doing a fuckton of work there.

As a vision guy I'm very upset that parietal cortex doesn't have a "figure out how to grasp burrito" bubble.

Wessel Cognitive Neurology Lab | The University of Iowa Thanks for visiting the Cognitive Neurology Lab at the University of Iowa. The lab is directed by Dr. Jan R. Wessel. We are affiliated with the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, the Depa...

I will be looking to hire 2-3 post-docs over the course of the next few months to work on questions related to cognitive control in humans, using EEG, TMS, DBS, sEEG, fMRI, or related methods.

If you know anybody, please tell them to email me.

Formal ad to follow. Lab website: wessellab.org

Ugh. *too many posts in too many threads, and **might not make sense. As a working memory researcher I should know better than to multitask.

Ah shit - too many posts in too many happening too quickly. My response might make sense in the specific context where it was posted, but the idea is even if you accept cross-species hardware equivalence the (experience-depenent) software is very different.

And circling back to the post that prompted this exchange, you're going to have your work cut out for you trying to explain to John Q. Public how drosophlia's ability to recall scents will help explain why grandpa keeps forgetting to take his medication.

Respectfully, I find this a canard. Our lab has used very simple visual attention and memory paradigms from NHP research in humans and with the benefit of verbal instruction we can cut training times from months and tens of thousand of trials to minutes and 10s of trials.

Rodents live in environments incomprehensible to humans but evolved sensorimotor affordances that enable their survival. Humans have regularized their world based on their own capabilities. I do not see a way to unite these perspectives that isn't superficial (e.g., we have the same ACh receptors)

Point taken, and having just finished Sobel's book on the problem of longitude that vexed navigators from antiquity to the 19th century I'm empathetic. But the pioneers in our respective examples didn't have access to the computational and analytic tools that abound today. We can do better?

Agreed, but this is the status quo. I'd like to see more development of human-centered technologies. If neuroscience is still looking to rodent and (non-human) primate brains in 2125, I don't think we'll have made much progress on "big ticket" goals.

Mental graphs structure the storage and retrieval of visuomotor associations - Nature Human Behaviour Trach and McDougle show that motor responses can form part of structured, graph-like memory representations.

In this article, @jetrach.bsky.social and McDougle show that motor responses can form part of structured, graph-like memory representations. @actlab.bsky.social
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

To me there seems a rather large gap between an "affective state" and it's operationalization in this paper, which more-or-less reduces to "patterns of brain activity measured while a stereotactically fixed mouse watches another mouse get its ass kicked".

As one undergraduate in my lab put it (paraphrasing): "why don't we just spend more time figuring out how to measure this stuff in people?"

Right, but mice aren't humans and the causal tools used in rodents are ethically and practically intractable in humans so at some point you wind up having to try and square apples with oranges.

Perhaps this is a personal failing but a couple of well-educated colleagues from the humanities and economics departments at my institution caught recent NPR coverage of this paper. They asked me why the hell neuroscientists are trying to study emotions in mice and I didn't have a good reply.

Haikus are fun
But sometimes they don't make sense
Default mode network

I put a line in my syllabus saying that if I get this email I will round down a half letter grade. Obviously it hasn't helped.

Nora?

a la Land (I just think this one is funny)

Thanks to everyone's feedback, we have updated our calculator to optimize sample size N & scan time T for fMRI studies: leonoqr.github.io/ORSP_Calcula...

The first new feature is that users can explore how different N & T leads to different accuracy, e.g., N=1000 & T=30min => 81% max accuracy. 🧵

Oscillations in Natural Neuronal Networks; An Epiphenomenon or a Fundamental Computational Mechanism? - Human Arenas The first part of the paper is devoted to a comparison between the functional architectures of the cerebral cortex and artificial intelligent systems. While the two systems share numerous features, na...

They conclude the latter, but I object to the question. When someone says "epiphenomenon," I hear "doesn't fit my theory."

Oscillations in Natural Neuronal Networks; An Epiphenomenon or a Fundamental Computational Mechanism?
link.springer.com/article/10.1...
#neuroscience

Well, I at least got a grant rejected today. That's progress on the federal funding front, right?

I JUST WANT TO GENERALLY APOLOGIZE TO MATH TEACHERS AT LARGE FOR BEING A LITTLE SHIT AT 15 WHO WAS EXTREMELY SURE OF THE COURSE MY LIFE WOULD TAKE AND DECLARING I DID NOT NEED TO LEARN TO SOLVE FOR X. I'M SO SORRY. I DEFINITELY DID NEED TO LEARN THAT.

Just wait for the upcoming tarrifs on ECVP.

We are currently seeking nominations for a new Editor-in-Chief at @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social journal, AP&P, whether it be you or a colleague you'd like to nominate! For details, see our announcement at www.psychonomic.org/page/2025app...