aaron bornstein

Guest Lecture for Minnesota Faculty Comrades Please click the link to complete this form.

If you're an academic outside of Minnesota wanting to help folks, one way to do that is to offer a guest lecture for faculty in the Twin Cities so they can have a break. Sanctuary Campus Network is coordinating these and you can sign up here:

This hasn't stopped in Los Angeles, it's just no longer "news" - the only reason this kidnapping was reported is be because it happened directly in front of an NPR journalist who writes on immigration.

Spoke with a PI whose postdoc is trapped abroad because of social media vetting. It appears the postdoc missed disclosing one account and it's unclear if they can come back… ever.

This is the country we live in now.

ChatGPT "Absolutely Wrecked" at Chess by Atari 2600 Console From 1977 Despite all its advances, ChatGPT still, seemingly, is less smart than an Atari simulator on beginner mode.

like i love this story and I think it reveals something important. the atari is encoding a ton of information about the rules of chess explicitly in a very small amount of data, and the associational model, despite a much larger amount of data & computation, does not effectively model the game

Reporter's Notebook: He was my fruit vendor for years. I saw immigration agents take him NPR's Adrian Florido has been buying fruit from the same fruit-cart vendor in his LA neighborhood for years. On Tuesday, Florido was there when federal immigration agents whisked him away.

NPR's Adrian Florido has been buying fruit from the same fruit-cart vendor in his LA neighborhood for years. On Tuesday, Florido was there when federal immigration agents whisked him away.

Lesions Causing Aphantasia are Connected to the Fusiform Imagery Node The absence of visual mental imagery, called aphantasia, occurs congenitally in up to 3% of the general population, but the brain regions responsible …

Cortex version here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti....

Applications for #UMich #Psychology Diversity Recruitment Weekend are in 2 days! If you are thinking about applying to psychology PhD programs in the future this may be for you! The application is short, but the benefits are big
lsa.umich.edu/psych/divers...

Screenshot of tweet from Huberman that reads: “The other is that dog breeds w/different shaped heads are predictive of their demeanor and intelligence. And while I don’t! believe in Phrenology I now do pay some attention to how the shapes of peoples heads relates to their intellect and steadiness, or lack thereof.”

In response to announcement that he will be a new CBS contributor, Andrew Huberman tweeted “I’ve always gone issue-by-issue on health & science, spoken to experts w/a range of takes & presented where I see the center of (data) mass pointed. I’ll do the same with @CBSNews”. In Sept he posted this:

Bovino out to pasture.

*Multi-region computations in the brain*
When two regions are better than one...
doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...
#neuroskyence

Google Scholar has at least two posters, both relating to RNA cancer therapies, co-authored by an Alex J. Pretti affiliated with a gene therapy company headquartered in the MSP suburbs.

Genetic Data From Over 20,000 U.S. Children Misused for ‘Race Science’

The New York Times reports that a group of “scientific” racists misused National Institute of Health data (that families were assured would be protected) to write bogus papers on supposed to biological racial differences. Gift link.

The entire wave of preemptive compliance was completely unnecessary. How many careers were altered, initiatives and individuals abandoned, principles compromised? For nothing.

Does memory fade slowly, or in drops and bursts? We analyzed 728k tests from 210k people. Key finding: “stability” isn’t a trait you either have or don’t have - it’s often a time-limited state at different points in aging. Preprint "Punctuated Memory Change": 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

But when I asked an organizer what they wanted to see out of press coverage, they told me they wanted people to see the beautiful things they are building here, and not just the worst stories of the worst of ICE's crimes.

What people are doing here is beautiful. It's a tragic beauty, but a real one

All we have is each other.

Just to sum up, today we learned that ICE:

- has an explicit policy of violating the 4th Amendment (but kept it secret because they know it’s illegal)
- kidnapped a 5-year-old & used him as bait before sending him thousands of miles away from his family
- murdered a man in a camp & lied about it

What is wild to me is the defense, BY THE NEURIPS BOARD, that fabricated citations do not mean "the content of the papers themselves [is] necessarily invalidated"

It does. It very much does. What do you think citing other work is for? What do you think writing a paper is for? What do you *think*?

"... the Trump administration’s most striking successes have been universities’ proactive steps to avoid the government’s wrath"

www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/u...

Protip: If you are requesting rec letters, please follow up and make sure they get submitted.

I just found requests in my Junk mail, some of which are outdated.

Those of us who submit hundreds of letters each year often do not keep track of specific requests. Some may go missed w/o follow up.

My lab is recruiting a postdoc and a full-time research technician to work on an NIH-funded project studying age-related changes in memory for naturalistic events. Behavior, fMRI, and blood-based biomarkers. 3+ years funding guaranteed.

Postdoc: tinyurl.com/ykjfbnj8

Tech: tinyurl.com/2f2hw3f5

University IT offices should be aware of CrowdStrike's "no test plans and no quality assurance team" when deciding to mandate mass surveillance of faculty, staff, and students, entrusting CrowdStrike with the collection and processing of those records. And faculty should calibrate trust accordingly.

See you tonight! Here to chat about motivational conflict, early life adversity, anhedonia, and more 💡

#ACNP2026 @acnporg.bsky.social Today's the day to visit @biancaleonard.bsky.social 's poster, number 113!

@deffinger.bsky.social at Lived Experience Panel @acnporg.bsky.social #ACNP2026:

We should be going from consultation to co-production in the integration of lived experience in research 🧠🧪

@acnporg.bsky.social

I think these findings raise interesting questions about the adaptive function of anhedonic attitudes. Find @biancaleonard.bsky.social and myself to learn more!

#ACNP2026 - Wednesday afternoon @biancaleonard.bsky.social will present a computational model-driven motivational conflict challenge that identifies novel, *opposing* influences of early-life unpredictability and anhedonia @mikeyassa.bsky.social @hartleylabnyu.bsky.social @malejandra.bsky.social

Iran Escalates Deadly Crackdown on Mass Protests as Trump Threatens to Launch Military Attack Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed in Iran as authorities crack down on protests against inflation and the government’s handling of the economic crisis, with thousands more arrested amid a...

"Many civil and political activists in Iran have warned against any kind of foreign intervention, because it actually increases repression inside of the country."

New paper published! 🎉“A systematic review of pharmacological effects on human aversive memory” is now available in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, providing the first broad synthesis across 36 compounds, different memory stages, and 13 biological systems. doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...