Pedro H. Santos

Presenting my on-going Master's research to Phil Monahan at our online annual seminar at UFRJ.

What a nice day. :)

Main lesson of the presentation: EEG preprocessing is a pain in the ***. hahahaha

New Correspondence with @davidpoeppel.bsky.social in Nat Rev Neurosci. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Here, we critique a recent paper by Rosas et al. We argue that "Bottom-up" and "Top-down" neuroscience have various meanings in the literature.

PDF: rdcu.be/eSKYI

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀?
Do they even exist...?
Join @lucinauddin.bsky.social who will present, followed by discussion in the Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon.
Open to all.
Date: Dec 9, 12pm EST-US
Register: umd.zoom.us/meeting/regi... (you need a zoom account which is free)
#neuroskyence

It started on: "are oscillations important?" and now it's like: "look here this paper about beta band oscillation in ants brain"

Me trying to keep up with the oscillations discussion in bluesky

What enables human language? A biocultural framework Explaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of l...

Origins of language, one of humanity’s most distinctive traits, may be best explained as a unique convergence of multiple capacities each with its own evolutionary history, involving intertwined roles of biology & culture. This framing can expand research horizons. A 🧵 on our @science.org paper.🧪1/n

If you are unable to download the full version of our newly published language evolution article in Science, there is a link for direct free access on the Max Planck Institute website here:

ROSE: A Universal Neural Grammar Processing natural language syntax requires a negotiation between symbolic and subsymbolic representations. Building on the recent representation, operation, structure, encoding (ROSE) neurocomputa...

New paper out today in Cognitive Neuroscience!
Proposing an explicit, causal-mechanistic, falsifiable and empirically grounded neural code for natural language syntax, and its innate basis.

ROSE: A Universal Neural Grammar

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Beyond Broca: The Two Routes to Speaking For 150 years, Broca's area has defined speech production. Now scientists have discovered a second parallel system that controls the melody and rhythm of how we speak and sing.

Beyond Broca: The Two Routes to Speaking. My new
@psychtoday.bsky.social essay excerpted and adapted from Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language, forthcoming this month @mitpress.bsky.social.
www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wire...
.

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge This week I was looking for info on what cognitive scientists mean when they speak of ‘domain-general’ cognition. I was curious, because the nuances are relevant for something I am researching at t…

AI slop and the destruction of knowledge irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/a...

Confronting the connectivity crisis in human M/EEG research The cognitive neuroscience community using M/EEG has not converged on measures of task-related inter-regional brain connectivity that generalize acros…

Confronting the connectivity crisis in human M/EEG research
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Left perisylvian rhythms encode prosody and syntax during delayed sentence repetition The human brain must add information to the acoustic speech signal in order to understand language. Many accounts propose that the prosodic structure of utterances (including their syllabic rhythm and...

'Left perisylvian rhythms encode prosody and syntax during delayed sentence repetition'.

Cool intracranial work on syntax and phonology!

www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Bill Labov: Looking Back, Looking Forward Bill Labov passed away peacefully at home on December 17, 2024, with his wife and fellow Penn linguist Gillian Sankoff by his side. He leaves behind a legacy so large that it is hard to put into word....

Really grateful to the editors of @jslx.bsky.social for this opportunity to write about Bill's legacy -- both scholarly and some personal -- from our perspective as 3 students from his later years. 🐦

w @laurelmack.bsky.social & Meredith Tamminga

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

"Our results suggest that LLMs' ability to predict brain activation does not strongly differ between language and non-language-related brain areas"

On whether the relationship between large language models and brain activity is language-specific

2025.ccneuro.org/abstract_pdf...

Merge-based syntax is mediated by distinct neurocognitive mechanisms: A clustering analysis of comprehension abilities in 84,000 individuals with language deficits across nine languages In the modern language sciences, the core computational operation of syntax, 'Merge', is defined as an operation that combines two linguistic units (e.g., 'brown', 'cat') to form a categorized structu...

New paper out today!

We provide evidence from 84,000 individuals with language deficits across 9 languages for distinct but highly common and robust structural syntactic types generated from Merge-based syntax.

🌲 🧠

arxiv.org/abs/2508.02885

Human neurons undergo protracted functional maturation into adulthood Human cognitive development is uniquely prolonged, reflecting the extended postnatal maturation of the cerebral cortex where cell-type differentiation, synaptogenesis, myelination8 and transcriptional...

Beautiful work from the Raimondo lab documenting the protracted maturation of human neurons (h/t @lancasterlab.bsky.social)
For #neoteny fans 🧪🧠
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

When word order matters: human brains represent sentence meaning differently from large language models Large language models based on the transformer architecture are now capable of producing human-like language. But do they encode and process linguistic meaning in a human-like way? Here, we address th...

When word order matters: human brains represent sentence meaning differently from large language models

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

‘We dissent’: NASA staff declare opposition to Trump cuts Declaration of dissent, which warns that science and safety are at risk, joins similar documents from staff at the EPA and the NIH.

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Thanks, my uni does not have access to that journal. I'm looking forward to reading it.

Parallel Cortical Networks Formed by Modular Organization of Primary Motor Cortex Outputs The increase of movement repertoire in primates is associated with the appearance of additional specialized cortical areas interconnected with M1. Hamadjida et al. show that, instead of being uniforml...

Modularity is not dead 🧠

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

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Jeremiah Cohen standing in front of a giant green neuron.

THIS IS ONE NEURON! Jaw dropping.

It distributes a particular neurotransmitter (norepinephrine) across the mouse brain; it’s a locus coeruleus neuron.

@jeremiahycohen.bsky.social and colleagues at the @alleninstitute.bsky.social are using new biotech to see things never seen before.

Extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos Compositionality, the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures, is a hallmark of human language. Compositionality can be trivial (the combination’s meaning is the sum ...

"[...] each of the seven call types we investigated here represents a building block of a compositional structure. [...] akin to human language, compositionality is a pervasive component of bonobos’ vocal communication."

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

The fog of war in science is about to lift There is many problems in science: we are about to see it due to automatic parsing of papers

"I am starting to get pretty good results when I internally run prompts asking LLMs to review papers for signs of questionable research practices. lot of mistakes that people make for a lack of knowing better will be wrongly called fraud. It is better if we start improving our practices right now."

On the origin of memory neurons in the human hippocampus The hippocampus is essential for episodic memory, yet its coding mechanism remains debated. In humans, two main theories have been proposed: one suggests that concept neurons represent specific elemen...

On the origin of memory neurons in the human hippocampus: Trends in Cognitive Sciences www.cell.com/trends/cogni...

This brought me to tears.
Thank you for bringing it to us, @betsysneller.bsky.social
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
We do not doubt the technical quality of your study.
However, we are not persuaded that the findings represent a sufficient advance to warrant publication in Nature Valentines, & are returning the paper without a review.

#AcademicValentine

Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge? New perspectives on the principle of model parsimony | PNAS The preference for simple explanations, known as the parsimony principle, has long guided the development of scientific theories, hypotheses, and m...

Really interesting discussion about something that is often automatic accepted as truth.

Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge? New perspectives on the principle of model parsimony
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

🗣️ Language is widely distributed throughout the brain 🧠

In a recent correspondence in @natrevneurosci.bsky.social, we suggest that there is no 'language network' in the brain. What appears as such is an inevitable illusion created in part by the methods we use.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Joint speech and text machine translation for up to 100 languages - Nature SEAMLESSM4T is a single machine translation tool that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation and automatic speech recognition between up to 100 languages.

A paper in Nature presents an AI model that can translate speech and text, including direct speech-to-speech translations, for up to 101 languages. The model, named SEAMLESSM4T, fills gaps in language coverage and outperforms existing systems. 🧪