Sam Gershman

Another fun project from @yangxiang.bsky.social. She asks the question: do people assign responsibility to personality traits in the same way that they assign reponsibility to people? The answer: sort of!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

"I dived deep in the ocean of astronomical theories, true and false, and rescued the precious sunken jewel of true knowledge by the means of the boat of my own intellect."

Quoted in The Golden Road, by William Dalrymple

This looks awesome, I wish I could be there. I hope more cognitive scientists get engaged with this kind of work!

Cracking the code of why, when some choose to ‘self-handicap’ — Harvard Gazette New research also offers hints for devising ways to stop students from creating obstacles to success.

The Harvard Gazette has a nice story on my student @yangxiang.bsky.social and her work with @tobigerstenberg.bsky.social
news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Congress is currently considering a piece of legislation that would effectively sever all scientific ties between the US and China. Unbelievable.

You can read the AAU response here:
www.aau.edu/key-issues/a...

Descartes thought the mind controls the body, but popular science in the 21st century has fliipped this on its head: an inverted homunculus in the brain controls the mind. Our mental states are hydraulic tubes through which hemodynamic spirits flow, animated by the soul residing in neural tissue.

The neuroscience here is fascinating, but I don't understand the title. What is the alternative?

I've worked with Momchil for years and can't recommend his lab enough!

John J. Vastola, Samuel J. Gershman, Kanaka Rajan: A Variational Manifold Embedding Framework for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.22128 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.22128 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.22128

I've seen some people argue that such devices could be useful when self-report is unreliable. But I don't see how this is possible. The reliability of self-report is usually an upper bound on the reliability of devices trained on self-report data.

In fact, many devices cannot outperform self-report by construction, because they are trained on self-report data. So their only plausible use cases are the rare settings where self-report is truly unavailable.

The best brain-machine interface remains the mouth. Evolution spent 4B years of evolution on R&D developing the device, so I guess it's not that surprising. Yet it still rarely appears as a baseline in evaluations of new devices.

If the goal is to appropriately weight reviews based on expertise etc then it's only necessary for the AC to know the identities, right? What is gained by transparency for reviewers and authors?

How does unblinding help with that issue?

I find these emails borderline outrageous because it's basically resume padding ("I worked with the great Professor Bergelson at HARVARD UNIVERSITY"). No one needs expert advisors in high school. Youth is for enjoying one's batshit crazy ideas without the cold shower of expert advice.

Berlioz is an inspiration to all of us who aspire to take reasonable ideas to their unreasonable extremes.

In his Treatise on Instrumentation and Orchestration, the composer Hector Berlioz envisioned an ideal orchestra that included 30 grand pianos, 30 harps, 360 singers, 120 violins!! As Gertrude Stein said, "If it can be done, why do it?"

www.hberlioz.com/Scores/Berli...

I am recruiting graduate students for the experimental side of my lab @mcgill.ca for admission in Fall 2026!
Get in touch if you're interested in how brain circuits implement distributed computation, including dopamine-based distributed RL and probabilistic representations.

Storing long-lived memories via molecular error correction: a minimal mathematical model of Crick's memory switch https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.11.13.688304v1

I love Feyerabend, and I think scientists should do whatever kind of science they want. But if they are going to publish a claim, with inferential statistics to back it up, then we want to be sure that the result is reproducible and not mining noise. We are currently awash in non-reproducibility.

I agree that not all scientific research is hypothesis testing. But I think published research should be, even if it comes *after* some initial exploratory phase. That's how you ensure robustness and reproducibility.

The biggest barrier is probably cultural; we're just not used to doing things this way, and I'm as guilty as anyone.

The reason to do this is that it removes the incentive to p-hack, inflate claims, overestimate effect sizes, tell post hoc stories, and generally engage in random walk science.

If funders wanted to make a huge positive impact on scientific practice, they would mandate that all publications appear first as registered reports, that APCs are only paid for RRs, and that grant applications only require preliminary data for RR sample size determination / power analysis.

Episteme We are a new type of R&D organization that recruits exceptional researchers across disciplines, who want to pursue important translational science for humanity that cannot be enabled efficiently withi...

Don’t count US science out just yet. The largest economy on the planet will rebound in a very big way. It’s already correcting…..

episteme.com

My favorite thing about elife!

Also, it is so cringe to force prostrate authors to cite your papers. Don't do that!

Everyone would be happier if reviewers took this as their mandate rather than a "criticize everything" approach. We'd all spend a lot less time on peer review, and papers would get less mangled by the process.

My reviewing style has changed over time. Rather than litigate every little thing, and pushing my own ideas, I focus only on 2 things:
(1) Are the claims interesting/important?
(2) Does the evidence support the claims?

Most of my reviews these days are short and focused.

"Let thine eye be thy cook" - Henry V, Act 5, Scene 2