New paper that merits a read (Im totally unbiased...not). Simple, straightforward, impactful message. Prediction a la LLM is nice. Constituent-constrained prediction is nicer. @jiajiezou.bsky.social and Nai Ding show brain, behavioral, MEG, ECoG data.
www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence
Vicious cycle:
Too many papers -> Review quality decreases ->
More crappy papers get accepted -> People realize it's a just a numbers game and submit more papers -> Too many papers...
Now add AI agents to every step of the pipeline.
This is not sustainable.
“A whole civilization will die tonight” is the most vile thing a US president has ever said, certainly during the post-1945 era when they’ve had the power to kill civilizations with the dropping of a bomb. I’m staring into the darkness. May this not be one of the most fateful days in human history.
Much love to my Iranian colleagues and friends trying to live their normal lives today ♥️
John T. Hale and Team Language Cycles are searching for participants from 25 languages for The Little Prince MEG study. Get in touch via languagecycles.com/home/tlpp/. Eight years and seven rejected proposals in the making, now generously funded by the Johns Hopkins University and the @dfg.de
One of best books I have read, a definitive study of American-Iranian political relations, is ‘Going to Tehran’ by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett 2013). It address misconceptions and makes the case that the US needs to normalize relations with Iran.
youtu.be/Z8yw4bIOYxI?...
New post in JoCNForum by @ryanhammonds.bsky.social and colleagues: "To text and back again, a vision-language model's tale"
doi.org/10.21428/8e6...
Despite many claims to the contrary, the Iranian diaspora has a diversity of opinions and feelings. Many (and probably most) are now opposed to this war.
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/02/w...
jacobin.com/2026/03/pro-...
niacouncil.org/zogbypoll/#c...
In other news, the proofs are up for my new paper, with a dream team of Subhs Shrestha, @linguistbrian.bsky.social, Diogo Almeida, Alec Marantz, and Rajesh Bhatt!
direct.mit.edu/nol/article/...
My heartfelt thanks to the linguist Denny Moore, who has done exactly what anyone investigating the Pirahã story and its aftermath should have done long ago. Namely: actually investigate.
"Fact checking Geoffrety Pullum's claims about Daniel Everett in Brazil"
ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009...
Does anyone have a PDF of this book chapter? Heeschen, C. (1985). Agrammatism versus paragrammatism: A fictitious opposition. In Agrammatism (pp. 207-248). Academic Press. doi.org/10.1016/B978...
New this year at @cogneuronews.bsky.social 2026: All abstracts will be published in Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society jocnf.pubpub.org/cns2026. Functionality includes ability to append a visual abstract, like this: doi.org/10.21428/8e6...
In March 2025, there were reports of French scientist being detained and barred from entry to US because of social media posts. Are there other reports of similar situations where European academics have been detained or denied entry to US (for same or related reasons)?
www.cnn.com/2025/03/20/e...
No war with Iran.
I hope academics in US, Europe and across the world stand strong against this flagrant violation of international law by the US government, Israeli government, and their supporters.
This will be an awesome event with a variety of speakers on topics related to human creativity.
sc.edu/study/colleg...
academics are some of the least funny people with some of the least awareness of that fact
Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
“Shared governance” by faculty is essentially being reduced to: do a bunch of work, but have no authority.
"data available upon reasonable request"
Academic freedom is meaningless unless academics have the ability to explore novel ideas without constant pressure to maintain yearly publication rates, pursuit of grant funding, etc.
📢 C-STAR Lecture Reminder
Join us for the upcoming lecture by @gregoryhickok.bsky.social on Friday, February 6th at 1 pm EST: "Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language and Its Sensorimotor Foundation"
No registration needed. Access through: cstar.sc.edu/lecture-seri...
I say this as someone who tends to get very strong student evaluations: I don't think they hardly, if at all, useful as an indicator of course quality, yet they are basically used as the only major indicator of teaching success in universities.
Excellent opportunity and research environment
Excited to share our new publication “The Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Phoneme Encoding in Aging and Aphasia”, published in JNeurosci 🧠
➡️ www.jneurosci.org/content/46/4...
with @lauragwilliams.bsky.social & @mvandermosten.bsky.social 🤝
Check out @stanfordbrain.bsky.social ’s summary of it ⬇️
Your Iranian colleagues are cut off from family back home & are in a state of collective grief, which has many faces. We may appear more aloof or be more impatient, may self-isolate, have more typos, may freeze or overwork to numb the pain, or find fear, memory, or hope in unexpected moments.
@gregoryhickok.bsky.social will be giving a C-STAR lecture on Friday, February 6 at 1:00 pm Eastern Time regarding his new book 'Wired for Words'. I'm sure it will be provocative in the best possible way. Please attend and prepare your most challenging questions!
cstar.sc.edu/lecture-seri...
@sc.edu it's frustrating to repeatedly fail to find parking in faculty/staff lots at the university. I would love to be able to do my job effectively but it's very hard if I can't park ANYwhere!
We have an opening for a postdoc research fellow on our NIH-funded study "Neural correlates of recovery from aphasia after stroke" in Brisbane, Australia. Ideal for anyone passionate about neuroimaging of language/brain. International applicants welcome!
uq.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/en-GB/uqcare...
Agreed - this seems quite clear examining the evidence available.
The key question is: did the officer have reason to believe the driver might be attempting to ram him? I.e., spur-of-the-moment judgment, his perspective looking at the windshield rather than at the tires, etc.