Yikes.

Another new one from the lab in J Neurosci:

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

Evidence accumulation is a core principle by which brains convert information into decisions. But what happens when the evidence the brain needs can't be directly read from an external stimulus or memory? 1/N

Very cool and inspiring! Progress toward a real application for brain decoding:

For example, could you start the video with a monocular animation of the same scene and fade it out as the autostereogram fades in? IDK if that would work, but there has to be something that can be done to make fusion easier...

Awesome! I love this, I want to show it in class, but I have had a heck of a time getting naive subjects (i.e. students) to see autosterograms. Given that you seem to have lots of control here - Is there anything more to be done to help with fusion?

Happy Critical Thinking Day to all who celebrate

Did not have this in my radar.

A line graph of the number of NSF awards in fiscal 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025. The fiscal year 2026 is well below the other curves and increasing only very slowly.

NSF Update through March 13, 2026

1/2

We know about cosmological dark matter despite being unable to measure it because, without it, galaxies would fall apart. By analogy, let's talk about "cognitive dark matter" (CDM): brain functions that meaningfully shape behavior but are hard to infer from behavior alone.

New paper! 🧵👇

Schematic of semantic tuning shifts from L2-English to L1-Chinese

Our work on bilingual language processing is now out in @pnas.org! Our fMRI study compares cortical representations btwn native and non-native languages. We find that representations are largely similar, but systematically modulated btwn languages www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Also happy birthday =-)

Better models of human high-level visual cortex emerge from natural language supervision with a large and diverse dataset - Nature Machine Intelligence Prediction of high-level visual representations in the human brain may benefit from multimodal sources in network training and the incorporation of complex datasets. Wang and colleagues show that lang...

And for 'semantic' features derived from DNNs of various flavors, the CLIP model (openai.com/index/clip/) is probably a good bet (per www.nature.com/articles/s42...)

GitHub - patrickmineault/your-head-is-there-to-move-you-around: Task-driven models of the dorsal visual stream Task-driven models of the dorsal visual stream. Contribute to patrickmineault/your-head-is-there-to-move-you-around development by creating an account on GitHub.

(DorsalNet: github.com/patrickminea...)

GitHub - gallantlab/pymoten: Motion energy features from video Motion energy features from video. Contribute to gallantlab/pymoten development by creating an account on GitHub.

Here are a couple tools for quantifying motion with python (github.com/gallantlab/p...) or matlab (github.com/gallantlab/m...) (same motion energy algorithm in both). I've found that this model predicts brain responses about as well as newer, fancier motion-quantifying DNNs e.g. DorsalNet

Hey, sounds like a cool project! I have a long response, but first, check out this project: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... I don't have suggestions for automatic labeling of emotional content, but I do for other domains...

New work from the Gallant lab mapping representation of semantic relations (has-a, is-a, found-at, etc) across the brain - super interesting stuff! V. related to one of the first topics I studied (tried to study) in grad school! Find the paper here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

If you haven't yet changed how you teach and evaluate thanks to AI, you probably need to. This is not something that educators asked to happen, but it is worth noting what is out there - in this case an OpenClaw tool designed to cheat.

Yes please.

NSD-synthetic, the out-of-distribution companion dataset of NSD consisting of 7T fMRI responses to 284 artificial images, is now published.

#NeuroAI #CompNeuro #neuroscience #AI

doi.org/10.1038/s414...

I finally got around to setting up a lab website!

Have a look: the-steel-lab.github.io

Just in time to start the new semester.

Worth checking out: bsky.app/profile/alex...
(see response from original author & Alex's response to that too)

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

“Incantation” 💯

Well, this is an utter disaster for science.

This gutting of peer review is very likely driven by Project 2025/OMB/Vought, very likely is about funding junk science, and very likely is coming for #NIH and biomedical research next.
🧪

*shudder*

Also, I feel like there is an analogy to LLMs here…

This is amazing, but I think my wife still takes the cake with her childhood drawing of “a man with a bag of eyebrows”

When “Stuff Happens” After Vaccination How scientists separate coincidence from true side effects

"With the news that the administration plans to link the COVID vaccine to child deaths using data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), it’s worth revisiting how we actually detect whether a vaccine is causing harm."

Excellent explainer from @drjenndowd.bsky.social from 9/2025😷🛟🧪

I’ve seen some impressive things @joshdeleeuw.bsky.social can do with web cam based eye tracking… not sure if there is public code yet

I am glad about the election results, but yes this 👇👇👇