Fantastic news. Congratulations to both of you! 🎉

🧠 the Digital Brain Project is now live:

$5M total · up to $500k per selected team

Let's open-source the modeling of the human brain brain activity!

➡️Apply on: digitalbrainproject.org

Applying for an ERC grant in the 2027 competitions: what you need to know The ERC plans to launch the grant competitions under its 2027 Work Programme between July 2026 and June 2027, with the calls for proposals introducing several changes to the eligibility rules for appl...

The #ERC just announced new rules!
erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

If you got a B score before, you’re blocked for 2 years (instead of 1). A C score means 3-year exclusion.

This applies to the 2027 call for now, but I’d expect this to stick. Important for anyone planning to apply this round!

Yeah… 🫂

Maybe I could’ve packaged that more gently. At the end of the day, it reflects how overloaded the funding system has become. Going forward, timing the application well will be even more important!

Applying for an ERC grant in the 2027 competitions: what you need to know The ERC plans to launch the grant competitions under its 2027 Work Programme between July 2026 and June 2027, with the calls for proposals introducing several changes to the eligibility rules for appl...

The #ERC just announced new rules!
erc.europa.eu/news-events/...

If you got a B score before, you’re blocked for 2 years (instead of 1). A C score means 3-year exclusion.

This applies to the 2027 call for now, but I’d expect this to stick. Important for anyone planning to apply this round!

"Once the diverse abundance of [Arousal⁺ & Arousal⁻] populations across brain regions is considered, neurovascular coupling becomes consistent across the brain: it is described by a single model with two HRFs that are similar across regions"

Super interesting work by @agnesland.bsky.social et al! 👇

We’ve got an exciting new thing to share! We have causal evidence (using TMR) that memory reactivation during sleep promotes abstract understanding of underlying structure, allowing transfer learning in a new domain with zero superficial feature overlap with the learned one.

TDLM-Resting-State Simulation How sensitive is TDLM really? Can we actually find replay when we know it is present?

Can we really measure replay in humans using MEG with current methods? In our most recent paper we simulated replay under realistic conditions via a novel hybrid approach with astonishing results.

we're delighted that it has now been published @elife.bsky.social!
elifesciences.org/articles/108...

Alex Martin talking about his science career

Alex Martin talked about his "eclectic" career spanning over 4 decades, including 31 years in the Laboratory of Cognition (NIH), with some reflections on what makes a successful scientific career: "the right place at the right time", "it's good to be first", "controversy is helpful"

It's been a long time coming, but I'm very happy this work has finally come to fruition!

Half of social-science studies fail replication test in years-long project Results from massive, ‘eagerly awaited’ initiative reinforce concerns about the credibility of science — but raise hope for solutions.

"A massive seven-year project exploring 3,900 social-science papers has ended with a disturbing finding: researchers could replicate the results of only half of the studies that they tested" www.nature.com/articles/d41...

#BIDS has been extended to #EyeTracking data!

There is now a standard for organizing and sharing eye tracking, covering gaze position, pupil size, meta data, messages, and more. Great news for #OpenScience! 🎉

Martin Szinte et al: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

#BIDS has been extended to #EyeTracking data!

There is now a standard for organizing and sharing eye tracking, covering gaze position, pupil size, meta data, messages, and more. Great news for #OpenScience! 🎉

Martin Szinte et al: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

How do we define "good" fMRI data? Especially with resting state, there are circularity risks if we evaluate data quality as showing the networks we expect to see. Javier Gonzalez-Castillo (& me & others) developed pBOLD, a new metric that uses multi-echo info. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/8

🚨New preprint alert! 🚨
Do multimodal LLMs (VLMs) reason about high-level visual perception like humans do? We asked over 2000 human observers and 18 VLMs to describe scenes using 15 different tasks, ranging from general knowledge, affordances, affect, sensory experiences, and future prediction. 1/

NEW preprint with @stephen-ramanoel.bsky.social and @mobilebrainimaging.bsky.social 🎉

In this final study of my PhD, we combined immersive virtual reality with mobile EEG and gait analysis during a path integration task, recording from 30 young and 32 older adults

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Graphical abstract showing four panels. Panel 1: a person in an MRI scanner with blue cognitive thought bubbles drifting from their head and pink body thought bubbles from their torso, with organs glowing inside. Panel 2: blue bubbles for cognitive items (Self, Words, Focus, Images, Future, Past) are larger than pink bubbles for body items (Breathing, Movement, Stomach, Heart, Skin, Bladder), with arrows showing body thoughts link to more negative and less positive emotion. Panel 3: physiological traces (EGG, ECG, respiratory) show higher arousal with body-wandering; a bar chart shows cognitive items (Past, Future, Repetitive, Vivid) correlate with more ADHD and depression symptoms while body items (Breath, Stomach, Skin, Heart) correlate with fewer. Panel 4: medial brain with thalamus, somatomotor cortex, and interoceptive regions highlighted, plus a chord diagram showing connectivity between these three regions.

New paper in PNAS! When the mind wanders, it often drifts to the body. We call this "body-wandering". These thoughts are often negative, but are associated with reduced ADHD & depression symptoms, driven by a distinct interoceptive-allostatic brain signature. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520822123

Thanks, Ben! :)

Thank you!

Honored to be named an APS Rising Star and to be on this list with so many fantastic scientists. Deeply grateful to my mentors, collaborators, and students over the years! ⭐

Spontaneous behavior is a succession of self-directed tasks Weinreb et al. reveal a hierarchy of timescales in mouse behavior, including low-level syllables and high-level behavioral states. States and syllables are encoded in different brain areas. Prefrontal...

Have you ever wondered why mice do what they do when they are free to do whatever they want? Check out our latest (and this slightly delayed thread about our recent paper, led by Caleb Weinreb and friends...) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Picture of Alex Martin, National Institute of Mental Health

The Laboratory of Brain and Cognition at NIH is hosting a two-day symposium on 'Foundations and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience' in honor of Dr. Alex Martin, to be held at NIH (with online videocast) on April 7th-8th, 2026. Register to attend online or in-person at: bit.ly/4bYlbxw

For nearly two decades resting-state fMRI has ruled supreme. And resting-state is suprisingly powerful. But we can do so much better by using broad batteries of tasks with the right design. Here a double-punch delivered by two papers from @carobellum.bsky.social and @basselarafat.bsky.social!

New paper from our IGOR Sustainability project in Nature Human Behaviour: “Sustainable neuroscience through open science” ♻️🧠

As there is no research on a dead planet, neuroscience must weigh its environmental footprint alongside its societal impact.

A thread 👇
[1/4]

What does it take to show the brain represents something? We offer a framework that brings conceptual clarity to representation, systematizing how decoding, encoding, RSA, etc. bear on that question. This makes explicit what findings establish and where interpretations go too far.

New lab paper! 🧠

Human hippocampal & MTL theta activity is linked to eye movements, but only during memory-guided navigation. Theta is also strongest during longer, more exploratory eye movements.

plos.io/4dwJhR8

Huge congrats to Humza & team! 👏

Transformer Explainer: LLM Transformer Model Visually Explained An interactive visualization tool showing you how transformer models work in large language models (LLM) like GPT.

Fantastic interactive explanation of #Transformers right here, including tokenization, what embeddings are, how self-attention works... Perfect for teaching or brushing up on your own understanding! poloclub.github.io/transformer-...

Hi Colleagues who use eyetracking! 👋 👀

@shen4brains.bsky.social , @jordwynn.bsky.social, Zhong Xu Liu and I are guest editing a Special Issue for Neuropsychologia on Contributions of eyetracking to cognitive neuroscience.

Very happy that this paper from our lab is now out in @pnas.org! What happens when the *same* person experiences the *same* information with a *different* interpretation? Nearly the whole 🧠—well, at least nearly all association cortex—changes how it represents that information! tinyurl.com/p8chj2j7

New review from our group out in Nature Reviews Psychology:

Determinants of individual navigation ability

with my excellent co-author: @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social