📢 PhD position in the NeuroAI of Language
Why can LLMs predict brain activity so well? We're hiring a PhD student to find out -- AI interpretability meets neuroimaging
Deadline March 20
Please RT 🙏
👇
mpi.nl/career-education/vacancies/vacancy/fully-funded-4-year-phd-position-neuroai-language
Group photograph of faculty and participants of the very first Cold Spring Harbor summer course on Genetics and Neurobiology of Language in 2014, taken as the sun was going down at the Banbury Campus, Lloyd Harbor.
Please tell friends & colleagues about our unique course “Genetics & Neurobiology of Language” July 27-Aug 3 2026. Expert tutors, interactive talks, panel discussions, all in a beautiful setting. Scholarships available: meetings.cshl.edu/courses.aspx...
@cshlnews.bsky.social @cshlbanbury.bsky.social
❤️
So proud and honored to have shared the floor with amazing women scientists for a panel discussion on Women in Neuroscience at NYU Abu Dhabi. It’s appalling to see that no matter where you are, women in science face the same big challenges. But changes are happening and we now have each other 💪
Go Jingnan!!
I am thrilled to share that I’ll be joining the University of Notre Dame (@notredame.bsky.social) as an Assistant Professor of Psychology this July!☘️🧠 Please reach out if you're interested in joining my lab! More details to follow soon.
Soon hiring a lab manager! Looking for someone who is really interested in language neuroscience, who is organised, motivated, a great communicator, and who works well in a research team. Express interest by submitting this form: tinyurl.com/glysn-labman...
Reposts appreciated!
New in Neuron! A team including #KempnerInstitute’s
@coltoncasto.bsky.social & @gretatuckute.bsky.social maps the cerebellum's role beyond motor control as part of an extended language network.🧠🗣️
More here: bit.ly/4rptQ13 #neuroscience #fMRI
@gsas.harvard.edu @evfedorenko.bsky.social
The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal!
Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
🧵(1/6)
Could not be more excited about Colton's @coltoncasto.bsky.social work! A deep dive into the linguistic cerebellum, and a discovery of an area remarkably functionally similar to the core left-hemisphere language areas, including in its selectivity for language. Go Colton and team!
The cerebellum supports high-level language?? Now out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social, we systematically examined language-responsive areas of the cerebellum using precision fMRI and identified a *cerebellar satellite* of the neocortical language network!
authors.elsevier.com/a/1mUU83BtfH...
1/n 🧵👇
I just created a series of seven deep-dive videos about AI, which I've posted to youtube and now here. 😊
Targeted to laypeople, they explore how LLMs work, what they can do, and what impacts they have on learning, well-being, disinformation, the workplace, the economy, and the environment.
The must-read paper on LLMs, language, and thought that I reference here:
Dissociating language and thought in large language models
arxiv.org/abs/2301.06627
by @kmahowald.bsky.social @neuranna.bsky.social Idan Blank @nancykanwisher.bsky.social @joshtenenbaum.bsky.social @evfedorenko.bsky.social
I may be a *little* biased but this 📘 is GREAT! If you ever found language structure interesting, but were turned off by implausible and overly complicated accounts, this book is 4U: a simple and empirically grounded account of the syntax of natural lgs. A must-read for lang researchers+aficionados!
New book! I have written a book, called Syntax: A cognitive approach, published by MIT Press.
This is open access; MIT Press will post a link soon, but until then, the book is available on my website:
tedlab.mit.edu/tedlab_websi...
Why isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science or neuroscience? Starting a substack (infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-m...) by writing down my thoughts on that question: as part of a first series of posts giving my current thoughts on the relation between these fields. 1/3
Go @tamaregev! Tamar systematically characterized prosody-processing🧠areas using precision fMRI.
The overlap between the prosody and language areas connects beautifully with her computational findings of high mutual information between words and prosodic features! Such a cool research program. :)
New preprint on prosody in the brain!
tinyurl.com/2ndswjwu
HeeSoKim NiharikaJhingan SaraSwords @hopekean.bsky.social @coltoncasto.bsky.social JenniferCole @evfedorenko.bsky.social
Prosody areas are distinct from pitch, speech, and multiple-demand areas, and partly overlap with lang+social areas→🧵
Hopkins Cog Sci is hiring! We have two open faculty positions: one in vision, and one language. Please repost!
Yup I realized that when one of his New Yorker articles discussed his great idea that the brain might have a special region for face recognition, all presented as his idea long after this had been widely published.
Incredible piece on Oliver Sacks. If you were ever awed at his supposedly true stories (I remember being stunned by the account of the autistic twins who rattled off large prime numbers), read this. He told wonderful stories, but they were in large part fiction.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...
How does cortisol tune brain networks to form strong emotional memories? Excited to share new work led by amazing former RA Flory Huang w collabs Rajita Sinha and @toddc.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
@neuranna.bsky.social and
@evfedorenko.bsky.social tackle with neuroimaging a phenomenon identified in the 1970s by the pioneering work of the great Molly Potter: conceptual information processing common to pictorial and verbal input. Thrilled to have played a small part in this exciting work.
If you are an MRI researcher interested in moving to 🇨🇦 for $500k a year or $1M a year for 8 years with a possibility of renewal at a reduced rate, take a look at our equipment cfmm.uwo.ca and this program www.canada.ca/en/impact-pl... . MSK, neuroscience, cardiac, cancer applications all encouraged!
Great work led by Daria & Greta showing that diverse agreement types draw on shared units (even across languages)!
How do LLMs process syntax? Do different syntactic phenomena recruit the same model units, or do they recruit distinct model components? And do different languages rely on similar units to process the same syntactic phenomenon?
Check out our new preprint (to appear at ACL 2026)!
shorturl.at/QWU81
Using a large-scale individual differences investigation (with ~800 participants each performing an ~8-hour battery of non-literal comprehension tasks), we found that pragmatic language use fractionates into 3 components: Social conventions, intonation, and world knowledge–based causal reasoning.
Now out in @pnas.org: a tour de force co-led by Sammy Floyd and Olessia Jouravlev (also with @moshepoliak.bsky.social, Zach Mineroff and Ted Gibson): www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
