Hello, Twitter! Pleased to share that my first public-press article, on the shifting debate over what makes human culture unique, was published today in The Conversation U.S.. More to come :) theconversation.com/humans-arent-t… via The Conversation U.S.

1. Does research by Cara Ocobock Agustín Fuentes & others, widely reported in SciAm & elsewhere, finally dispel hunter-gatherer myths that have persisted since the 60's? In a preprint led by Vivek V. Venkataraman The Meanings&Dividends of Man the Hunter osf.io/preprints/osf/… we respond🧵

NYC people -- I'm teaching a weekend class on computational biology / bioinformatics next weekend, April 19-20 if anyone's interested! it's beginner friendly, prereq is just basic python and no biology background is required. signup form and more info below 👇

In a study now out in eLife - the journal, Georgin Jacob Pramod RT/ಪ್ರಮೋದ್ ರಾ ತಾ and I have some exciting results: a novel computation that helps the brain solve disparate visual tasks, a novel brain region that performs this computation....what's not to like?! Read on.... 1/n elifesciences.org/articles/93033

The standard action selection model of the basal ganglia has long been falsified, but too many echo chamber papers in vanity journals managed to prolong its life. Here's just another paper challenging the standard model. Congruent neuronal modulation across competing actions

This is not coincidence. Autism is driven by organic food sales.

AI vision is insanely good nowadays—but is it really like human vision or something else entirely? In our new pre-print, we pinpoint a fundamental visual mechanism that's trivial for humans yet causes most models to fail spectacularly. Let's dive in👇🧠 [arxiv.org/abs/2504.05253]

Could you have been an alligator? youtu.be/NtKgGoYSWGk

The depths of Indian poverty through the eyes of an MBA.

1. The Santa Barbara school of evolutionary psychology holds that a universal set of complex psychological adaptations evolved in Pleistocene Africa. In no particular order, here are few folks on here doing research in this tradition, highlighting one paper/thread each:🧵

Non-visually-derived mental objects tax "visual" pointers biorxiv.org/content/10.110… #biorxiv_neursci

We traded this for a higher GDP.

The tragic death of Anand Vaidya at the age of 48 was a great loss to philosophy. I'd strongly recommend reading this fantastic essay Anand wrote on how Indian philosophy can help with the deepest questions of human existence. aeon.co/essays/how-cla…

Sharing a new paper from the lab. This paper, led by Sangyoon Ko, represents a merging of two longstanding research themes in the lab-- adult neurogenesis and systems consolidation. rdcu.be/el18q A short thread follows for those interested

I find this work deeply inspiring and exciting! Exploring ultraweak photon emissions as optical markers of brain activity: iScience cell.com/iscience/fullt…

Paul Middlebrooks Paul Middlebrooks talks with neuroscientists and philosophers about the use and misuse of the term representation and how it influences the way we interpret the connection between neural, behavioral and mental activity. thetransmitter.org/brain-inspired…

gd they always win

In her new book, published today, neuroscientist Nicole C Rust, PhD takes a bird's-eye view of where the neuroscience community is currently and where it needs to go to solve some of the field’s biggest questions. thetransmitter.org/community/elus…

Our computer vision textbook is now available for free online here: visionbook.mit.edu We are working on adding some interactive components like search and (beta) integration with LLMs. Hope this is useful and feel free to submit Github issues to help us improve the text!

My article, "Objective foundations for the study of mental qualities," forthcoming in Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, is now up in a penultimate version as a preprint on PsyArXiv at osf.io/preprints/psya…