HMM: the early years Back in Spring 2015, when I had just started as a postdoc at Princeton, Janice Chen was wrestling with a data analysis problem in a new kind of dataset she had collected. She had fMRI data from subjects watching an hour-long movie and then freely recalling (over tens of minutes) the narrative. She wanted to see whether people’s...

The end of this month will mark the end of my first year as a tenure-track assistant professor. I don't know if I have much helpful advice to give, since I'm still new enough to the job that it's hard for me to know what I've been doing right or wrong, and I'm very grateful to my collaborators and colleagues in my department for bearing with me as I've...

All airports, he had long ago decided, look very much the same.​ It doesn’t actually matter where you are, you are in an airport:​ tiles and walkways and restrooms, gates and newsstands and fluorescent lights.​ This airport looked like an airport.​ -Neil Gaiman, American Gods​ Each scene of a movie (or paragraph of a story) generates a pattern...

Much of the conversation about research methods in science has focused on the "replication crisis" - the fact that many classic studies (especially in psychology) are often not showing the same results when performed carefully by independent research groups. Although there are some debates about exactly how bad the problem is, a consensus is emerging...

[I wrote these posts during the Society for Neuroscience 2017 meeting, as one of the Official Annual Meeting Bloggers. These blog posts originally appeared on SfN's Neuronline platform.] SuperEEG: ECoG data breaks free from electrodes The "gold standard" for measuring neural activity in human brains is ECoG (electrocorticography), using electrodes...

Our brains receive a constant stream of information about the world through our senses. Often sci-fi depictions of mind-reading or memory implants depict our experiences and memories as being like a continuous, unbroken filmstrip. From The Final Cut, 2004 But if I ask you to describe what has happened to you today, you will usually think in terms...