mike freund
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mikefreund.bsky.social
mike freund
@mikefreund.bsky.social
520 followers 1.9K following 35 posts
forever a student
currently a post-doc @ sites.brown.edu/badrelab
curious about control of decision making, neural dynamics, multivariate stats
mcfreund.github.io
Posts Replies Media Videos
Reposted by mike freund
djbyrnes1.bsky.social
Ellis starting the day off by reading out Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago" in its entirety.
November 6, 2025 at 4:16 PM
Reposted by mike freund
cconstan.bsky.social
New paper from the lab:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A brief thread (1/10)
Longitudinal measures of monkey brain structure and activity through adolescence predict cognitive maturation - Nature Neuroscience
Working memory improves during adolescent brain development. Zhu et al. tracked monkeys through adolescence, revealing that maturation of white matter tracts and refinement of neural firing patterns s...
www.nature.com
October 27, 2025 at 1:28 PM
Reposted by mike freund
markhisted.org
I made a video about the shutdown, and why this government worker won’t be a pawn.

When the president and Supreme Court are both acting lawlessly, Congress must stand up and stop it.

US science is collapsing and Congress needs to act.
🧪
Full video here: www.instagram.com/reel/DP1tXXE...
October 16, 2025 at 11:17 PM
Reposted by mike freund
thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social
How does the brain decide? 🧠

Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc.

After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up.

rdcu.be/eGUrv
Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode during perceptual decisions - Nature
Simultaneous recordings were made of hundreds of neurons in the rat frontal cortex and striatum, showing that decision commitment involves a rapid, coordinated transition in dynamical regime and neura...
www.nature.com
September 17, 2025 at 8:12 PM
Reposted by mike freund
fishkin.bsky.social
I'd like to commend the lawyers who wrote this complaint on behalf of the professors and employees of the University of California against the Trump administration.

It's a sober legal document with strong claims, but also, this is a fight for public opinion, and this reads like the writers know it.
AAUP-UC-Trump Lawsuit -- Uploaded by Jaweed Kaleem of the Los Angeles Times
www.documentcloud.org
September 17, 2025 at 2:27 AM
Reposted by mike freund
roselynechauvin.bsky.social
Want to know the behind the scenes of the "Disuse-driven plasticity in the human thalamus and
putamen" paper? discover @ndosenbach.bsky.social and I interview by @cp-cellreports.bsky.social

www.cell.com/cell-reports...
Q&A with Nico U.F. Dosenbach and Roselyne Chauvin
Nico U.F. Dosenbach and Roselyne Chauvin spoke with Cell Reports about their recent paper, in which they observed subcortical plasticity in humans following a 2-week arm/hand-casting paradigm with dai...
www.cell.com
September 9, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Reposted by mike freund
gaia-tavoni.bsky.social
I will always be grateful for the immense -- and unique -- contribution the Swartz Program made in supporting theoretical neuroscience over the past 30 years. Its closure leaves a profound void. doi.org/10.53053/FPR...
Long-standing theoretical neuroscience fellowship program loses financial support
Funding from the Swartz and Sloan Foundations helped bring physicists and mathematicians into neuroscience for more than 30 years.
doi.org
August 26, 2025 at 9:59 PM
Reposted by mike freund
dieworkwear.bsky.social
via Benedicto.Uribe on TikTok
June 14, 2025 at 8:47 PM
Reposted by mike freund
eliothiggins.bsky.social
The conditions that have led to what’s happening in the US today exist in democracies around the world.
They are an inevitable outcome of our collective failure to adapt to fundamental changes in the information ecosystem on which our democracies were originally built.
June 7, 2025 at 8:39 PM
Reposted by mike freund
peiferlabunc.bsky.social
It's a demoralizing time to be a US scientist but that is part of their strategy. My friend Jeff Dangl just emailed our faculty reminding us that NSF and NIH grant review panels are still being held and staff there want us to keep submitting. Stay engaged and keep fighting! 1/n
May 16, 2025 at 7:23 PM
Reposted by mike freund
barnaveliirina.bsky.social
Our paper in @natcomms.nature.com, we show how cognitive maps in the hippocampal system could solve the general problem of representing and relating multiple alternative action plans. 
doi.org/10.1038/s414...

With @doellerlab.bsky.social, Patrick Haggard, @vigano.bsky.social, Daniel Reznik
May 8, 2025 at 7:24 PM
Reposted by mike freund
carlosbrody.bsky.social
we're crowd-sourcing a searchable repository of tangible benefits stemming from federally-funded research. Come enjoy the great stories; or send in an idea; or volunteer to join the team.

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

please share and re-share so we get more great stories in there!
Searchable database of tangible benefits that federally-funded research gave us.
A crowd-sourced site. Health and Well-being. National Security. Prosperity.
publicusaresearchbenefits.com
May 7, 2025 at 11:28 PM
Reposted by mike freund
gershbrain.bsky.social
New work by @liushuze.bsky.social establishes an empirical link between policy complexity and neural dimensionality:
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Neural and behavioral signatures of policy compression in cognitive control
Making context-dependent decisions incurs cognitive costs. Cognitive control studies have investigated the nature of such costs from both computational and neural perspectives. In this paper, we offer...
www.biorxiv.org
May 7, 2025 at 1:56 PM
Reposted by mike freund
briannosek.bsky.social
An open letter supporting the international bachelor’s psychology programs threatened for cuts. Proceeding with these cuts would damage some of the most important and impactful psychology departments globally. #supportdutchpsychology

openletter.earth/against-lang...
Against Language Barriers: A Call to Protect International Education in Dutch Academia
openletter.earth
April 28, 2025 at 10:46 PM
Reposted by mike freund
zreagh.bsky.social
Check out our new study by @atabk.bsky.social! He tweaked a word list memory task to have hidden rules at encoding, which shifted and created “event boundaries.” People recalled pre-boundary words more, and post-boundary words less. Other fun bits in the paper include a reinforcement learning model!
April 28, 2025 at 8:01 PM
Reposted by mike freund
maddyjalbert.bsky.social
I got an email yesterday afternoon that my NSF SPRF Postdoctoral Fellowship was terminated. My grant focused on testing interventions to address online misinformation and I was 8 months into a two year appointment.
prowag.bsky.social Mike Wagner @prowag.bsky.social · Apr 19
Friday Night Massacre of accurate information.

A devastating day for the USA as tens of millions of dollars of grants seeking to combat the spread of false information were terminated. We have a federal govenrment that does not consider the verifiable truth a priority. www.nsf.gov/updates-on-p...
Updates on NSF Priorities
www.nsf.gov
April 19, 2025 at 4:43 PM
mikefreund.bsky.social
beautiful, heartbreaking words in this judge's rejection of trump's request

The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.
chrisgeidner.bsky.social Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · Apr 17
It is an astounding opinion written by an 80-year-old, conservative Reagan appointee who — along with his former colleague, Judge J. Michael Luttig (a note that makes its own point about this moment) — once led what many considered to be the most conservative appeals court in the nation.
It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear. The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order. See 8 C.F.R. § 208.24(f) (requiring that the government prove "by a preponderance of evidence" that the alien is no longer entitled to a withholding of removal). Moreover, the government has conceded that Abrego Garcia was wrongly or "mistakenly" deported. Why then should it not make what was wrong, right? "Facilitation" does not permit the admittedly erroneous deportation of an individual to the one country's prisons that the withholding order forbids and, further, to do so in disregard of a court order that the government not so subtly spurns. "Facilitation" does not sanction the abrogation of habeas corpus through the transfer of custody to foreign 3 detention centers in the manner attempted here. Allowing all this would "facilitate" foreign detention more than it would domestic return. It would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood. The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?* And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive's obligation to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" would lose its meaning. U.S. CONST. art. II, § 3; see also id. art. II, § 1, cl. 8. Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions. The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph. It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.
April 17, 2025 at 8:54 PM
Reposted by mike freund
pevohr.bsky.social
Discussions this weekend made it clear that folks don't necessarily realize that our existing "scientific pipeline" of federal funding for basic research didn't just happen. The entire approach was deliberately designed to work this way, on purpose

Meet Vannevar Bush
Official government photo Dr. Vannevar Bush Chief of Scientific Research and Development Office of Production Management 1940-1944 Black + white photo of a bespectacled man in a three-piece suit sitting at a shiny desk in a dark-paneled office, pencil in hand. He's midway through a stack of paperwork + has a call bell nearby http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ds.11801 Vannevar Bush (/væˈniːvɑːr/ van-NEE-var; March 11, 1890 – June 28, 1974) was an American engineer, inventor and science administrator, who during World War II headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), through which almost all wartime military R&D was carried out, including important developments in radar and the initiation and early administration of the Manhattan Project. He emphasized the importance of scientific research to national security and economic well-being, and was chiefly responsible for the movement that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush
February 25, 2025 at 3:17 AM
Reposted by mike freund
MANY PROPOSALS WERE WITHDRAWN BY NIH ON THIS CYCLE FOR SIMILAR REASONS. Is this yet another mechanism to avoid funding research? I don't know. Chime in here if you know of other cases.
April 9, 2025 at 11:16 AM
Reposted by mike freund
mitpress.bsky.social
We're disappointed to see Ben Barres's powerful book "The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist" among the ~400 titles removed from the Naval Academy Library. Needless to say, we're proud to have published his book and will keep it — and his memory — alive.
The Coming Out of a Transgender Scientist
"I know that I am making the right decision because whenever I think about changing my gender role, I am flooded with feelings of relief."
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
April 8, 2025 at 8:24 PM
Reposted by mike freund
daralind.bsky.social
Seeing a lot of anger over people in ICE detention having to eg file habeas claims on their own.

There are existing efforts to support these folks: not just full legal rep, but partial assistance (easier to scale).

Here’s one volunteer network (full disclosure: my org) immigrationjustice.us
Home - Immigration Justice Campaign
We believe in a society that sees migration as a tool for liberation and prizes the dignity and humanity of all people.
immigrationjustice.us
April 8, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Reposted by mike freund
matthewstiegler.bsky.social
When a person is abducted, there's a number to call to report & identify. A habeas petition challenging the abduction is electronically filed in that district, by a lawyer admitted in that district, within 30 minutes of the call. Anywhere in the country, 24 hours a day.

Nothing else is good enough.
luluthepuppy.bsky.social Lulu the Puppy @luluthepuppy.bsky.social · Apr 6
hello! i am very curious if anybody is building a rapid response network to file habeas shell petitions for nice people before ice can take them out of state?
April 7, 2025 at 11:07 PM
Reposted by mike freund
marisakabas.bsky.social
Sackets Harbor, NY school principal Jaime Cook speaks to a reporter about protesting today for her three students who were abducted by ICE:

www.wwnytv.com/2025/04/04/7...
April 5, 2025 at 6:50 PM
Reposted by mike freund
annealiz1.bsky.social
Please circulate this free gift article widely. This is an incalculable loss to our country; a nightmare with generational consequences put in place by the stupidest of people who have no idea what they are doing and wouldn’t care if they did
prasad.bsky.social Prasad Jallepalli, MD, PhD @prasad.bsky.social · Apr 4
www.nytimes.com/2025/04/03/o...

Really important piece to share widely. Too many Americans don’t know how severe a threat this Administration poses to our scientific infrastructure, global leadership, and health security
Opinion | The Uncertain Fate of the Young American Scientist (Gift Article)
Young researchers are choosing between staying in science and staying in the United States.
www.nytimes.com
April 4, 2025 at 10:47 AM
Reposted by mike freund
behrenstimb.bsky.social
Science is under threat in the US. @elife.bsky.social have commissioned a series of articles discussing the implications and what we can do. The first three articles are now live. More to follow:
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
elifesciences.org/articles/106...
Science Under Threat in the United States: How scientists and institutions should respond
Individual researchers and university leaders need to make the case for science to their elected representatives and to the public at large.
elifesciences.org
March 25, 2025 at 2:24 PM