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Reposted by Carlos Brody

Nancy Kanwisher @nancykanwisher.bsky.social · 1d

I am proud of MIT, where our branch of AAUP has voted unanimously to endorse this statement urging MIT leadership and the MIT Corporation to reject the Compact wholesale
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Letter Regarding Compact

MIT Chapter of the American Association of University Professors October 6, 2025 Statement on the “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” MIT has been invited by the federal governmen...

docs.google.com

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 2d

Another absolutely astounding "gem" in the compact: abolish units that "belittle" conservative ideas -- while doing it in the name of an "intellectually open campus" 😮‼️

😂 Amazing! apparently no sense of irony (or consistency) whatsoever! 😂

Also completely incompatible with First Amendment.

Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 2d

Excellent analysis of the Trump compact for universities -- read it, recommend it, share it.

Among the big points: take away the law's predictability and fairness, and instead become entirely subjugated to arbitrary whims of the DOJ.

Dangerous and un-American.

balkin.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

Balkinization: The Art of Replacing the Law with the Deal

A group blog on constitutional law, theory, and politics

balkin.blogspot.com

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 2d

Excellent analysis of the Trump compact for universities -- read it, recommend it, share it.

Among the big points: take away the law's predictability and fairness, and instead become entirely subjugated to arbitrary whims of the DOJ.

Dangerous and un-American.

balkin.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-...

Balkinization: The Art of Replacing the Law with the Deal

A group blog on constitutional law, theory, and politics

balkin.blogspot.com

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Reposted by Carlos Brody

Rebekah Tromble @rebekahtromble.bsky.social · 5d

Message to university leaders considering signing—or negotiating—the extortion letter.

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Reposted by Carlos Brody

Science and Freedom Alliance - SAFA @safa-science.bsky.social · 6d

Federal workers are speaking out on how the Trump regime is harming Americans:

"We stand here today at a moment of the greatest assault of our lifetimes on our freedoms. The US Constitution is being shredded... We are here to call on Congress to stand up and stop it."

youtu.be/uw1KwIBgrCw?...

Mark Histed, NIH Scientist *speaking in personal capacity

YouTube video by Civil Servants Coalition

youtu.be

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Reposted by Carlos Brody

Talia Lerner @talialerner.bsky.social · 11d

Comment now! Cutting off student visas is terrible for US competitiveness in key research areas.

Dr. Kat Napaaqtuk❄️ @napaaqtuk.bsky.social · 11d

Comment period ends on Monday for a proposed rule change that would terminate student visas after 4 years. It also puts limits on exchange visitors and reps of foreign media, and shortens the length of time at the end of the visa from 60 days to 30 days.

www.federalregister.gov/documents/20...

Establishing a Fixed Time Period of Admission and an Extension of Stay Procedure for Nonimmigrant Academic Students, Exchange Visitors, and Representatives of Foreign Information Media

Unlike most nonimmigrant classifications, which are admitted for a fixed time period, aliens in the F (academic student), J (exchange visitor), and most I (representatives of foreign information media...

www.federalregister.gov

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 16d

Thank you @nancyrmack.bsky.social and @princetonneuro.bsky.social for a great explainer about our paper!

pni.princeton.edu/news/2025/wh...

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 17d

Always exciting when someone reads one's work! Thank you for the interest and the quotes @ulisespereirao.bsky.social

And a shout out here to Adrian Bondy, @juliecharlton.bsky.social and @thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social, the wonderful co-first-authors who led the work.

Adrian is on the job market!

Ulises Pereira Obilinovic @ulisespereirao.bsky.social · 17d

Friday’s AIND JC lead by Shawn Olsen and I on the Brody lab preprint ran 90+ min, unusual. Nice paper, spirited discussion. Make a clear argument that to grasp behavior we need multiregional, multi-neuron, simultaneous single-trial data. Below quotes from the paper.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Brain-wide coordination of decision formation and commitment

Neural correlates of a subject’s upcoming choice in decision making tasks are remarkably widespread throughout the brain, but how these brain-wide signals are coordinated remains unknown. Do brain reg...

www.biorxiv.org

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 17d

This sounds great! Well done on doing it.

I'm part of a team crowd sourcing a database of examples of societal benefits due to federally funded science

bit.ly/4dz2ZK7

if you get a chance, send us an idea and we'll write it up into the database!

A title and a link are enough to get us going 😊

Searchable database of tangible benefits that federally-funded research gave us.

A crowd-sourced site. Health and Well-being. National Security. Prosperity.

bit.ly

Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 18d

Life is a crazy rollercoaster these days! Yesterday I was all proud of people in my lab, like @thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social and @timkimd.bsky.social and the paper they posted about.

Today? -- gah 😳🤯 straight corruption!

Up & down like that All. The. Time!

Breathe deep, everyone. It's a marathon

Grace Lindsay @neurograce.bsky.social · 18d

Omg that second highlight. Just straight corruption.

Filipe Campante @filipecampante.bsky.social · 18d

The H1-B visa thing is, like everything else in the Trump administration, set up to carve up exceptions for friends and punish enemies. It’s the authoritarian thru-line that stitches everything together.

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 19d

6/6

You can make up your mind, as marked by nTc, long before you report a decision. And that nTc moment is not timelocked to any external referents (like the onset of the decision report).

Instead, nTc is a covert signal. Internal to the brain.

It was one of the brain's secrets... now revealed.

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 19d

5/6

That confirmed that in nTc, Thomas and Tim had found a neural marker of decision commitment (a.k.a. "making up your mind").

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 19d

4/6

They dubbed the estimated moment of the turn "nTc" and predicted that sensory inputs after nTc should not affect the animal's decision. They tested their prediction.

And whoa... the data (black), while noisy, matched the prediction (green) really well.

A sensory decision's sensitivity to sensory inputs is predicted to fall to zero after the neural marker of decision commitment -- and the data matches the prediction.

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 19d

3/6

🤔.. when are you no longer sensitive to inputs? *When you've already made up your mind*.

Thomas and Tim figured that if they could pinpoint the time of the turn, then they could pinpoint the time the animal made up its mind. They developed a method to precisely estimate the moment of turning.

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 19d

2/6

Recording in decision-making regions from many neurons at once revealed the neurons' collective evolution as decisions were made

Each decision had two phases: first, neural state was sensitive to sensory inputs; then, trajectories in neural state space turned and became insensitive to inputs.

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 19d

What happens in your brain when you make up your mind?

Postdoc (soon faculty at U. of Utah) @thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social and ex-grad student (now Shanahan Fellow at Allen Institute) @timkimd.bsky.social have some answers in this new paper out in Nature!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 19d

The First Amendment and a Free Press are fundamental to freedom and to making America a great country.

Threatening to take away broadcast licenses for criticizing the president is a direct attack on the First Amendment. We have to speak up, be active, defend it.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/18/u...

Trump Pressures Broadcasters Over Critical Coverage, Escalating Attack on Speech

www.nytimes.com

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 23d

I'm doing this: publicusaresearchbenefits.com . Join me.

Is it the best thing to do? I don't know. If you can think of something that fits you better, then do that! 💪🏼But do something.

And don't forget that science thrives on freedom, democracy, and strong institutions. We need to defend those too.

Searchable database of tangible benefits that federally-funded research gave us.

A crowd-sourced site. Health and Well-being. National Security. Prosperity.

publicusaresearchbenefits.com

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · 23d

The Trump administration's assaults on great American successes, like this one, leave many of us scientists bewildered and not knowing how to respond.

But inaction is not an option. If you don't know what to do, put time and effort into figuring out what to do.

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/m...

How the Trump Administration Is Dismantling America’s Cancer-Research System

www.nytimes.com

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · Sep 6

Other fun simultaneous recording results:

* brain-wide noise correlations are massive, as large as trial-averaged signals

* making up your mind causes a brain-wide change in decision-related neural activity.

* Cross-region coordination drops like a stone after after you make up your mind.

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · Sep 6

Complementary approach: simultaneous recordings allow analyses to see who leads and who lags. Among other results stemming from simultaneous recordings, in this preprint we show that during decision-making, frontal cortices and striatum lead, other regions lag.

doi.org/10.1101/2024...

Brain-wide coordination of decision formation and commitment

Neural correlates of a subject’s upcoming choice in decision making tasks are remarkably widespread throughout the brain, but how these brain-wide signals are coordinated remains unknown. Do brain reg...

doi.org

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · Aug 29

This rule would have meant I couldn't do my Ph.D. in America.

I did do it in America. Became a professor. 12 thriving U.S. labs are now headed by trainees from my research lab. Like me, they are all working hard to enrich American knowledge and society.

With this self-harming rule, none of that.

Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · Aug 29

Trump admin planning to change student visas from lasting for duration of academic program to fixed 4-yr term, and then much harder to renew
Could destroy US ability to attract global talent, particularly those seeking advanced degrees in STEM. The median time to complete a PhD is 5.7 yrs per NSF.

Trump Deals A New Immigration Blow To International Students

Trump officials have proposed a new rule limiting international students to fixed periods of entry, making a U.S. education more precarious.

www.forbes.com

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · Aug 29

As of today, I am a US citizen! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 I am very excited. 🎊

This wonderful country has given me a family, a career, and a community I love.

First duty as a patriotic citizen? 🇺🇸 Speak up to defend our Democracy, our Constitution, and our science, all under grave threat.

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · Aug 21

how incredibly hard and difficult. Sending thoughts and prayers but wishing I could do more.

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Carlos Brody @carlosbrody.bsky.social · Jul 19

Loved it! Thank you for this video. So clear!

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