Pedro H. Santos

Pedro H. Santos

@blightedboy2.bsky.social

https://phsousaa.github.io/PedroHSantos/index.html PhD student at UFRJ (Brazil) I'm interested in how sociolinguistic information is processed during speech perception. Member of Acesin (Syntactic Access Lab)

29 followers62 following40 posts

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Elliot Murphy
@elliot-murphy.bsky.social

Neural geometry in the human hippocampus enables generalization across spatial position and gaze www.cell.com/neuron/abstr...

cell.comNeural geometry in the human hippocampus enables generalization across spatial position and gazeChericoni et al. show that neurons in the human hippocampus track the positions of multiple agents in a simple pursuit-based video game. They identified place codes for each agent and for gaze. The co...

Pedro H. Santos reposted

The Transmitter
@thetransmitter.bsky.social

Dynamic coding of speech, as suggested by two new studies, challenges the idea that language features are encoded in a one-to-one manner in the brain. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/language/shi...

thetransmitter.orgShifting neural code powers speech comprehensionDynamic coding helps explain how the brain processes multiple features of speech—from the smallest units of sounds to full sentences—simultaneously.

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Eliezyer de Oliveira
@eliezyer.bsky.social

Another perspective: someone's career can be delayed or completely ended because of delays in review. Who is to blame when reviewing papers is seen as a burden?

The Transmitter @thetransmitter.bsky.social

Broad peer review is crucial for a healthy scientific literature, but neuroscientists turn down review requests too often. Simple math suggests that small groups of scientists can significantly bias the literature, writes @jvoigts.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/publishing/l...

thetransmitter.orgLack of reviewers threatens robustness of neuroscience literatureSimple math suggests that small groups of scientists can significantly bias peer review.

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Elliot Murphy
@elliot-murphy.bsky.social

The methodological foundations of lesion network mapping remain sound www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.orgThe methodological foundations of lesion network mapping remain soundLesion network mapping (LNM) and related techniques have been used in over 200 studies, primarily to test whether anatomically distributed lesions that cause the same symptom fall within a common brain network. A recent article challenges the specificity and validity of this technique, suggesting that lesion network maps primarily reflect intrinsic properties of the normative connectome rather than lesion-symptom relationships. However, the data and procedures in van den Heuvel et al. do not reflect those used in most LNM studies. Further, the main conclusions were based on similarity between maps, but similarity does not imply the absence of meaningful differences. In contrast, LNM provides evidence for meaningful differences using specificity testing. Exemplary analyses of 1090 lesion locations from 34 prior LNM studies do not support van den Heuvel's concerns and confirm the lesion-deficit specificity of LNM. While we encourage further methodological investigation, the analyses of van den Heuvel et al. do not invalidate prior LNM findings or future applications. ### Competing Interest Statement SHS has intellectual property on use of brain connectivity to guide brain stimulation, is a former scientific consultant for Magnus Medical, has received investigator-initiated research funding from Neuronetics and BrainsWay, received speaking fees from BrainsWay and Otsuka (for PsychU.org), former shareholder in BrainsWay (publicly traded), current shareholder in Magnus Medical (not publicly traded). SHS also provides clinical consultations for individualized brain stimulation targeting in both private practice and academic settings. A.H. reports lecture fees for Boston Scientific, is a consultant for and holds stock options of Modulight.bio, was a consultant for FxNeuromodulation in recent years and serves as a co-inventor on a patent granted to Charite University Medicine Berlin that covers multisymptom DBS fiberfiltering and an automated DBS parameter suggestion algorithm unrelated to this work (patent #LU103178). J.J. reports lecturer honoraria from Insightec, Addiktum, Nordic Inducare, Lundbeck and Novartis; conference travel support from Insightec, Abbvie and Abbott; consulting for Adamant Health, Summaryx and TEVA Finland; advisory board for TEVA Finland; stock ownership of Neurologic Finland and Suomen Neurolaboratorio. M.D.F. is a scientific consultant for Magnus Medical. M.D.F. has intellectual property on the use of brain connectivity imaging to analyze lesions and guide brain stimulation, has consulted for Magnus Medical, Soterix, Abbott, Boston Scientific, Tal Medical, MDC Venture Capital, and is on the Scientific Advisory Board of Salma Health. He has received research support from Neuronetics and Boston Scientific. F.L.W.V.J.S reports no conflicts of interest. S.B.S reports no conflicts of interest. A.L.C. reports no conflicts of interest. A.D.B. has intellectual property on an automated neuroimaging platform for lesion-informed outcome prediction and is a co-founder of NeuroPred, Inc. National Institute of Mental Health, https://ror.org/04xeg9z08, R01MH136248, K23MH121657, R01MH140916, R01MH113929, R21MH126271, UM1NS132358
Pedro H. Santos
@blightedboy2.bsky.social

Veeery interesting paper, but I still think it's funny how language neuroscientists ignore ~55 years of sociolinguistic research and investigate social knowledge with sentences such as "According to Darwin man is the cousin of the apes" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

biorxiv.orgLanguages of the brain: fMRI dissection of the amodal networks for language, mathematics, and social knowledgeThe ability to compose complex mental representations by recombining simpler primitives is a characteristic of the human brain that manifests itself in a variety of domains such as spoken or written l...

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Sander van Bree
@sandervanbree.bsky.social

New Correspondence with @davidpoeppel.bsky.social in Nat Rev Neurosci. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Here, we critique a recent paper by Rosas et al. We argue that "Bottom-up" and "Top-down" neuroscience have various meanings in the literature. PDF: rdcu.be/eSKYI

nature.comTop-down and bottom-up neuroscience as collections of practices - Nature Reviews NeuroscienceNature Reviews Neuroscience - Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience as collections of practices

Pedro H. Santos reposted

PessoaBrain
@pessoabrain.bsky.social

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗻𝗲𝘁𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝘀? Do they even exist...? Join @lucinauddin.bsky.social who will present, followed by discussion in the Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon. Open to all. Date: Dec 9, 12pm EST-US Register: umd.zoom.us/meeting/regi... (you need a zoom account which is free) #neuroskyence

umd.zoom.usWelcome! You are invited to join a meeting: NeuroPhilo Salon. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.Welcome! You are invited to join a meeting: NeuroPhilo Salon. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the meeting.

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Simon Fisher
@profsimonfisher.bsky.social

Origins of language, one of humanity’s most distinctive traits, may be best explained as a unique convergence of multiple capacities each with its own evolutionary history, involving intertwined roles of biology & culture. This framing can expand research horizons. A 🧵 on our @science.org paper.🧪1/n

science.orgWhat enables human language? A biocultural frameworkExplaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of l...

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Simon Fisher
@profsimonfisher.bsky.social

If you are unable to download the full version of our newly published language evolution article in Science, there is a link for direct free access on the Max Planck Institute website here:

mpi.nlWhat enables human language? A biocultural framework | Max Planck Institute
Simon Fisher@profsimonfisher.bsky.social

Origins of language, one of humanity’s most distinctive traits, may be best explained as a unique convergence of multiple capacities each with its own evolutionary history, involving intertwined roles of biology & culture. This framing can expand research horizons. A 🧵 on our @science.org paper.🧪1/n

science.orgWhat enables human language? A biocultural frameworkExplaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of l...

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Elliot Murphy
@elliot-murphy.bsky.social

New paper out today in Cognitive Neuroscience! Proposing an explicit, causal-mechanistic, falsifiable and empirically grounded neural code for natural language syntax, and its innate basis. ROSE: A Universal Neural Grammar www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

tandfonline.comROSE: A Universal Neural GrammarProcessing natural language syntax requires a negotiation between symbolic and subsymbolic representations. Building on the recent representation, operation, structure, encoding (ROSE) neurocomputa...

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Greg Hickok
@gregoryhickok.bsky.social

Beyond Broca: The Two Routes to Speaking. My new @psychtoday.bsky.social essay excerpted and adapted from Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language, forthcoming this month @mitpress.bsky.social. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wire... .

psychologytoday.comBeyond Broca: The Two Routes to SpeakingFor 150 years, Broca's area has defined speech production. Now scientists have discovered a second parallel system that controls the melody and rhythm of how we speak and sing.

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Elliot Murphy
@elliot-murphy.bsky.social

'Left perisylvian rhythms encode prosody and syntax during delayed sentence repetition'. Cool intracranial work on syntax and phonology! www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

jneurosci.orgLeft perisylvian rhythms encode prosody and syntax during delayed sentence repetitionThe human brain must add information to the acoustic speech signal in order to understand language. Many accounts propose that the prosodic structure of utterances (including their syllabic rhythm and...

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Betsy Sneller
@betsysneller.bsky.social

Really grateful to the editors of @jslx.bsky.social for this opportunity to write about Bill's legacy -- both scholarly and some personal -- from our perspective as 3 students from his later years. 🐦 w @laurelmack.bsky.social & Meredith Tamminga onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

onlinelibrary.wiley.comBill Labov: Looking Back, Looking ForwardBill Labov passed away peacefully at home on December 17, 2024, with his wife and fellow Penn linguist Gillian Sankoff by his side. He leaves behind a legacy so large that it is hard to put into word....

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Elliot Murphy
@elliot-murphy.bsky.social

New paper out today! We provide evidence from 84,000 individuals with language deficits across 9 languages for distinct but highly common and robust structural syntactic types generated from Merge-based syntax. 🌲 🧠 arxiv.org/abs/2508.02885

arxiv.orgMerge-based syntax is mediated by distinct neurocognitive mechanisms: A clustering analysis of comprehension abilities in 84,000 individuals with language deficits across nine languagesIn the modern language sciences, the core computational operation of syntax, 'Merge', is defined as an operation that combines two linguistic units (e.g., 'brown', 'cat') to form a categorized structu...

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Cedric Boeckx
@cedricboeckx.bsky.social

Beautiful work from the Raimondo lab documenting the protracted maturation of human neurons (h/t @lancasterlab.bsky.social) For #neoteny fans 🧪🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.orgHuman neurons undergo protracted functional maturation into adulthoodHuman cognitive development is uniquely prolonged, reflecting the extended postnatal maturation of the cerebral cortex where cell-type differentiation, synaptogenesis, myelination8 and transcriptional...

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Elliot Murphy
@elliot-murphy.bsky.social

When word order matters: human brains represent sentence meaning differently from large language models www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.orgWhen word order matters: human brains represent sentence meaning differently from large language modelsLarge language models based on the transformer architecture are now capable of producing human-like language. But do they encode and process linguistic meaning in a human-like way? Here, we address th...
Pedro H. Santos
@blightedboy2.bsky.social

"[...] each of the seven call types we investigated here represents a building block of a compositional structure. [...] akin to human language, compositionality is a pervasive component of bonobos’ vocal communication." www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.orgExtensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobosCompositionality, the capacity to combine meaningful elements into larger meaningful structures, is a hallmark of human language. Compositionality can be trivial (the combination’s meaning is the sum ...
Pedro H. Santos
@blightedboy2.bsky.social

"I am starting to get pretty good results when I internally run prompts asking LLMs to review papers for signs of questionable research practices. lot of mistakes that people make for a lack of knowing better will be wrongly called fraud. It is better if we start improving our practices right now."

open.substack.comThe fog of war in science is about to liftThere is many problems in science: we are about to see it due to automatic parsing of papers

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Simon Fisher
@profsimonfisher.bsky.social

Roses are red. Violets are blue. We do not doubt the technical quality of your study. However, we are not persuaded that the findings represent a sufficient advance to warrant publication in Nature Valentines, & are returning the paper without a review. #AcademicValentine

Pedro H. Santos
@blightedboy2.bsky.social

Really interesting discussion about something that is often automatic accepted as truth. Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge? New perspectives on the principle of model parsimony www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

pnas.orgIs Ockham’s razor losing its edge? New perspectives on the principle of model parsimony | PNASThe preference for simple explanations, known as the parsimony principle, has long guided the development of scientific theories, hypotheses, and m...

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Nature Portfolio
@natureportfolio.nature.com

A paper in Nature presents an AI model that can translate speech and text, including direct speech-to-speech translations, for up to 101 languages. The model, named SEAMLESSM4T, fills gaps in language coverage and outperforms existing systems. 🧪

go.nature.comJoint speech and text machine translation for up to 100 languages - NatureSEAMLESSM4T is a single machine translation tool that supports speech-to-speech translation, speech-to-text translation, text-to-speech translation, text-to-text translation and automatic speech recognition between up to 100 languages.

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Simon Fisher
@profsimonfisher.bsky.social

I like how social media enables scientists to actively dispel popular myths & misconceptions about our research. As an illustration, here’s my thread on why there’s no such thing as a “gene for language”... 🧪 1/9

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Neuroskeptic
@neuroskeptic.bsky.social

"Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time?" www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... Hmm. If we could think about two things at once, would we be one person or two?

cell.comThe unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?Zheng and Meister write about the paradoxical slowness of human behavior. Although our senses gather data at 109 bits/s, our overall information throughput is only 10 bits/s. This stark contrast touches on many fundamental aspects of brain function.

Pedro H. Santos reposted

Luke Sjulson
@lukesjulson.bsky.social

Neuroscience students asked us to teach a PRACTICAL course on experimental methods, and it is now on YouTube! Please like and repost to help us get the word out! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Lecture 1: Signals and data acquisition Focusing on hardware, digital/analog I/O, synchronization 🧵

youtube.comNeuroscience methods - YouTubeNanocourse: Approaches to Study Neural Circuits This course was taught by Anita Autry, Tiago Gonçalves, and Luke Sjulson at Albert Einstein College of Medici...