Sebastian Michelmann

1/ Our brains probably don’t store a new copy of “red” when we encounter something red. Yet we can reinstate distinct memories of red objects. How do we reuse what we already know when encoding memories? Excited to share new work led by @haoliu4391.bsky.social, with @marcelomattar.bsky.social 🧠🧵

1/10 🧠 Imagine seeing a cute dog before it runs away. A few seconds later, your friend tells you this was a Corgi. To remember this experience later, your brain has to link the dog (who is now out of sight) with the name you just heard.

Imagine two people standing in the same spot, looking at the same Goya. They inspect exactly the same parts of the painting, but in a different order. Later, they talk about what they saw. Ignoring all other differences: are the memories they formed identical?

📣 Inclusive electroencephalography – a tutorial and media resource 📣 We're proud to announce publication of a tutorial to help make EEG research more inclusive, co-produced with Black and Hijabi students. doi.org/10.3758/s134... @thechbh.bsky.social @uob-sop.bsky.social @unibirmingham.bsky.social

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Stephen M. Smith Imaging Neuroscience: The First Three Years—Editorial doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Excited to share our work, now published in Neuropsychologia! We show how temporal expectation shifts priorities in working memory—and can lead to long-term forgetting. Huge thanks to Dr. Jarrod Lewis-Peacock and @bulezz.bsky.social for their help and support! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Columbia Psychology is hiring for a Cognitive Science/Neuroscience Assistant Professor position as part of our ongoing push to expand our Cognitive research program (including two hires last year). We'll be starting application reviews next week so get materials in asap! apply.interfolio.com/193975

I would like to highlight two postdoctoral positions in the project Neuronal Mechanisms of Reading in Children Using OPM-MEG at the University of Oxford: my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecruit… my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecruit��� Deadline 30 Sep.

1/ How do we sustain mental continuity in the face of interruption? @xianl-explorer.bsky.social found that, while people listen to a story, posterior medial cortex expresses a slowly evolving "background" representation of the story's context, which survived through silence and interfering tasks.

First preprint from the lab from postdoc Carlo Cerquetella! Demonstrating that neuronal spiking in the human medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex cohere into a redundant, low-dimensional neural correlate of visual attention (captured mostly by saccades) during naturalistic movie viewing.

Thrilled to share this with the world! In this work led by Zihan Bai, we asked how episodic memory interacts with working memory and found evidence for a tight integration between the two systems. Zihan walks you through it in his thread 🧵🧠 🔥

And we’re off! 🚀 Symposium submissions for ICOM7 are open! Can’t wait to see what ideas you’ll be bringing to Glasgow!!

📣 My lab at NYU currently has two open post-doc positions. We are interested in understanding perception, thinking, and hallucinations. We employ a range of cutting-edge techniques in human neuroscience (e.g., 7T fMRI, MEG, iEEG/DES) and computational approaches (e.g., DNN modeling).

New preprint from the lab: We reproduced our 2p data in the accumulating towers task with e-phys and found low-dimensional neural manifolds in the frontal cortex that were aligned timepoint-by-timepoint with the hippocampus. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We’re recruiting a full-time lab manager to join the Shared Minds Lab at USC! This will be a great opportunity for someone who wants to get hands-on experience with research before starting a PhD program in psychology or neuroscience. More below:

New perspective piece out in @cp-neuron.bsky.social with Zaid Zada, @adelegoldberg.bsky.social, and Uri Hasson! We try to articulate some of our excitement about LLMs and discuss what kinds of insights they might provide into the neural computations supporting natural language in the human brain.

Come work with me at Google! We have an open 6-month temp role on my team - it’s a great opportunity for someone with a cog neuro or psych background interested in exploring big tech. Looking for comp modeling experience (e.g. RL, DDMs) and Python/JS. Reach out to learn more or pass along any names!

How do we make good decisions with little experience? Adults can rely on memories of past choices. In our new study in @pnas.org we show kids & teens do something similar–but what they remember turns out to be quite different! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

The Naturalistic Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Lab is launching at UT Austin and is looking for founding members at all levels, including lab manager, PhD students, and postdocs! #NeuroJobs We will study human brain🧠 and memory & attention, using fMRI and modeling. thesonglab.github.io

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Hayley Bree Caldwell, Sebastian Michelmann, et al: Phase similarity between similar objects indicates representational merging across retrieval training but not sleep doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

My paper exploring EEG phase dynamics across sleep and retrieval training has just been published online! This paper summarises the work I conducted with Sebastian Michelmann and Simon Hanslmayr, during my PhD. The paper is open access, so feel free to give it a read🧠 direct.mit.edu/imag/article...

I'm recruiting two postdocs (or potentially PhD students) to work on projects at the intersection of cognition, neuroscience, and AI (with a particular emphasis on mechanistic interpretability). Apply here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F... and please share!

Excited to see this out today and so happy to have been part of this! Amazing work by @ckerren.bsky.social showing how the dimensionality of memory representations expands in a ripple-locked reinstatement process.

My lab is hiring! We are recruiting a full time research coordinator to support our projects on memory brain states. More info and application: jobs.virginia.edu/us/en/job/R0...

📣 In meiner Arbeitsgruppe (LMU München) ist eine PhD-Stelle zu besetzen. Gesucht werden motivierte Bewerber:innen mit Interesse an experimenteller kognitiver Neurowissenschaft. Bewerbungsfrist: 10.08.2026. Bewerbungen bitte per Email. Mehr Infos hier: job-portal.lmu.de/jobposting/f...

Looking to work with a postdoc. Prior experience with fMRI and computational modeling required, interest in psychiatry desired. Fellowship provides three years salary plus independent travel/equipment funds. Send CV and 2-3 manuscripts (preprints OK).

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

Check out @jonathannicholas.bsky.social 's new preprint measuring eye movements to infer individual memory retrievals during decision making, plus a cool RNN modelof that process. Can't express how excited I am about this new technique!

I am looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join my lab at Sabancı University in Istanbul for a 2-year TÜBİTAK-funded position, with possible extension. Interested candidates can email me with a CV and a brief note about their research interests. More details on gunselilab.com soon.

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Excited to share I will be joining UC Davis as an assistant professor starting July 2027! Thank you dearly to all mentors and friends who have supported me over the years ❤️ and Cal Poly friends, I'll miss you!

Excited to see the final version of our manuscript out! We find that OPM-MEG reliably captures neural activity comparable to other neuroimaging methods. Thank you to the reviewers for their thoughtful feedback and to @s-michelmann.bsky.social for his mentorship on this project. 🧠😄

So excited to see this out today! Huge congrats to @oliviachristiano.bsky.social, who led this project.

In collaboration with @monicarosenb.bsky.social , we showed that individual diffs in LTM encoding is uniquely predicted by inter-electrode correlations even controlling for working memory abilities. This suggests that WM & LTM encoding are separate abilities coded by different neural signatures! 1/n

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New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

@michael.muthukrishna.com and I are hiring a postdoc to join our labs at NYU!  We're looking for someone excited to work on one of society's newly emerging and potentially generation-shaping challenges: the multi-agent alignment problem.