Sign in

Christopher Honey

@chrishoney.bsky.social
1.3K followers 510 following 55 posts

Associate Professor, Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University. theoretical neuroscience; open-ended cognition; memory

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Amitai Shenhav @ashenhav.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
2 yrs ago, I briefly laid out a new theory of how motivation works (AGH). Here, I expand on the problems AGH was trying to solve, why they are hard to solve, what my solution looks like, and how this should change our understanding of thoughts & actions. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵A few highlights:
17441
Reposted by Christopher Honey
worm @rfksbrainworm.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
If you ever wondered why visible light is those particular wavelengths, it's because life evolved to see in the narrow range where water is transparent
Diagram of absorption of emf by water. There's a gap right that dips in the 500 nm range
10260611700
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Martin Hebart @martinhebart.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
What is the nature of universal representations in AI models, and what determines whether they emerge? Our paper accepted at #neurips2026 led by @florianmahner.bsky.social & @rothj.bsky.social addressed these questions comparing 162 vision models, with intriguing results. arxiv.org/abs/2605.13675 🧵
arxiv.org
Characterizing Universal Object Representations Across Vision Models
Deep neural networks trained with different architectures, objectives, and datasets have been reported to converge on similar visual representations. However, what remains unknown is which visual prop...
34215
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Yes.
000
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Rik Henson @rhens.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
So thankful to the University of Cambridge for enabling a new chapter in the long history of the APU/CBU (since MRC decided to close all its units…)
45718
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Doeller Lab @doellerlab.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Join us at @mpicbs.bsky.social as a fully funded 3-year PostDoc (m/f/d). Your project will focus on how cognitive maps shape learning, memory, and decision-making. Excellent infrastructure with a leading scientific network. Apply by September 30: postdocprogram.mpg.de/node/58460
postdocprogram.mpg.de
The role of cognitive maps in learning, memory and decision making | Max Planck Postdoc Program
02111
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
To be clear, I am not suggesting that UBI is causing the loss of power. Automation is causing the loss of power. But I am suggesting that the kind of money that one receives in exchange for labor has a different political character from the money received via UBI.
120
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
If supermarkets lay off 80% of their workers over 3 years and the supermarket shopping experience is still fine, will that motivate a general strike? The laid-off workers have no labor to withhold, and who strikes for them?
100
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
It sounds like you are describing something more like a mass protest or boycott. A key element of a worker's strike is the withdrawal of labor; if the withdrawal of labor barely affects production, strikes lose their impact, and labor loses bargaining power.
110
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I think that a general strike by people whose work is needed would be very different from a general strike by people whose work is unneeded.
110
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Got it! It's an interesting wrinkle on what we mean by "agency" in the first place.
000
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
One of the non-financial benefits of work is the sociopolitical power associated with striking/resigning. If you are working (and you have agency and choice), but your work is unneeded, would that also decrease well-being?
140
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Stephanie Chan @scychan.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
What does the *empirical evidence* tell us about work and wellbeing? And what does that imply for AI futures? arxiv.org/abs/2609.11019 We reviewed studies of populations across the world, including the unemployed, retirees, lottery winners, and financially dependent spouses. Major takeaways:
1216
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Adele Goldberg @adelegoldberg.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
very cool! Once their world extends beyond primary colors & shapes in a matrix to one w/ realistic scenes and situations incl social dynamics, will be esp cool to see how they extend meanings in new contexts, and ultimately develop a full range of constructions, almost as if they don't need UG
242
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Mariam Aly @mariamaly.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
How do keep a narrative active in our mind despite interruptions? The default mode network can maintain a representation of an interrupted story over a delay, even when the delay is filled with a demanding task. This representation is strikingly transformed from the initial experience!
biorxiv.org
Cortical and Hippocampal Pathways to Mental Continuity
How do people preserve mental continuity when tasks are interrupted? One established pathway runs through the hippocampus, which stores snapshots of our mental context for later reinstatement. We prop...
17824
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
"Incorrect use of stats" is probably >90% if we're being strict, but it's mostly inconsequential. The far more critical item is "errors that overturn conclusions", and sometimes the stats (null models and control analyses) are drivers there. Also, "overturn" may be too strong... undermine for sure.
060
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
I think that outright fraud (e.g. data fabrication) is more in the 0.5-2% range in serious journals, but I'd otherwise agree with the numbers. Note that, for the references point, we're talking about "at least one reference" out of a set of ~50, so the per-reference issue is closer to sub-10%.
350
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Thank you, Mariam!!
020
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Federico Rossano @federicorossano.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
UCSD Cognitive Science Department is hiring an Assistant Professor incorporating novel computational approaches in the study of biological and/or artificial intelligence. I have had the privilege of working in this department for 10 years and the intellectual environment really is unique. 1/3
13423
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
5/ Xian ran a lot of controls, all in the preprint, with co-author Hongmi Lee! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Thank you to @mariamaly.bsky.social for posting about the preprint yesterday as well :)
biorxiv.org
080
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
4/ This posterior-medial process resembles "deprioritized" or "rotated" working-memory traces that have been reported in sensory cortex and PFC, but now we see it in default-network regions which accumulate high-level context over minutes. @bradpostle.bsky.social
150
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
3/ The persistence of this background pattern predicted how reliably posterior medial cortex re-synced to the story after the interruption, and (along with hippocampal activity) it predicted how well listeners later recalled the story.
140
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
2/ One known mechanism for continuity is hippocampal memory: we can snapshot mental context and later restore it. But Xian found a cortical process: a background pattern that gradually drifted over narrative time, and which persisted through interruptions in a transformed format.
A three-row illustration of (A) the timecourse of correlation between the story-phase pattern and the interruption-phase pattern immediately following, revealing negative correlation; (B) a topographic map of the PMC region that was analyzed; (C) spatial maps of voxelwise activation across different segments of the story (activation selective to each segment) and the following interruption phases.
130
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
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.
A schematic figure showing an evolving timeline of mental context during an interrupted narrative.
26828
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Johns Hopkins Arts & Sciences @jhuartssciences.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Meet Zeus. ⚡ Hopkins’ new recycling machine turns packaging foam into dense plastic blocks that become park benches and picture frames, keeping it out of the landfill. ♻️ hub.jhu.edu/2026/09/11/f...
hub.jhu.edu
Foam recycling now available at Johns Hopkins
A new recycling machine in a parking lot at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center takes airy chunks of foam and churns them into dense plastic cubes that can be made into park benches, picture frames, ...
021
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Too soon.
050
Reposted by Christopher Honey
SMBC Comics @smbccomics.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
The crank doesn't actually do anything, but it makes the humans happy. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/crank PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com
4-panel SMBC comic update. A man is looking down, saying "I worry intellectuals like me are useless now that machines are so good at everything." A yellow robot behind him says "no, no, don't feel bad. You can still contribute to new discoveries!" The robot then gestures to metal boxes with a crank sticking out of them, with the words "math," "physics," "CS" and "philosophy" written on each box. The robot asks "now, would you like to turn the mathematics crank of the physics crank today?" The man defiantly states "no! I reject all this! I shall be a pure aesthete, concerned only with my own beautiful creations!" Shortly after, the man is scene turning the crank on a box marked "poetry" in a beautiful font as he says to himself "so... Self-actualized..."
923434
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Alana Darcher @alanadarcher.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
🎉 *extremely* excited to share our human single neuron + movie dataset is out in #ScientificData! 📄 Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients 🔗https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-07955-0 1st public dataset from @humansingleneuron.bsky.social!🧵
513937
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Kate Devlin @drkatedevlin.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
The UK AI pushback: 42% of people are deliberately limiting their AI use and 70% of people think it would be difficult or impossible to avoid being exposed to AI even if they wanted to. New report from us at @kings-dfi.bsky.social : www.kcl.ac.uk/news/over-40...
kcl.ac.uk
Over 40% of people are limiting AI use, as popularity starts to wane | King's College London
People are increasingly choosing to limit or reject the use of AI tools, according to a new report published today by the Digital Futures Institute at King’s College London and Responsible AI UK.
8296131
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Roxana Zeraati @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Our paper "Neural timescales from a computational perspective" is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We discuss how computational models and methods can distill empirical observations on neural timescales into quantitative, testable theories of brain computation.
nature.com
Neural timescales from a computational perspective - Nature Neuroscience
This review integrates computational approaches to provide a unified view on how data analysis methods, biophysical mechanistic models and machine learning approaches can help to uncover the origins a...
422986
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Ishan Singhal @singhal.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
If our experiences unfold like a stream over time, how would this stream unfold in other animal species? Together with @birchlse.bsky.social and @anilseth.bsky.social, a review of temporal illusions and a path for temporal phenomenology in animals! a 🧵/n www.cell.com/trends/cogni...
17832
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s…another creative & impactful project from the rocket-fueled @talboger.bsky.social, applying the wickedly cool “visual anagrams” method to animacy! Read the paper in @elife.bsky.social today, then attend his presentation at @socphilpsych.bsky.social later this week. 🦆✈️
1329
Reposted by Christopher Honey
tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Do we perceive animacy itself, beyond its lower-level visual correlates? In @elife.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and I leverage “visual anagrams” — images whose interpretations change with orientation — to suggest the answer is: yes! elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...
47622
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
These instructions actually crash the bookshop.org checkout. I am not kidding. There is some kind of bug where, if you enter a large enough number in the quantity box, and press "Update, the site produces this:
020
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
*voice of a human* Now if only I had some way to acquire these copies using a convenient digital transaction...
100
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
But in this case Bertie is unsupported by a Jeeves?
110
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Carl Quintanilla @carlquintanilla.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Dylan, on life in your 80’s, is incredible. @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/06/14/o...
229119683098
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Matthias Nau @matthiasnau.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
The massive 7T-fMRI Natural Scenes Dataset (NSD) has been extended to Neuropixels recordings in macaques! Exciting resource for inter-species comparisons by Li et al. @natneuro.nature.com. www.nature.com/articles/s41... Also nice News & Views by Kay and colleagues! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
16816
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
And if you are in the Washington DC area this coming weekend, feel free to come to our conference! futurerealities.org/FOR2026/
futurerealities.org
FOR 2026 | The Future of Our Realities: Work and Truth
A June 20, 2026 conference in Washington, DC about how AI is reshaping work, truth, media, labor, and shared reality.
0103
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Thank you to Johns Hopkins for a Nexus award that supported this work. hub.jhu.edu/2026/06/15/a...
hub.jhu.edu
Americans strongly support regulations on AI
New poll by researchers at Johns Hopkins finds even artificial intelligence proponents want more rules
140
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
The full results, questionnaire, and downloadable data are on the poll site. There's also a data-explorer if you want to look at demographic splits. And there's a quiz if you like quizzes. futurerealities.org/poll/2026/
futurerealities.org
A national survey on AI attitudes
A national survey of 2,122 U.S. adults on attitudes toward AI.
140
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Fourth, Americans are more likely to expect AI to widen inequality than narrow it (52% vs 18%). And when asked "who gains the most power?", 44% name tech companies, 20% say AI systems themselves, and 8% say ordinary people.
Stacked bar titled "Will AI widen or narrow inequality?" over the next 10 years. Greatly increase 27%, somewhat increase 25%, not much 15%, somewhat decrease 10%, greatly decrease 8%, not sure 16%. In total 52% expect an increase vs 18% a decrease.Bar chart titled "Who Americans think will gain the most power from AI," share naming each group. Large technology companies 44%, AI systems themselves 20%, governments 15%, ordinary individuals 8%, not sure 13%.
140
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Third, trust in AI varies greatly, both across people and across tasks, and this is somewhat independent of the population's broad support for regulation.
Bar chart titled "What Americans trust AI to do," percentage who trust AI a great deal or somewhat, ranked. Look up facts 67%, create art or music 57%, file taxes 42%,medical advice 37%, retirement savings 33%, be my co-worker 32%, teach my child 31%, emotional support or therapy 30%, drive my car 24%, decide my court case 19%.
140
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
There is also bipartisan support for AI-related unemployment benefits and a "digital dividend", which is roughly a UBI funded by taxes on tech companies. @imarinescu.bsky.social
Both parties support taxing AI and paying displaced workers," showing percent support by political affiliation (Republicans, Democrats,
Independents). Benefits for AI-displaced workers: 65 / 72 / 65. Digital dividend, a UBI funded by a tech tax: 52 / 60 / 52.
160
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Second, there are specific rules that people strongly want: the right to a human and legal requirements of transparency and privacy around AI.
Grouped bar chart titled "Bipartisanship is not dead: everyone wants legal restrictions on AI," showing percent support by political affiliation (Republicans, Democrats,  Independents). Human review of AI decisions: 83 / 80 / 77. Tell me when I'm talking to AI: 79 / 79 / 75. Ban AI impersonation: 75 / 76 / 74. Label AI-generated media: 71 / 71 / 69.
140
Christopher Honey @chrishoney.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
Some findings from our national survey of U.S. population attitudes toward AI. First, feelings about AI are actually very similar across political parties (and many other demographics). They vary most by people's experience with AI tools. Explore the data: futurerealities.org/poll/2026/ 🧵
Bar chart titled "Positive feeling toward AI varies by experience, not by party," showing the percentage who feel positive about AI overall. By experience using AI: never used AI 12%, tried it a few times 24%, use it weekly 50%, skilled daily user 80%. By political party: Republicans 39%, Democrats 36% (nearly identical).
1164
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Leyla Isik @lisik.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
📢 We are recruiting a full-time lab manager/RA joint between our lab and @marinabedny.bsky.social 's lab. A great opportunity for a recent grad interested in gaining more research experience in cognitive neuroscience. Details and apply here: hiring.jhu.edu/careers/job/...
hiring.jhu.edu
Research Assistant (KSAS - Cognitive Science) | Johns Hopkins University
We are seeking a Research Assistant who will work jointly in the Isik and Bedny labs on projects involving neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG), behavioral testing, and computational approaches. The position is p...
0119
Reposted by Christopher Honey
cogscikid.bsky.social @cogscikid.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Task diversity is supposedly key to generalization in RL. But what does it do to continual RL, where agents face one new task distribution after another? We find that past a point, more diversity actually inhibits continual reinforcement learning 🧵
45114
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Dan Levenstein @dlevenstein.bsky.social · 09/03/2026
Compositional representation of self, others, and gaze direction in *human* hippocampus - super cool. arxiv.org/abs/2603.04747
arxiv.org
Neural geometry in the human hippocampus enables generalization across spatial position and gaze
Hippocampal neurons track positions of self, others, and gaze direction. However, it is unclear how their respective neural codes differ enough to avoid confusion while allowing for abstraction. We re...
06018
Reposted by Christopher Honey
Hanna Wallach @hannawallach.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Microsoft Research NYC is hiring a researcher in the space of AI and society!
26240