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john sakon

@johnsakon.bsky.social
678 followers 406 following 394 posts

I’m a neuroscientist studying memory @ UCLA 🌌 *Were most of your stars out?* 🌌

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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 2h
The @democraticparty.bsky.social keeps trying to move to the center to (theoretically) get votes from moderate old Americans—who are relatively happy with the way things are—instead of galvanizing the unhappy youth vote—who are losing all the country’s wealth www.wsj.com/economy/affl...
wsj.com
Affluent and Older Americans Got Much Richer in Postpandemic Years
A Federal Reserve study found overall median net worth rose 2% between 2022 and 2025.
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
he's 54 that's not natural ;)
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jam @socialistboat.dad · 01/09/2024
I just need to _____ meme about getting a cross breeze going
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Right?! Been around for over a decade, except back then they called them reading “dreams” bc they looked so bad
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Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
“Let’s say there’s a world or time line I exist in where A.I. has been subject to regulation. It is ethical. It has no footprint environmentally,” the novelist Jeff VanderMeer, a prominent critic of A.I., told me over the phone. “With those guardrails in place, would I read an A.I. book? All I can say is no. And the reason is, in part, because I want to read something coming from a particular mind.” Using A.I., he said, “feels like a betrayal of the whole point of why you’re a writer.”
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Did it die? I wanted to bring it up in lecture today to help students learn about reading papers (useful for an initial sniff test of a reputable journal) but the site appears down @carlbergstrom.com
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Michael Hobbes @michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Seems like it should be part of the "are phones ruining the kids" debate that every marker of teen mental health has improved since 2021 www.cdc.gov/yrbs/youth-h...
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
C) there are people like this. My guess is it would actually be easy to identify the too-general slop at this point but maybe less so if you massage it right
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 06/09/2026
Werner Donger
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Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Not stated strongly enough.
Without notifying Congress or the American people, DoD has signed an interagency agreement that could give the Department access to billions of dollars that Congress provided to NIH for critical biomedical research. These funds were provided to support research to develop treatments or cures for infectious diseases such as influenza, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV, Ebola, and other dangerous pathogens.
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Melanie Tschiersch @mtschiersch.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Our paper "Redundant prefrontal hemispheres adapt storage strategy to working memory demands" is finally out in Nature Communications! We combined bilateral PFC recordings, modeling and human data to ask: How do the hemispheres work together to store information?1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Redundant prefrontal hemispheres adapt storage strategy to working memory demands - Nature Communications
Neural mechanisms underlying spatial working memory are not fully understood. In this manuscript, simultaneous bilateral monkey recordings and attractor networks show how weakly coupled, redundant pre...
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
youtu.be/KHqZgnR69YI?...
youtu.be
Letterboxd Reviewers
YouTube video by Nick and Brad
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
Ron def wants what’s best for Dems
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
Did you see it at one of the three original film theaters??
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aaron bornstein @aaronbornstein.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Thurs AM: @shuhengguo.bsky.social "Replay Supports Both Future and Immediate Decisions by Updating a Successor Representation" with @johnsakon.bsky.social, Itzhak Fried, Mike Kahana, and Alexa Booras Extended abstract: aaron.bornstein.org/cv/pubs/2026...
aaron.bornstein.org
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char 👻 @accxrdingtochar.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
oh my god lol
fox 2 local detroit stream shows the “who won tonight’s democratic debate?” with abdul el-sayed is winning 95 vs. 5%
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Amelia Eisch 🧪🧠👩‍🔬 🐁 @eisch.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
New preprint from @sgrella.bsky.social team: silencing ventrolateral OFC (chemogenetically) blocks spatial memory-updating. Mice detect novelty fine but can’t use it to revise an existing memory. Deficit tracks w/ reduced engram reactivation in dentate gyrus. Looking forward to digging into this.
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
why perpetuate the "late break" myth?
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Link broken?
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ryan cooper @ryanlcooper.com · 21/07/2026
here’s my offer, The Atlantic magazine, I will read the next “reactionary pretends to give honest advice to Democrats” take if you let me write a piece where I, a DSA member, pretend to give honest advice to Republicans
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
Yeah also a good one! These two papers are on separate islands for me so curious how each are received
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Got it. Yes Fusi has work related to this as well pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34916282/ Don’t think I realized this attack on place cells was part of the war on functional categorization at large when I was reading it 😂
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Special cases of what? I lost the thread around here since I thought we were talking about FC single neuron vs. neural ensemble representations
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Nicholas Grossman @nicholasgrossman.bsky.social · 18/07/2026
The US built the greatest talent magnet ever, attracting the smart, skilled, and striving. They’d come to study, then stay and build things here, or leave with positive impressions and fruitful connections. Helped make the US wealthy and powerful. Then America chose to throw it away. And for what?
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The Verge @theverge.com · 18/07/2026
Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’
buff.ly
Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’
He called AI writing “pastiche nonsense.”
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Giuseppe Fireball
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 04/07/2026
it's not even from britain they just commandeered it
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Naomi Klein @naomiaklein.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
Everybody in the "climate space" (which means everyone on earth...) needs to understand these mind-blowing figures. Google's "total electricity consumption jumped from 31 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2024 to 43 TWh in 2025." In ONE year. The AI corporate arms race is eating the world.
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The Space Pope @popecrocodylus.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
Turning a big dial that says CHILDREN OF MEN and looking back at the audience desperately for approval.
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 29/06/2026
www.nature.com/articles/s41... great person theory dies in the details
nature.com
The pivot penalty in research - Nature
An analysis of millions of scientific papers and patents reveals a ‘pivot penalty’ when researchers shift direction, with the impact of studies decreasing rapidly the further they move from their prev...
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Ken Tremendous @kentremendous.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
I am baffled that my campaign slogan for New York's 12th district, "Let's Close Our Eyes and Do Everything the Same Forever and Maybe Somehow Things Will Improve?" failed to rally Democratic voters. Some said "maybe lose the question mark" but I wasn't sure I could stand behind a flat statement.
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
🙄
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
Yes. But why did they put that hideous wad of stone next to it?
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
ha well I don't want to be wrong on the internet! There are severe consequences for that right?
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
Don't think it will be worth publishing now 😔 Basically can take the pooling of free and cued recall in Gelbard-Sagiv 2008 for granted
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
@eitans.bsky.social I take this back!! I went back to this data hoping to publish it...and my revised analyses show more what you said: that cued recall reactivated concept-selective neurons just as much as free recall did. Not as exciting as I'd hoped, but fits with idea of concept cell invariance
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 15/06/2026
This is classic libspeak for burying it under the rug. Yes, we all want a good "regulatory framework" where everyone that reads that phrase imagines a different thing in their mind that should work but would of course get bullied away by monied interests
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
gonna be with them soon turns out the trump admin doesn't seem to be prioritizing science
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 02/06/2026
Worried about it. But Collins already votes like a ghoul so probably worth the risk he backs it up. FWIW a colleague on here said they happened to be in a chairlift with one of Platner’s friends (had photos and everything to prove) and said he’s a legit leftist
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 30/05/2026
LA home of za #quartersheets
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Jonathan Cohn @jonathancohn.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
The amount the US spends on attacking countries that pose no threat to us and causing mass death is obscene. We could spend money on making the world a better place. Instead, we spend it on making it worse. www.politico.com/news/2026/05...
politico.com
Pentagon puts building blocks in place for Cuba invasion
The Navy’s presence in the Caribbean has not reduced despite the Iran war.
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
We have a chance to make real change happen in LA
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Norm Charlatan @normcharlatan.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
lmao, get ready to learn Thunder Bay, buddy
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
the bug in their brain will never be satisfied unless it knows the state negotiations aren’t going to take its precious
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
fortune.com/2026/05/16/n... Important info for my NY friends
fortune.com
Mamdani's New York is coming to tax your private jet. Here's how to prepare | Fortune
Here's how Mayor Mamdani's tax agenda could reach the Teterboro ramp — and which airports, ownership structures, and strategies offer the most protection.
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Skye @simplyskye.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Mamdani: I cannot help but think of the words of our 40th president, Ronald Reagan. He famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are 'I'm from the govt & I'm here to help'" I think nine more terrifying words are actually, "I worked all day and can't feed my family"
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
www.uclahealthcareers.org/job/23388529...
uclahealthcareers.org
Staff Research Associate I - Neurosurgery - UCLA Health Careers - Job #29810 - Los Angeles, CA
Take a look at a great career opportunity where you can make a real difference at UCLA Health
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john sakon @johnsakon.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
We are hiring a half time (20 hrs/wk) Research Assistant to record single neurons in the hospital at UCLA (working with epilepsy patients) to study memory. Ideal job for someone looking to gain clinical/neuroscience experience for med/grad school. Apply at the link below:
media.tenor.com
a computer generated image of a nerve cell with red lights
ALT: a computer generated image of a nerve cell with red lights
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