iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

iḥbuben - figs aman - water amcic - cat dhen - soup stock used for making couscous I've been taught other words but have not retained them

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

help i'm accidentally learning Tacawit Berber

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Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón

Linguistic Society of America @lingsocam.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

On Oct 27 at 4P ET, linguists at different career stages will have a conversation about applying for jobs amid anti-trans & anti-queer legislation, being visibly out in research & classrooms, finding community, & putting queer & trans issues at the center of our work. www.lsadc.org/ev_calendar_...

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Noun-noun compounds. How does 'drug dog' mean a canine narc and not a dog that's chill af?

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Reposted because it's an interesting perspective! I come at this from a traditional linguistics background which has historically emphasized human-understandable symbolic theories, so I'm curious how others think.

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I think that AI solving for complex problems is an existence proof that distributed solutions can work for those problems. We still need to undertand how both the brain AND the AI systems actually do it. And, there's also no guarantee that the way the brain solves a problem is the same way AI does.

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Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón

Nicole Rust @nicolecrust.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

89% of SBE NSF grants were never awarded!! My field (Cognitive Neuroscience) is included in this gutting, as are so many others. Plenty of horror stories in the same space are also coming from NIH. It’s not just delaying research; it’s labs shutting down and a next gen that won’t be trained.

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Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón

noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

i've obviously posted about this before, but it really is amazing. until recently it seemed totally reasonable (if a bit pessimistic) to go "other people's experiences are just an inscrutable epistemic quandry. there's literally no way to ever know if 'aphantasiacs' exist". and then, we just did it

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Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón

Lisa Fazio @lkfazio.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Devistating. And against Congress's directive. SBE was included in the 26 budget and the NSF section states that "no directorate shall receive more than a 5 percent reduction relative to the fiscal year 2024 enacted level."

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Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón

Rachel Ryskin @ryskin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

These are great opportunities that can lead to tenure-track positions in the UC system. Happy to support a PPFP application if there’s a good research fit!

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I mean, is that so much to ask? 🥺

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Meanwhile, my lab’s having a bake sale, if you’d like a cupcake please DM me ($1,000,000 each)

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

NSF MRI, theoretically. The university held an internal competition, but the solicitation hasn’t gone out yet. The expected date for open admissions is Oct 15 though, so we’re writing the grant uh, just in case?

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Always accepting donations from approximately $2 to $4 million

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Whoa my tweet went viral. I don’t have a bandcamp, but I’m trying to write an NSF grant. If you retweeted me and want to give me $2-$4 million lmk, you’d save me a lot of time and energy

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Turing said if you’re conscious, then you speak Chinese

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Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón

hikikomorphism @hikikomorphism.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

(confused) I believe LLMs are conscious, but only Deepseek LLMs, because of the Chinese Room theory

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I mean, if they'd like to have a cognitive neuroscientist in residence I'd be interested to hear more details

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

I've heard people make claims that AI would lead to a new Renaissance, but I didn't imagine it'd happen like this:

Screenshot of a Tweet from Pope Leo XIV. It reads:

"In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgen to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Parents, talk to your kids about garden paths before it's too late

A flyer for a shop on UCSC campus. The flyer reads 'Free condoms! Free lube! Free fentanyl test strips!'. There's a line break after 'fentanyl', so the flyer looks like it says 'free fentanyl' at first glance

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Whoops! Thanks for the people who reposted my study links. As usually happens, we found a bug the second I posted the links :) Stay tuned...

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Preparing for the new academic year, and I swear that every platform for sharing course material (Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard...) is perfectly designed to be as unintuitive and stress-inducing as possible to my ADHD brain

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Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón

ashley fairbanks @ziibiing.com · 12/09/2026

i am incredibly excited to share our research about how paying people’s rent through mutual aid made an impact on minnesota this year we accidentally collected more data than anyone ever has for an effort like this, and can very seriously say we prevented an eviction bubble that everyone expected

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

My impression of Elizabeth Holmes in the Nathan Fielder trailer: :) ⦂) ⵓ) ꖉ) 𐌚)

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Surprise gift from my mom! 'Kind of looks like a BRAIN'

A photo of a rock with convolutions that look somewhat like the lateral view of the right hemisphere of the brain. It's laying on a note that reads 'kind of looks like a BRAIN'

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

That's a shower in the back, not a noose, by the way.

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

I'm recently single (lol) so I'm considering moving to San Francisco on a bit of a budget. I would not wish apartment hunting in San Francisco in this economy on my worst enemy. Would you guys visit me if I lived in the Pain house?

An image of a STORE FRONT that was posted as an apartment on Craigslist. The store front has ceiling-to-floor windows that give full view of the inside of the apartment. The windows have the word 'PAIN' painted on, with photos of people rubbing their backs in agony.

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Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón

Charlie Vaske @seavaske.com · 05/06/2026

For a picture of where SF could be if it NIMBYed as hard as Santa Cruz: the *median* income is below the low income cutoff, because housing is so scarce and rare that HUD has to perform an income adjustment to mean any sort of market rents.

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

A little late to the party but I saw the Persona 6 trailer 👀 Can't wait to play it in 2038

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

I’ve been lucky to work with Subhs since 2021 when she informally joined our lab at NYU Abu Dhabi, and her cool work on agreement and concord processing in the brain across languages is really exciting!

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Her experiment shows that, when processing two word expressions in Spanish like “carro rápido” (‘fast car’) at-a-glance, the brain notices whether the gender agreement endings are correct before it understands the meaning of the words or the structure of the phrase.

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Congratulations to PhD student Subhs Shrestha for defending her 1st QP!

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

'They' referring to an explicitly gendered antecedent from instagram reeler gabe.rema #linguistics

Screenshot of an Instagram reel. The image shows the face of a man speaking with a text caption above his head. The caption reads: 'Yay another weird looking guy that is allegedly attractive in media even though not a single perosn youll ever meet finds them attractive.'

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 13/05/2026

A sampling of the psycho- and neurolinguists (UCSC and NYU(AD) contingents) who are living on my Tomodachi Life island currently

A screenshot of the video game Tomodachi Island. Eight characters are shown jumping in a classroom. Each one looks like a psycho- or neurolinguist that I have worked with.

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

I keep updating my bf on what his character in TL is doing. “Omg you just did [thing he always does in real life]!!!” and he’s like “?”

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Some of you are going to be on my Tomodachi Life island and not even know it

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

He could not believe that Broca's patients' brains were preserved and in our possession, that Hindi/Urdu सब्ज़ी / سبزی sabzī 'vegetables' was etymologically related to Bangla সবুজ sôbuj 'green', and that Urdu قمیص qamīs 'kameez' was cognate with Portuguese/Spanish camisa 'shirt'

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 10/04/2026

My neurologist is Bengali, so my appointment this afternoon was twice as long since he wanted to talk neuro shop with me and then ask me etymology questions about Perso-Arabic borrowings into Bangla

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Reposted by Dustin A. Chacón

Maija Tervola @maijatervola.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

A very interesting research setup on grammatical differences and how brain processes them. Done with a couple of understudied languages, Hindi and Nepal. Finnish has a similar differential object marking depending on quantitative definiteness of the object. And a thorough Bsky-summary, thanks!

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

I'm very proud of this work; to my wit, it's the first cog neuro study in Nepali, & the first MEG study in sentence processing in Hindi. Thanks to NYUAD and NeLLab for supporting this hare-brained idea, two *VERY* patient & thorough reviewers, & editor @kemmorey.bsky.social for making this possible!

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Here's the (sensor space) results showing a biphasic wave corresponding to differential object marking in Nepali (left) and Hindi (right). In the time window of the second 'phase' in the Hindi data, we did the exploratory source-space analysis and found the p = 0.09 cluster in supramarginal gyrus s

A figure showing that MEG activity results in a reduced positive field around 300–500ms and a reduced negative field 650–900ms in Nepali for differential object-marking

A figure showing nearly the same sensor-space pattern as in Nepali but in Hindi. Except, we then found in a post hoc, exploratory source-space analysis a p = 0.09 cluster reflecting a difference in activity between the two languages, with a reduction in activity in supramarginal gyrus for object-agreement constructions in Hindi but not Nepali.

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

This is important since our field has been very enamored with one-size-fits-all approaches to language, like LLMs, that might blur the lines between these subtle grammatical differences between languages.

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Dustin A. Chacón @lingdustin.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

A lil slogan that I've started saying is that we have good theories of 'langauge in the brain', but I'm not sure we have good theories of 'languages in the brain', like our friends who study syntax and phonology might have.

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