Context Lab

A motley crew of science nerds trying to understand the inner workings and limits of human memory. Plus some Bayesian stuff...and 🧁. Director: @jeremyRmanning

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

Since you typically know more about your *own* past than your future, this affects what you say and do. And your "biased" knowledge of your own autobiographical timeline is transmitted to other people when you communicate!

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

Now out in @NatureComms (lead: @Xu_Xinming)! How do conversations shape how (and what) people guess about the unknown past and future (e.g., in other people's lives)?

Paper/code/data: https://t.co/rUYJCi4O85

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

From examining millions of real and fictional human conversations, we found that people refer to past events ~1.5 more often than future events, on average. This affects what other people *learn* (or infer) from our conversations.

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

Fun writeup of one of our group's recent papers (https://t.co/QNBY19hXk5)-- thanks @PsyPost!

[PsyPost.org @PsyPost]

New research uncovers how the brain dynamically shifts its activity in response to mental challenges, revealing surprising insights into its adaptability. The study sheds light on a hidden mechanism that helps optimize our cognitive abilities in real time. https://t.co/6kqWrsVWwV

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

We also did some digging to get at the specific networks that seem to exhibit this mode switching process most strongly (DMN!) or weakly (primary sensory cortex!) and also used some cool @neurosynth analyses to help us interpret the results.

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

New study out in @PNASNews (lead: @LucyLongOwen)!

Our brains comprise billions of tiny components interact via trillions of connections, changing at sub-ms timescales. How is it so robust to injury and noise?

Paper: https://t.co/yjReM2pbd0
Code/data: https://t.co/2CbFj9pnv9

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

When we are less engaged, our brain switches to a mode that prioritizes flexibility in favor of reliability.

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

We've been doing some @LeetCode together to help hone our coding skills. We've set up a project for going through the daily problems: https://t.co/DHcttu4kQw

We welcome participation from "outsiders" too; instructions are at the link above if you'd like to participate! 🧑‍💻

[Jeremy Manning @jeremyRmanning]

I'm feeling very happy, lucky, and grateful to have reached this next career milestone (tenure!) with the support of my family, lab, and colleagues! Special thanks to my current grad students @paxt0n4 and @Xu_Xinming for their incredible work, creativity, and general awesomeness!

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

We've (lead: @paxt0n4) added an awesome new system for automatically managing dependencies, that's isolated from the runtime environment.

Davos now turns your notebook into a "fully enclosed" + shareable doc (w/ code/figures/data/text) that installs its own dependencies!

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

Excited to announce the latest release of our "Davos" Python package (v0.2.3)! 🎉🥳

Add Davos to a Jupyter notebook by inserting a new cell with this code at the top:

%pip install davos
import davos

Then replace all uses of "import" with "smuggle"

https://t.co/eyCIUOu2kg

[Methods in Neuroscience at Dartmouth (MIND) @comp_mind_ss]

MIND is in the news today! 📰🗞️ https://t.co/mzAnZgyTnq

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

We're also grateful to @OpenAI, @huggingface, and @Meta, whose awesome LLM wizardry gives Chatify its brain powers 🧠💕🪄, and to the developers of @ProjectJupyter, LangChain, and GPTCache for providing a solid foundation for creating such neat tools!

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

We're excited for the alpha release of our Chatify 🤖package in collaboration with @neuromatch! Chatify adds an LLM-powered "AI tutor" widget to Jupyter notebooks.

Try it by adding this code to the top cell:

!pip install chatify
%load_ext chatify

Link: https://t.co/f4fxgN8Rgq

[Context Lab @ContextMemLab]

Special shoutout to our core developers 🧑‍💻🧑‍💻🧑‍💻🧑‍💻: @HemuManju, @jeremyRmanning, @j6m8, and @KordingLab 🥳, and to all of our (many, many) pre-alpha testers 🧪🏅!