Shared Minds Lab
Department of Psychology | University of Southern California
Research
How do individual brains converge on a shared understanding of the world? // How do we use language to transmit our thoughts from one brain to another? // How do we coordinate our own behavior with the actions of others?
The Shared Minds Lab aims to understand how our brains communicate, cooperate, and ultimately coordinate our collective behavior in real-world contexts. Our work combines elements of ecological psychology, deep learning, and cognitive neuroscience to explore how we become aligned.
People
Samuel A. Nastase
Sam Nastase is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and director of the Shared Minds Lab at the University of Southern California. His expertise combines naturalistic neuroimaging and deep learning to better understand how the brain supports communication in real-world contexts.
Under construction!
The Shared Minds Lab is just getting started. We’re hoping to build our team of students, postdocs, and collaborators over the next couple years. If you’re interested in joining the lab, please reach out!
Publications
A shared model-based linguistic space for transmitting our thoughts from brain to brain in natural conversations
Zada, Z., Goldstein, A. Y., Michelmann, S., Simony, E., Price, A., Hasenfratz, L., Barham, E., Zadbood, A., Doyle, W., Friedman, D., Dugan, P., Melloni, L., Devore, S., Flinker, A., Devinsky, O., Hasson, U.*, & Nastase, S. A.* (2024). A shared model-based linguistic space for transmitting our thoughts from brain to brain in natural conversations. Neuron, 112(18), 3211–3222. DOI PDF
Shared functional specialization in transformer-based language models and the human brain
Kumar, S.*, Sumers, T. R.*, Yamakoshi, T., Goldstein, A., Hasson, U., Norman, K. A., Griffiths, T. L., Hawkins, R. D., & Nastase, S. A. (2024). Shared functional specialization in transformer-based language models and the human brain. Nature Communications, 15, 5523. DOI PDF
Join
The Shared Minds Lab is recruiting PhD students to start in Fall 2026! We welcome inquiries from prospective graduate students, postdocs, and undergraduate researchers interested in joining the lab. Please have a look at some of our recent publications and be prepared to discuss how you would expand on them. We look forward to seeing you in the vibrant city of Los Angeles!