Got to meet one of my heroes today. John Hopfield broke down barriers for generations of physicists: “Physics at its best is a point of view for understanding the totality of man and the Universe.”

First paper from the lab! 🤠 Understanding the statistical physics of the brain is hard (in part) because statistical physics is hard. We find a class of max ent models that can be solved EXACTLY in very large neural systems Led by the awesome David Carcamo www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

WTI's Inspiring Speaker Series continues this week with Timothy Lillicrap, “Model-based reinforcement language for reasoning in games and beyond” 10.9.25 | 10 – 11:15a 100 College St, Workshop 1116 🔗 wti.yale.edu/event/2025-10/inspiring-speaker-tim-lillicrap All Yale community members are welcome.

Adding loops into a genome is a complicated and costly business for a cell. New findings suggest that it may be the reason that ancient life became complex. @philipcball.bsky.social reports: www.quantamagazine.org/loops-of-dna...

I thought we would never work on gamma oscillations again, but I was wrong 🤷‍♀️ So happy to see this work out in @nature.com! This was a truly epic project spearheaded by @q-perrenoud.bsky.social. Gamma isn't always an oscillation, but it's critical for sensory encoding and perceptual performance 🧠

(1/8) My latest study is out in @nature.com ! Kudos to coauthors especially @jess-cardin.bsky.social and to @kavliatyale.bsky.social and @wutsaiyale.bsky.social for support. We find that gamma power in mouse visual cortex is caused by brief events of visual processing www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Final week to apply for the 2026 SFI Complexity Postdoctoral Fellowships If you're an early-career scholar and passionate about collaborative, transdisciplinary research beyond traditional departments, this is the postdoc fellowship for you. Deadline: Oct 1, 2025 Apply: santafe.edu/sfifellowship

Biological physics bridges the complex phenomena of life with minimal quantitative models from physics. How should we teach biophysics? Join us for an online panel on "Teaching and Learning Biological Physics" (Sep 17, 5:30pm ET). Registration:

Have a striking image of your biophysics research? 🐭🐒🐛🪰🦠Submit it to the DBIO Image Contest! The winning images will be advertised on shirts and other media at the 2026 Global Physics Summit. Submit here:

Interested in organizing a session at the 2026 APS Global Physics Summit? It's pain free and a great way to get involved in organizing! We're taking nominations for invited DBIO Symposia through August 24:

It was an honor to write this, but also great fun. A chance to look back at the classics, and think about the path forward. #Physics is a beautiful human endeavor. journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

Republicans want states to cut food aid errors. Their bill could do the opposite: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/u...

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Interested in coarse-graining, irreversibility, or neural activity in the hippocampus? If so, check out our new preprint exploring how maximizing the irreversibility preserved from microscopic dynamics leads to interpretable coarse-grained descriptions of biological systems!

Living systems operate nonequilibrium processes across many scales in space and time. Is there a model-free way to bridge the descriptions at different levels of coarse-graining? Here we find that preserving the evidence of time-reversal symmetry breaking works remarkably well!

Biology consumes energy at the microscale to power functions across all scales: From proteins and cells to entire populations of animals. Led by @qiweiyu.bsky.social‬ and @mleighton.bsky.social‬, we study how coarse-graining can help to bridge this gap 👇🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2506.01909

Science is built on public trust, federal funding, and academic freedom. All of these are currently being eroded, but what can we do? Join us for an online panel on "Being a Voice for Science" (June 11, 2-3pm ET). Info and registration: engage.aps.org/dbio/resourc...

Apply or nominate for DBIO awards by June 2! Awards include: APS Fellowship Max Delbrück Prize in Biological Physics Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Research in Biological Physics

When constructing models of the world, we aim for good compressions: models that are as accurate as possible with as few details as possible. But which details should we include in a model? An answer lies in the "minimax entropy" principle 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2505.01607

What is the connection between information theory and statistical physics? And how can this connection help us understand the brain? Final installment with the Simplifying Complexity podcast ( @bhcomplexity.bsky.social) podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

Statistical physics and information theory may seem daunting, but with a little insight they can become intuitive and are actually deeply related. A fun chat on the Simplifying Complexity podcast (@bhcomplexity.bsky.social) podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/w...

Hear Christopher Lynn from Yale on the latest episode of #SimplifyingComplexity. How can we use the ideas of complexity and network science to better understand the brain? Apple: buff.ly/3VTjG9I Spotify: buff.ly/3WaR9MA 🧪⚛️ #complex #complexity #ComplexSystems #ComplexityScience

Our understanding of neural computation -- both in the brain and artificial networks -- is founded on an assumption: That neurons fire in response to a linear sum of inputs We systematically test this assumption 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2504.08637

The Lynn Group is now on Bluesky! 🕺 We explore how structure and function emerge in complex living systems, particularly the brain. 🧠 We take a statistical physics perspective: seeking to identify the key minimal ingredients that combine to produce collective macroscopic phenomena