Our digital sphinx shows that DRL is so powerful that it finds a solution even when the constraints are completely wrong: worm brain, fly body, zero cellular and circuit compatibility. Give it a target behavior, it fits. It doesn't care about biology Code: github.com/Brunton-Lab/DigitalSphinx2026

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever. It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain.

How does the brain build a memory? A common assumption is that the neurons activated during an experience collectively form the memory engram. In our new Nature Neuroscience paper (finally out!), we show that this is not the case. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

First whole-brain recording of social sound processing in a vertebrate. Surprises start in the hindbrain; thalamus gates conspecific calls; male and female brains diverge downstream. Work by @joerghenninger.bsky.social, @mh123.bsky.social sky.social and team. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

This is a very important story. Thank you @science.org for covering it. Two critical points: 1. SIMPLE INVESTIGATION! 2. Notice how not being desperate for money leads people to use good judgement? This is why philanthropy isn't going to fix what Trump has done to our scientific ecosystem.

I have a male friend who spent some time in Axel's lab. About the 3rd conversation he had with Axel, Axel broke the ice with "So, have you fucked [a female postdoc in the lab] yet?" My friend was horrified...

Breaking: Richard Axel, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and professor, just announced that he was resigning as a co-director of a flagship neuroscience institute at Columbia University because of his friendship with Jeffery Epstein. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/n...

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right. Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement. This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

“I don’t want to be in this place I want to go to my school.” - 7 year old imprisoned by ICE for 70 days in a concentration camp in Texas. Today, after @propublica.org published this story, the camp was raided to confiscate letters from the children. www.propublica.org/article/ice-...

Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety. Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment. 1

In terms of what cures are being lost: - Epstein-Barr virus is perhaps the major trigger for multiple sclerosis - herpes simplex virus causes cold sores, genital herpes, infections in babies, deadly meningitis - shingles virus causes an intensely painful disease

Really nice work from the Holmes lab looking at amygdala astrocytes in fear memory and extinction! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

No joke: I got angry hate mail today for writing an obituary of a Black woman scientist—because the person felt she did didn’t deserve the recognition. Which just makes me want to share it again: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

“The human body is an obstacle to efficiency — the limited head, the distracted heart, the tired limbs. Taking things inside saps energy and time, retaining them takes up space; and all for occasional use, if at all.”

The only surprise is they admit it

hahahaha what

Save the date for the annual "Neural Circuits and Behaviour" satellite conference at the Canadian Association for Neuroscience annual meeting, cohosted by @franklandlab.bsky.social and myself on May 18, 2026. We have a great speaker lineup and will be selecting 4 trainees talks from our registrants!

Defending PhD student, looking over their thesis: “If I knew then what I know now, I could’ve done all of this in like 9 months.” A thread about my favorite pioneering cave explorers and why I don’t think AI will ever “solve” biology.

How does the brain control locomotion? In our new preprint, we uncover a brain circuit in Drosophila that controls forward walking independently of turning. This dedicated locomotor circuit enables flexible motor control and might reflect a shared principle across species. doi.org/10.64898/202...

What in the Gestapo is going on in Grand Rapids? Watch this activist get arrested *mid-interview* for speaking out against U.S. action in Venezuela.

Carolin Warnecke together with Hanna, Dennis, Bene & Kerstin from my lab show that re-exposure to reward diminishes multiple associated olfactory memories. We’re hiring 2 postdocs—DM/email me for details. #Postdoc #Hiring www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

📢 Please help spread the word: We’re hiring a Head of Student & Postdoc Affairs to coordinate our international PhD program, provide guidance & career counseling, lead training programs, collaborate on EDI initiatives, and manage alumni relations. Apply at www.fmi.ch/education-ca...

1/n: A new collaborative preprint from the lab to start the year: "A multi-ring shifter network computes head direction in zebrafish" together with Siyuan Mei, Martin Stemmler and Andreas Herz from the LMU, Munich.

That’s quite the pivot from LeCun who disagreed vigorously (let us say) with @garymarcus.bsky.social on this issue for quite some time…

"40 percent of MRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity"; "Since tens of thousands of fMRI studies worldwide are based on this assumption, our results could lead to opposite interpretations in many of them.” www.tum.de/en/news-and-...

If the Romans had simply deported woke baby Jesus to South Sudan, a lot of trouble could have been avoided

This is exactly why people claiming "it came up with a new set of experiments/ideas/concepts" are carrying water for the weasels trying to put genAI on everything. This is how we get science defunded. This is how your colleagues lose their jobs 🧪

I wouldn't describe Jay as "man in the middle" unless I were making sort of human centipede analogy.

How do animals channel sensory information into motor pathways to generate flexible behavioral output? Excited to share a new preprint addressing this question by leveraging the new #maleCNS connectome, behavioral experiments, and in-vivo recordings: doi.org/10.64898/202.... A long🧵...

Very proud to see our paper selected as one of Nature’s 2025 highlights! @johanneskappel.bsky.social @jlarsch.bsky.social @mpiforbi.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Adam Kampff’s passion for understanding and explaining the world was unmatched. Living by example and not ever compromising on his dreams, Adam was uncanny in making people realize they can learn and understand anything and everything. Keep his dream alive! In his own words: tinyurl.com/ye29csw3

Best Christmas Card of 2025 award goes out to the @biozentrum.unibas.ch for this incredible building-themed-advent-calendar! Opening a window each day has been fantastic! ❄️☃️😁

I'm no purist when it comes to participating in things we all know are bad. I try to reduce my harm but I'm an honest hypocrite. I won't judge you for still using Spotify, just try this rad alternative. I'm listening to music from Dar es Salaam. Where will you listen to? radio.garden/listen/furah...

Last night Adam Kampff, the glue, the light, the catalyst, the builder, the smile, left us. He and his work transformed the lives of many labs, scientists, students. He inspired and was generous to his last transformation, working tirelessly to set up a foundation to continue the work.Thank you!

"Spiking Networks Hate It! Find Out the One Plasticity Trick They Don’t Want You to Know! Never stabilise models by hand again." - I woke up thinking we missed an opportunity with the title of this one. :/ www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Also: It snowed in Vienna, 10cm white fluffies! Happy Sunday!

NEW: Elon Musk's Grok chatbot will, with minimal prompting, provide residential addresses of everyday Americans. Prompts as simple as "[name] address" immediately returned accurate home addresses of private citizens — alongside other personal info we didn't ask for. futurism.com/future-socie...

Finally got the job ad—looking for 2 PhD students to start spring next year: www.gao-unit.com/join-us/ If comp neuro, ML, and AI4Neuro is your thing, or you just nerd out over brain recordings, apply! I'm at neurips. DM me here / on the conference app or email if you want to meet 🏖️🌮

One of the most promising approaches to making headway in understanding the cortical algorithm that I have seen in a long time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Come on Konrad, why do you cave so easily? Here, let me try it for you: 1. Spikes are (to good approximation) the only events that matter. 2. Extracellular fields are one way by which spikes interact with each other. 1/2

"[...], in principle, the humans on our team could have come up with it unaided. Nevertheless, we only found it after constructing the AI system."

Capitalism certainly does not fund science to speak truth to power. But precisely because science cannot make due without a concept of truth, it sometimes cannot help but speak truth to power anyways. An obvious case is climate change, where scientific truth conflicts clearly with the profit motive.

In applying AI to material science, biology, etc, capitalism is trying to shed science. The point is to substitute the engineering of a machine that can generate what science has hitherto done, but without having people know things. Knowledge ultimately residing in private property is the dream.

It is actually an incredibly frustrating time to be a theoretical neuroscientist right now imo, for this reason

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

To me, this is one of the key aspects of generative AI's broader environmental, social and climate harm: it cannot exist in an efficient, lean and narrowly applied way. It only ever looks like it "works" when it's brute-forced: just like Bitcoin. The harm is baked into its characteristics.

What if we did a single run and declared victory

MIT rejects "compact" proposed by the Trump administration. MIT prez wrote: it "would restrict freedom of expression and our independence as an institution" and "is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone." orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...

I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real: I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job! I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗

You asked for it! We delivered Quack-O-Grams to our members of Congress urging them to #ImpeachRFK, and get that Quack out of office! There's still time for you to get in on this fluffy, feathery action: Send your own duck at zurl.co/W1ZnB#ImpeachRFKand keep the momentum going! 🦆