A must-read review. It argues that brain areas are only one of several organizing principles and are not especially central, given their weak correspondence to function. Cytoarchitecture and connectivity are a starting point, not the endpoint. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

Happy to share our new paper in @nathumbehav.nature.com: t.co/Ciq7AKvle5. Using 500k+ behavioral trials, we show that #serialdependence deviates from #Bayesian predictions, pointing to a new narrative about how recent experience shapes perception. @aozkirli.bsky.social @achetverikov.bsky.social

Doing a PhD is - at heart - one long discussion with your mentor. The discussion changes over time - with unexpected turns and ups & downs - but through it all is a pair of people discussing a topic endlessly to make sense of it. PhD students: choose someone you like to talk to!

fMRI signals “up,” but neural metabolism might be going “down.” In our @natneuro.nature.com paper, we demonstrate that about 40% of voxels with robust BOLD responses exhibit opposite oxygen metabolism, revealing two distinct hemodynamic modes. rdcu.be/eUPO8 funds @erc.europa.eu #neuroskyence 🧵:

🚨 new preprint alert! biorxiv.org/content/10.1... what is the architecture of an individual working memory? 1/n

New preprint! 🎉 We investigate how the brain maintains multiple items in working memory, testing two competing hypotheses for sequential memory: neural subspaces vs. neural sequences. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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

To those who access published (nonhuman) neurophysiology data & analysis code: what’s your favorite place to find it?

Colombo et al., Plos Biology, "Hemispherotomy leads to persistent sleep-like slow waves in the isolated cortex of awake humans" journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

15 years in the making, we confirmed that mitochondria - the powerhouse of the cell - have an unusual localization in patients who experience psychosis (including schizophrenia and bipolar disorders). You’ll never guess what kind of patient cells we used to make this discovery… 🧵

It's never occurred to me that it IS an assumption. This is the most astonishing start to a paper I've read in years: "Living organisms are assumed to produce same-species offspring. Here, we report a shift from this norm in Messor ibericus, an ant that lays individuals from two distinct species."

Talk: Cognition is Emergent - Earl K. Miller Neuroscience and Philosophy Salon, 9-12-25 youtu.be/Sk4ehOcsDmM?...

Will try! But I'll say in advance that I view the mouse brain as very different. Their anatomical connectivity is very high, with almost the entire cortex interconnected. Something like 97% if the Kennedy figures are right. Experiments in primates and humans are needed but obvly cannot be done now.

(1/26) Excited to share a new preprint led by grad student Albert Wakhloo, with me and Larry Abbott: "Associative synaptic plasticity creates dynamic persistent activity." www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨New paper🚨 Neural manifolds went from a niche-y word to an ubiquitous term in systems neuro thanks to many interesting findings across fields. But like with any emerging term, people use it very differently. Here, we clarify our take on the term, and review key findings & challenges rdcu.be/ex8hW

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪

a friend of mine shared this ai-generated "emotion wheel" and unfortunately i have been laughing my ass off at it for like 15 minutes now. today i am feeling Fnliinneon

Because we must build good things while we scream about the bad, I have started a "Data for Good" team @data-for-good-team.bsky.social that partners with organizations needing short-term data science help. We have three projects ongoing & will add more as our capacity grows. data-for-good-team.org

Depressed individuals often experience a profound slowing/standstill of time. Northoff argues this is due to a desynchronization between “self-time” (inner) and “world-time” (external); inner sense of time becomes abnormally slow, making external events feel overwhelmingly fast or unmanageable. This

It's kinda obvious. #AGIComics has already figured out which brain region is the most important. 😇

High-Dimensional Dynamics in Low-Dimensional Networks. New preprint with a former undergrad, Yue Wan. I'm not totally sure how to talk about these results. They're counterintuitive on the surface, seem somewhat obvious in hindsight, but then there's more to them when you dig deeper.

Functional organization derived from network-driven processes offers clear advantages wrt traditional methods when studying human brain networks, outperforming SoTA communication models in explaining functional communities from structural data. #Neuroscience 🧪🧠 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

This data can also be accessed on the MICrONS Explorer – a growing portal for connectivity and functional imaging data. Dive into the data: www.microns-explorer.org/cortical-mm3 New to MICrONS? Check out these tutorials: tutorial.microns-explorer.org

In the physical world, almost all information is transmitted through traveling waves -- why should it be any different in your neural network? Super excited to share recent work with the brilliant @mozesjacobs.bsky.social: "Traveling Waves Integrate Spatial Information Through Time" 1/14

Is scientific intuition real? One definition: a scientist has good intuition if they design experiments which yield important results without necessarily being guided by an underlying theory. They "just know" what to do. I think a lot of what we call intuition is basically luck.

I found this to be an informative and provocative read - what happened to cognitive science? Authors argue, based on bibliometric and scientometric analysis, that cognitive science as a discipline is basically dead. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

(1/30) New preprint! "Symmetries and continuous attractors in disordered neural circuits" with Larry Abbott and Haim Sompolinsky bioRxiv: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Not the biggest problem we're facing right now, but wow it's annoying that when this guy shares my work everyone tells him how brilliant he is and when I share it I get random dudes swinging by to tell me I can't do maths

New preprint: "The geometry of the neural state space of decisions", work by Mauro Monsalve-Mercado, buff.ly/42wVHD5. Surprising results & predictions! (Thread) We analyze neuropixel population recordings in macaque area LIP during a reaction time, random-dot motion 1/

I wrote about the concept of agency (both human and artificial) in the year 2025. gracewlindsay.com/2025/01/24/2...

The Marchenko–Pastur law describes the limiting spectral distribution of eigenvalues of large random covariance matrices. The theorem proves that as dimensions grow, the empirical spectral distribution converges weakly to this law. https://buff.ly/406Xaxg

"saudação nazista? mas é só uma arte marcial alemã" - Elon Musk

in the article of former North Carolina Congressman Patrick McHenry:

Today, the SFI Press published Vol. 4 of Foundational Papers in Complexity Science. This concluding book follows Volumes 1 & 2 in May and Volume 3 in September & contains papers published between 1989 and 2000 — when complex-systems science had become a fledgling field of study in its own right.

What papers do you like that demonstrate the use of 'orthogonal subspaces' for encoding information in neural populations? #neuroskyence #compneuro #neuroAI

Terrific illustration of Simpson’s paradox, a not uncommon stumbling block in data analysis, via @tah-sci.bsky.social In the whole dataset, the relationship between X and Y is negative, but the relationship between X and Y is actually positive, once proper subsets of the data are considered.

DAY 1: Advent of Comp Neuro 🎄🤖🧠🧪 Feedback in RNNs can rotate the neural subspace to separate different source signals! "Invariant neural subspaces maintained by feedback modulation" elifesciences.org/articles/76096

Hot take: I don't really think Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) can elucidate circuits based on fMRI data. Maybe not so hot???

Love that the graph of lifetime nostalgia evokes the cover of unknown pleasures - a record for which I feel intensely nostalgic

Happy to share this first post in Bluesky. Excellent first paper by my talented PhD student Judith Sattelberger about how local and inter-areal oscillation dynamics predict bilateral visual field advantage in working memory. Check it out academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

New paper from our lab, by Mark Saddler, using machine learning to test the role of temporal coding in hearing. Here is a quick summary. (1/n) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Every Author as First Author, problem solved!

New paper out in #Neuron: A general theory of sequential working memory in prefrontal cortex and RNN/SSMs with their exact neural mechanism. Plus unifying this new mechanism with the alternate mechanism of hippocampal cognitive maps! (1/9) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Stellar new work lead by the inimitable James Whittington in Neuron that develops a new theory unifying episodic and working memory and explains diverse hippocampal and prefrontal data: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... w/Will Dorrell, @behrenstimb.bsky.social Mohamedy El Gaby

OK If we are moving to Bluesky I am rescuing my favourite ever twitter thread (Jan 2019). The renamed: Bluesky-sized history of neuroscience (biased by my interests)

Thought experiment: imagine one could run an exhaustive computer simulation of a living organism that is numerically accurate at the level of particle physics. Would it be alive (either to us, or to an observer included within the simulation)? If not, what is that is missing?

Spikes versus rates is it? Hmm. Hypothesis: spikes carry all the information and rates can be used to indirectly decode some of this from an experimenter perspective because the brain allocates more energy (more spikes) to important signals. 🧠🤖🧪

Harsh! …but here’s to the importance of negative results. 🧪🌍#AcademicSky

Important paper! www.biorxiv.org/content/bior... Im not sure the Discussion fully delineates its radical implications. No more... * Place cells * Grid cells, splitter cells, border cells * Mirror neurons * Reward neurons * Conflict cells (continued)

Since no one did it, here is a list of people doing research on working memory. The list is admittedly biased (based on the people I follow), so please help: don't hesitate to let me know of someone missing. I will happily follow and add them to the list! Please RT🙏 go.bsky.app/8ZsVgMo