Now out at PNAS - congratulations to Ramanujan Srinath and the team! Ram's ability and willingness to connect all these data, models, and ideas has changed my thinking/interpretation of many findings. I suspect I will keep learning from this study for a long time. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Come see our poster tomorrow morning (#4307 in Hall A)! Paper, code, and more can be found at onnoeberhard.com/q-commit. Joint work with @claireve.bsky.social and Michael Muhelebach.

I am in Seoul at ICML to present our newest paper "Commit to the Bit: Reactive Reinforcement Learning Done Right". We show that finding reactive policies in POMDPs is easier than previously thought and that the ubiquitous 𝑞⋆-realizability assumption is stronger than necessary. 🧵

Story time friends... Ring attractor networks rely on fine-tuned symmetric connectivity. The fly head direction network has ring attractor dynamics but heterogeneous connectivity. How is this possible? 1/🧵 Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Don’t miss one of the best conferences of the whole EU folks, if you do anything computational, present it at Bernstein we always appreciate more diversity of topics and methods.

„Potential mechanisms and functional significance of aperiodic neural activity“ Timely review article by Michael Preston Jr, @syd-smith.bsky.social & Brad Voytek

Major preprint update! 🎉 How can learned behaviors generalize across environments when the hippocampus remaps? Our original preprint showed that task-related latent structure persisted across contextual remapping. In this revision, we add the major finding that... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our new paper is out this week in Nature Neuroscience! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We built a BCI that works with the brain's natural geometry — and we found that people could learn to play a video game with their brains in <1 hr of training. This efficiency is groundbreaking & here's why:

Our python package for real-time targeting of birdsong syllables "Moove" is finally out! Thanks to my co-authors Nils Riekers, @goebl.bsky.social and Lena Veit. Our pre-print is online on biorxiv and our code is available on GitHub. Check it out! doi.org/10.64898/202... github.com/veitlab/moove

Happy to see this paper from @xiaoyuxuu.bsky.social and @zaixucui.bsky.social out on how the development of structural connectivity aligns with the sensorimotor-association axis www.nature.com/articles/s41...! Exciting convergence with work from @audreycluo.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Neuropixels + Optogenetics = Neuropixels Opto Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics. 960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors. Today in @natmethods.nature.com doi.org/10.1038/s415... Thanks to @wellcometrust.bsky.social, @alleninstitute.org, @hhmijanelia.bsky.social & team.

New review with Cheng Xue at U Chicago @cxue.bsky.social in Trends [email protected]! We discuss the neural geometry of task-dependent computation: disentangled encoding, RNN modeling, switch cost, etc. www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

🔴 New results 🔴 How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for perception? 👁️👂🧠 Thrilled to share our new results on brain-wide distributed processing underlying natural vision and audition! Link and 🧵 👇

🚨 New paper in @nature.com We asked why two hippocampal areas with very different anatomy, CA3 and CA1, often seem to code space so similarly? By recording bats flying up to 200m, we found that the difference was hidden by scale! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵 1/11

www.amacad.org/publication/... my new article in the American academy of arts and sciences journal Daedalus. Part of a special issue in AI+Science lead by James Manyika.

Nature research paper: Subspace communication in the hippocampal–retrosplenial axis go.nature.com/4tsyJqB

These models can partly generalize across species, brain regions and tasks, suggesting that a set of machine-learnable rules govern neural population activity, writes @juangallego.bsky.social. But will we be able to understand them? #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neuroai/why-...

We are super excited to welcome Dmitry Kobak @hippopedoid.bsky.social as a new VIB.AI group leader! The Kobak lab will officially kick off in April at the VIB.AI Ghent hub. More: vib.ai/en/news/dmit...

New paper in @pnas.org #Neuroskyence The brain state during general anesthesia looks like hybrid of sleep and coma. We also identify distinct neural patterns that are unique to anesthesia using #EEG 👇 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @yale.edu @wutsaiyale.bsky.social @yaleschoolofmed.bsky.social

Donoghue et al. introduce the Human Single-Neuron Pipeline, an open source processing pipeline for collecting and analyzing human single-neuron data: doi.org/10.52294/001... @ohbmossig.bsky.social @ohbmofficial.bsky.social #OpenDatasets #SpecialIssues

Unbelievably honoured to read Tatiana Engel's (@engeltatiana.bsky.social) wonderfully written Preview on our work "Linking neural manifolds to circtuit structure in recurrent networks" (with @lpezon.bsky.social & @gerstnerlab.bsky.social) in this issue of Neuron www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... 🙏

New paper from the lab! "Plasticity and language in the anaesthetized human hippocampus" www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🥳 Super excited to share our lab's first preprint, led by @hungyun.bsky.social "Distinct tasks engage shared neural subspaces in human hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/9)

Anatomy sets things up, but it’s not the whole story. A low-D communication subspace from PFC to motor cortex reconfigures with context, routing action signals so the same movements can be driven by different rules without rewiring the whole network. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

We think this finding is really exciting as it opens up new avenues to study neural communication in human (intracranial) EEG beyond pairwise connectivity metrics such as coherence. Free link to the paper: rdcu.be/fgqIB Thanks to all coauthors, incl @jonasterlau.bsky.social

Excited that our paper is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com 🎉 Huge thanks to all my co-authors, especially @jonasterlau.bsky.social & @randolph-helfrich.bsky.social for the support and great teamwork 🍀

Two postdoc opportunities @yale.edu in human neurophysiology. One position in my lab @wutsaiyale.bsky.social focusing on human cognitive neurophysiology. Details at helfrich-lab.com/news/ Plus a possible collab with anesthesiology 👇 #NeuroTwitter #NeuroJobs #neuroskyence #EEG Please share.

I always assumed that brain function had to line up with cytoarchitectonics. It turns out I was wrong. Human cortex, especially PFC, is tiled by chains of functional patches that subdivide and interlink architectonic areas into parallel processing streams. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

✍️ In the @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social blog: our new tool built to compare the dynamics of complex systems when both internal circuitry and external inputs shape their behavior. Catch @annhuang42.bsky.social presenting this work at #ICLR! kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/research/dee...

Visual #workingmemory peeps, you're going to love this. This is super challenging - might give you pause on how we are measuring color memory... My color memory is a 40.4/50. Please do worse so I feel better. dialed.gg?c=3PCHDE

Antimatter delivery anyone? I first wrote about plans to transport this wildly volatile stuff (looking at another @cern.bsky.social expt) in 2018 They've finally done it! Amazing ⚛️🧪 This tiny sample of 92 antiprotons is a huge world first My @nature.com story here: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc. The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic! www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

New paper hot off the (pre-)press! We dig into the evolutionary origins of neural computations for behavioral control across mice, monkeys, and humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... As our lab's first foray into comparative analysis of neural dynamics, I’m super excited about this work! 1/18

New Journal Club: Neural manifolds are maturing from visualization trick to biological claim. But if population activity lives on low-dimensional manifolds, what constrains the geometry?

Conjunctive population coding integrates sensory evidence to guide adaptive human behavior. New work led by @jonasterlau.bsky.social in @pnas.org. We used human intracranial EEG to understand how coordinated population activity supports context-dependent behavior. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/.... (1/4)

Ripple oscillations are central for memory and sleep. But ripple detection in humans remains challenging. Here we introduce a simulation approach in @natcomms.nature.com as common ripple detectors mainly pick up 1/f noise and not genuine oscillations 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

🚨 New preprint! Why do some insights from spikes translate to field potentials while others don't? In this paper we compare visual memory representations in spikes and LFPs to propose a general framework that answers this question. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵 (1/10) 🧠🟦 🧠💻

Bichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467

Aperiodic activity reflects pathological waveforms in epilepsy (and not necessarily hyper-excitability or altered E/I-balance). The 1/f slope goes up *or* down as function of waveforms during seizures. New work by Laura Heidiri and Frank van Schalkwijk from the lab: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/5...

New work from the lab published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social by @jonasterlau.bsky.social and Jan Martini. We describe that trial-by-trial variability indexes recurrent connectivity across the cortical hierarchy, which supports reliable and flexible coding www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... (1/4)

Bifurcations—an underexplored concept in neuroscience—can help explain how small differences in neural circuits give rise to entirely novel functions, writes Xiao-Jing Wang. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...

A cute little animation: a critically damped harmonic oscillator becomes unstable with integral control if the gain is too high. Here, at K_i = 2, a Hopf bifurcation occurs: two poles of the transfer function enter the right-hand s-plane and the closed-loop system becomes unstable.

📰 I really enjoyed writing this article with @thetransmitter.bsky.social! In it, I summarize parts of our recent perspective article on neural manifolds (www.nature.com/articles/s41...), with a focus on highlighting just a few cool insights into the brain we've already seen at the population level.

🚨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

I am in Vancouver at ICML, and tomorrow I will present our newest paper "Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning with Memory Traces". We argue that eligibility traces are more effective than sliding windows as a memory mechanism for RL in POMDPs. 🧵

How does the brain sample the #visual environment in space and time? @iraposo.bsky.social &co show that two distinct temporal patterns (rhythmic oscillations & aperiodic timescales) predict attention-guided behavior @plosbiology.org 🧪 plos.io/3ThTKVy

Hey #CVPR2025! Curious about this work? I'll be presenting it this morning! Poster 31, from 10:30 to 12:30 🤠 @cvprconference.bsky.social

I'm flying to Michigan today to present our new paper "A Pontryagin Perspective on Reinforcement Learning" at L4DC, where it has been nominated for the Best Paper Award! We ask the question: is it possible to learn an open-loop controller via RL? 🧵

🙌 It's been a wonderful PhD Retreat at the HIH yesterday, with lots of time for exchange, poster sessions and the election of the new PhD representatives: Stefano Iavarone, Niloofar Mokhtari @estherkuehn.bsky.social & Surender Surender @ghtabatabai.bsky.social 🎉