1/ 🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩 #neuroskyence

« Diverse calcium dynamics underlie place field formation in hippocampal CA1 pyramidal cells. » A fundamental study now published @elife.bsky.social elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Didn’t want to hijack someone else’s thread, but also: what’s the alternative? Sure, evolution produces sufficient not optimal solutions. Cool. How do we model that? Or if you don’t care about modeling, what predictions does that make that we can test experimentally?

Eliezer Yudkowsky, quoted in the NY Times. For anyone who has followed the "AI Safety" / "Less Wrong" discussions, this is...well, something.

M1, not so low-d after all: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Of potential interest to those keen on motor control and/or multi-task networks. Congrats to Elom and Eric. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Everything Everywhere ...

Hippocampal theta sweeps indicate goal direction https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.21.671551v1

„it is important that the theorist’s tendency towards reductionism does not cloud out the complexity of the living brain“

Is it possible to go from spikes to rates without averaging? We show how to exactly map recurrent spiking networks into recurrent rate networks, with the same number of neurons. No temporal or spatial averaging needed! Presented at Gatsby Neural Dynamics Workshop, London.

Thrilled to share our new Adesnik lab paper!! Using holography in excitatory & inhibitory neurons, we reveal how a single cortical circuit can both complete and cancel predictable sensory activity, sharpening representations 📄https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.02.668307v1 🧵

1 To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised! 🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Director at Max Planck - a unique position! The Open Call for Expressions of Interest in Max Planck Directorships is open now and can be submitted by the 31st of October 2025. ➡️ mpg.de/directors - Please share the Open Call among potential candidates.

Feature-specific inhibitory connectivity augments the accuracy of cortical representations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.02.668307v1

'Unlike in artificial neural networks, learning in biological networks is thought to modify synaptic weights but not signs ... here, we demonstrate experience-dependent sign switching at glutamate and GABA co-releasing synapses'

This is a nice history lesson on inhibitory plasticity. Not sure I agree about the present and future though ;)

1/ Mapping synaptic connectivity between individual neurons is extremely laborious. We developed BRISC, a new method that makes it possible to map inputs onto 100s of neurons in the same animal in a matter of weeks! Led by Alex Becalick and @antblot.bsky.social. 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Connectomic reconstruction from hippocampal CA3 reveals spatially graded mossy fiber inputs and selective feedforward inhibition to pyramidal cells https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.09.663979v1

To claim that sensory responses of visual cortical neurons are not prediction errors (based on the data the authors have) is unwarranted. There is ample evidence for stimulus surround and visuomotor prediction errors.

There might be a bit of misconception here. What the paper very convincingly shows is that visual cortex does not compute global oddball prediction errors and does not receive any top-down predictions that could be used to compute such prediction errors.

"Can an AI model predict perfectly and still have a terrible world model? [...] A transformer trained on 10M solar systems nails planetary orbits. But it botches gravitational laws" Twitter thread: x.com/keyonV/statu... Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.06952

I'm pleased to share our new work, “Spatio-temporal organization of network activity patterns in the hippocampus”, out in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social ! With Demi Brizee & David Dupret, we track how oscillations and spiking behaviour map onto hippocampal layers using an LFP-based embedding. (1/13)

Retinal waves reveal axial biases in modular patterns of cortical activity that predict future orientation preferences https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.09.663735v1

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... 🧠📈 🧪

Our study is out in Nature! Using wireless Neuropixels we recorded hippocampal activity in freely flying bats and uncovered replay and theta(less) sweeps, revealing striking differences from classic rodent models. 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Seeing the world through the lens of oscillations - we are delighted to share our new paper where we demonstrate that anatomically resolved oscillatory bursts reveal dynamic motifs of thalamocortical activity during naturalistic stimulus viewing (doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...).

Attractors are usually not mechanisms - new blog post: open.substack.com/pub/kording/...

📣New study in Neuron, featuring modeling insights: "Cell-Specific Dendritic Integration in Cortical GABAergic Interneurons"! It reveals PV & SST interneurons compute differently. This highlights how distinct dendrites enable specialized brain computations! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"the hippocampus is essentially a "solved problem" in terms of the general framework for how its biological properties enable its well-established role in memory" - Randy O'Reilly, 2008 @tomstafford.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy's summary of a comp-neuro debate: eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/id/eprint/14...

Out now @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social, w/ @akalt.bsky.social & @drmattdavis.bsky.social. Are sensory sampling rhythms fixed by intrinsically-determined processes, or do they couple to external structure? Here we highlight the incompatibility between these accounts and propose a resolution [1/6]

Yes!

A Temporal Hierarchy of Sustained Attention Dynamics journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

My latest Aronov lab paper is now published @Nature! When a chickadee looks at a distant location, the same place cells activate as if it were actually there 👁️ The hippocampus encodes where the bird is looking, AND what it expects to see next -- enabling spatial reasoning from afar bit.ly/3HvWSum

So excited to see @hannahpayne.bsky.social‘s paper out today: rdcu.be/eqAd4 It’s a beautiful result, and using a great model species for this question makes it powerfully clear and simple. Scaling up tools in a single model system won’t get you there on its own!

I think neuroscientists are going to split into two camps in the near future: those who are comfortable with sacrificing mechanistic understanding (at least in the short term) and those who are not.

today we had a nice discussion on q: 'does Sutton's Bitter Lesson apply to neuroscience?' Sutton argued that big compute and data lead to AI systems better than any human-crafted alternatives. Neuroscience has big data now, is it going the same way? Eg www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Maintaining stability in plastic, recurrent E-I networks is super challenging. Making the networks do useful things even more so. Over the last decade we made only slow progress, but maybe ML approaches can help in the future:

90% of doing science is being open to new ideas.

Very happy that this work is finally out in ‪@pnas.org‬! We show that synaptic and intrinsic forms of homeostatic plasticity sense distinct aspects of network activity, and can thus be independently recruited by distinct network functions. A thread: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

New #NeuroAI #compneurosky preprint! To better understand how target-directed learning works in the brain, we sought to engineer an artificial neural network capable of solving complex image classification tasks that comprises only experimentally-supported biological building blocks. (1/15)

I've spent much of my PhD thinking about E/I balance, and our latest preprint represents the culmination of that journey. Huge thanks to @fzenke.bsky.social for guiding me. Looking forward to your thoughts & comments.

Neuronal computation in the cerebellum via a vector calculus. Work of Mohammad Amin Fakharian, Alden Shoup, Paul Hage, and Hisham Elseweifi www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We’re excited to share the full lineup for the Gordon Research Conferences on Inhibition in the CNS. It’s the perfect opportunity to network, explore cutting-edge research, and share your own work with a vibrant community. Applications are still open! Feel free to reach out with any questions!

Some #neuroskyence #neuroAI #compneuro highlights from the past ~week: bsky.app/profile/segy... bsky.app/profile/nico... bsky.app/profile/neur... bsky.app/profile/neur... bsky.app/profile/dlev... I would like to see more physiology, but sounds like there's an issue getting posts to eyeballs.

🚨Paper Alert🚨 Our paper on the mechanism of homeostatic control in PV interneuron activity is now online in Nature! A massive thanks to all the authors, including @clembrnrd.bsky.social and @marinlab.bsky.social. Read the paper at www.nature.com/articles/s41....

Conference Fellowships for the UK Neural Computation meeting are now available, to support presenting authors; sponsored by @aria-research.bsky.social Includes fee waiver and attendance expenses Apply here by May 23rd neuralcomputation.uk/fellowships.... p.s. UKNC abstracts due by May 12th!

What I wish I knew: 33 thoughts for early career researchers Reflections I wish someone had shared with me early in my research career. predirections.substack.com/p/what-i-wis...

Flow fields never get old

Our new paper is out in Science. What is the synaptic plasticity rule in the brain, we asked. It turns out there are multiple, even within individual neurons. Congrats Jake! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...