Really wise (and delightful) *DO NOTs* for speaking. Among my favorites: "Design your talk so that <30% of the audience understands it". Even if your discoveries are very important, that's bad. Value = f(discovering stuff, explaining that stuff coherently). 🎯.

Excellent and thought-provoking essay by Ted Chiang. [gift link] www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2...

Do brain circuits really sit in a 'soup' of neuromodulators? Are neurons like soggy bits of bread soaked in signaling factors? Is the whole brain just squelching around in one big pool of warm modulators?

Academic friends, It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region. A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions. Please read & sign if you agree: sites.google.com/view/protect... #IranWar

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more." This piece on AI by Cory Doctorow is spectactular. pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

New paper out related to this job ad! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Alex used perceptual responses to predict discomfort ratings for arbitrary environmental sounds

I considered writing a long carefully constructed argument laying out the harms and limitations of AI, but instead I wrote about being a hater. Only humans can be haters.

To study how animals understand the physical world (and the rules that govern its dynamics), @jinyao-y.bsky.social trains rats to play fetch with robots 🐀🤖🎾 To learn more, come to our poster Tuesday morning! [Board W11] Rats learn and use intuitive physics knowledge to solve fetch tasks. #SfN2025

FYI 🧠 -- We are recruiting for a postdoc interested in computational models of hearing at UConn. Reach out if you have questions jobs.hr.uconn.edu/en-us/job/49...

#JNeurosci: Clonan et al. investigated how people detect speech in environments with different background noises occurring at a consistent loudness. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1751-24.2025

Very happy about my former mentor Sara Solla having received the Valentin Braitenberg Award for her lifelong contributions to computational neuroscience! Sara will be giving a lecture at the upcoming @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social meeting which you shouldn't miss. bernstein-network.de/en/newsroom/...

This is a pretty cool exploration of dissonance in music. youtu.be/tCsl6ZcY9ag?...

some pintographs 4/∞

Ursula K. Le Guin on the true pain of being a writer

I want everyone to how rapidly a euphemistic language of acquiescence has been codified among the administrative class, insulating the perpetrators of this chaos from blame.

Today! Hartford Stand Up For Science! #nutmegsky

In honor of today’s International Day of Women and Girls in Science, The Transmitter spoke with eight women neuroscientists leading initiatives that strive to promote women in the field. www.thetransmitter.org/qa/how-eight... #WomenInScience #February11

In case folks are interested in contacting their congresspeople about the NIH indirect cuts with some estimates of what they would mean for institutions in their state, here are some estimates based on published F&A rates and funding ... let me know if you want a particular state

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines? Jevin West (@jevinwest.bsky.social) and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take. thebullshitmachines.com

When teaching about speech production (which I'm doing today) I always enjoy this Pink Trombone demo Also: If you really really really hate someone show this to their kids dood.al/pinktrombone/

How can we build BCIs that operate robustly in the face of nonstationarities? Our @neuripsconf.bsky.social Datasets and Benchmarks paper introduces the Few-shot Algorithms for Consistent Neural Decoding (FALCON) Benchmark! Led by Brianna Karpowicz and @joelye.bsky.social

Faculty Position 🧠👩‍🏫 -- UConn BME is hiring for an Assistant/Associate Professor in ML including Neural Engineering... jobs.hr.uconn.edu/en-us/job/49... #compneuro #MLSky

...what is known in the trade as a "vigorous discussion" 😂

Faculty Position 🧠👩‍🏫 -- UConn BME is hiring for an Assistant/Associate Professor in ML including Neural Engineering... jobs.hr.uconn.edu/en-us/job/49... #compneuro #MLSky

I can't find where the original for this came from, but it made my day.

Fun to see this place coming a bit more alive! I tried my hand at a starter pack for neural engineering & computationally-leaning (systems) neuroscience. Super not exhaustive, so if you want to be added (or removed), just ping me. I'm still working on finding folks here. go.bsky.app/Ty3ftme

Why does #compneuro need new learning methods? ANN models are usually trained with Gradient Descent (GD), which violates biological realities like Dale’s law and log-normal weights. Here we describe a superior learning algorithm for comp neuro: Exponentiated Gradients (EG)! 1/12 #neuroscience 🧪

We’re excited to welcome @markdhumphries.bsky.social, author of “The Spike,” as our new columnist. Check out his first piece, in which he explores how averaging is a convenient fiction of neuroscience. www.thetransmitter.org/neural-codin...

Optimist: cup is ½ full Pessimist: cup is ½ empty Neuroscientist: The activity of cups in this cabinet provides an accurate representation of liquid volume. However, experiments (e.g. burning down the kitchen or spraying it with a hose) are needed to verify the causal nature of this representation

Optimist: cup is ½ full Pessimist: cup is ½ empty Neuroscientist: this is a half-half cup. As seen in the supplemental, 22% of all cups are half-half type, which is significantly more than chance. Other major types we observed were full cups (10%), quarter-half cups (12%), and empty cups (6%). 🧠📈

essential stereogram content -- stevenson-lab.media.uconn.edu/wp-content/u...

Since i didn't know how much I needed it until i heard it, let me just say that a thing you could maybe really use right now is @levarburton.bsky.social reading you Ray Bradbury's "The Toynbee Convector." pca.st/episode/a144...

This is maybe my favorite "scientist profile" article I've ever seen - those of us who might have otherwise claimed an unusual or unorthodox career path need to sit right down. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

New preprint with work from Alex Clonan modeling speech recognition in natural noise! 👂💬🧠🤖🤯 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Wonderful to read this article be able to put a name to writing techniques. It's like being back in English class but for academic writing!

New work! Compact deep neural network models of visual cortex B. Cowley, P. Stan, J. Pillow*, M. Smith* tiny.cc/dmxhvz Task-driven DNN models nicely predict neural responses but have millions of params---next to impossible to explain. Do they need to be so large?

Closing out the year with one last post 🎉 A look at theories of everything of the brain, featuring A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett, Cisek's phylogenetic refinement, and Chris Eliasmith's How to Build a Brain. www.neuroai.science/p/an-end-of-...

What a year for Neuroscience! Annual fabulous and clever Review by Mark Humphries. Big year for dopamine and cell types. medium.com/the-spike/20...

Really thought-provoking! I think the "is it controllable" question really depends a lot on the case. At one extreme, some brain functions are evolved to be controlled. Netflix frequently has high-d, super fast control of my visual cortex. 1/4 bsky.app/profile/nico...

My new piece for @thetransmitter.bsky.social. Why is treating brain dysfunction so ENORMOUSLY challenging? Because it amounts to controlling a complex system. Drawing from the history of weather research, I pose the question: Can it even be done? www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

famous moments in psychology / cog-sci as lego sets, a thread. 1. Pavlov's dogs.

We have a new preprint out with some progress on the puzzle of why many Bayesian decoders are overconfident... www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

cashless society when? arxiv.org/abs/2310.04153

Three more posters at #SfN23 this afternoon, presented by Jenna, Jimmy, and Abhijith 🧠📈 #SfN2023 www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10892... www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10892... www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10892...

Check out our two posters today at #SfN23 from Niloo and Alex! #SfN2023 www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10892... www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/10892...

Faculty position opening: Assistant Professor of Systems Neuroscience, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Detailed Info here: jobs.hr.uconn.edu/en-us/job/49... #neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

I love Ursula Vernon's work so much, and this was a great speech! If you're curious about what it looks like when a swallowed beetle reaches the "light at the end of the frog," here are some details (& video) from Shinji Sugiura, the Kobe University scientist who documented it for the first time 🧪