arxiv.org/abs/2507.06952 This diagram is just ... 😂

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... 🧠📈 🧪

When we reach for an object, we adapt to unexpected dynamics and respond to disturbances. These two mechanisms work online, and when you perturb them at the right time, you can see interference... Full story ➡️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Hot take: I like a lot of research on "digital twins" but I think it's kind of a lame name for a cognitive model! I'm sorry I didn't say that in my paper: osf.io/preprints/ps...

This is fun - to make RL models more like mice in the paths they select, you gotta give them the fear of death: arxiv.org/abs/2505.12204 🧠📈 🧪

🚨PhD position alert!🚨 Joint PhD position with @fedemar.bsky.social @predictivebrain.bsky.social and Sonja Kotz, to investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of perceptual decisions vacancies.maastrichtuniversity.nl/job/Maastric... Please share and if you have questions, send me a message!

Huh. Looks like Plato was right. A new paper shows all language models converge on the same "universal geometry" of meaning. Researchers can translate between ANY model's embeddings without seeing the original text. Implications for philosophy and vector databases alike. arxiv.org/pdf/2505.12540

Does publishing serve science or is science serving publishing? Damian Pattinson and I (@elife.bsky.social) argue scientific publishing has evolved into a system that, rather than facilitate scholarly communication, distorts and dictates it. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... #OpenScience

New preprint from the lab, led by grad student Brandon Pratt, on the encoding properties and sensorimotor function of proprioceptive limit detectors (ie, hair plates) in the fly leg. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

@pessoabrain.bsky.social drops knowledge on us. Neuron spiking is highly coordinated. Waves of electric field influences are a great way to do that. The brain is much less like a machine than it is like the murmurations of a flock of starlings aeon.co/essays/how-t... #neuroscience

🧠What do random neural networks have in common with the motor cortex? Turns out, a lot! Both exhibit similar low‑dimensional dynamics across sensorimotor tasks.👇🧵

A fantastic paper linking control theory with neural networks! Congrats Hari and Frec

I have seen folks waste so much time by not properly planning research. Missed literature, missing controls, ignored hypotheses, etc. Lack of planning also produces bad science (e.g. analysis until significant). So I am writing an app. Looking for feedback. scientific-paper-planner-test.vercel.app

Fred Crevecoeur @fredericcrevec1 🚨preprint time by @harikalidindi.bsky.social for our work on neural population dynamics: we show that features of neural population activity during reaching emerge from a simple linear body-network system 🧵👇 biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧠What do random neural networks have in common with the motor cortex? Turns out, a lot! Both exhibit similar low‑dimensional dynamics across sensorimotor tasks.👇🧵

Amazing #cosyne25 @cosynemeeting.bsky.social Lots of feedback, tons of idea, wonderful exchanges !! @harikalidindi.bsky.social

(1/5) Excited to share my work with @engeltatiana.bsky.social , out now in Nat Neuro! We show that RNNs use low-d latent circuit mechanisms for cognitive tasks. We find that context-dependent decisions in both RNNs and PFC arise from latent inhibitory mechanisms. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

DAY 24: Advent of Comp Neuro 🎄🤖🧠🧪 Top-down inputs can select and amplify certain sensory inputs while suppressing others! Orthogonalization for the win! “Early selection of task-relevant features through population gating” @jbarbosa.org et al www.nature.com/articles/s41...

For those of us who are not professional biologists, it can be daunting to hear about transcription factors, signaling pathways and non-coding RNA. But this poignant piece from @philipcball.bsky.social opened my eyes to how deep and essential these ideas truly are. nautil.us/how-life-rea...

In our preprint we show that expectations about future sensory inputs shape neural population dynamics in motor circuits, supporting the idea that movement is governed by the sophisticated manipulation of sensory feedback. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.22.629295v1 2/

Can the motor system use sensory expectations to prepare for unexpected events? Excited to share my latest work with @andpru.bsky.social – where we establish that sensory expectations shape neural population dynamics in motor circuits! 🧵 and paper below 1/

What is or isn't a "BCI"? We argue in Nature BME today that if the tech stimulates or records brain activity AND does computation, it's a BCI. www.nature.com/articles/s41... But we still need a way to discuss different types of BCI separately... 🧵 #BCI #BrainComputerInterface

Here @sresch.bsky.social and I respond to a Latash piece on definitions in biological motor control. Our view: let's not caught up in prosecuting definitions -- we're in the meat of the discovery stage. doi.org/10.1123/mc.2...

Biased list Kaufman: www.nature.com/articles/nn.... Mante: www.nature.com/articles/nat... Semedo: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Panichello: www.nature.com/articles/s41... Yoo: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Flesch: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... Us: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This paper looks interesting - it argues that you don’t need adaptive systems like Adam to get good gradient-based training, instead you can just set a learning rate for different groups of units based on initialization: arxiv.org/abs/2412.11768 #MLSky #NeuroAI

Read this! Brilliant. Now we need an analogous description that describes how physicists might approach solving important open problems in biology 😀

There's a movement in neuroscience suggesting we should be pursuing bigger bets with larger teams. I think there's a case for doing a bit of this, but I think it's a bad idea to prioritise it for two reasons, and a good case for saying we should be moving in the exact opposite direction. 🧠🧪

@markhisted.org lays down some knowledge. What are recurrent networks doing in the brain? www.thetransmitter.org/neural-netwo... #neuroscience

#iTeachPhysics: Dynamics Cart 2.0! - Pull with two handles in 2D - Include friction & air resistance - Free-body diagrams - Position, velocity, acceleration, & force vs time graphs. - Graph matching challenges Link in reply 🍎🎢⚛️♾️ Video Description: screen grab of these features on the simulation.

The third edition of my textbook, Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, was published today. You can preview the first 68 pages on Google Books, or take a look at the preface below to see what's new. The main new thing is a chapter on the Kuramoto model! Hope you enjoy it.

An important thread in the context of the madness of only using data-driven networks to mimic the sensorimotor system. Need more small/explainable/tractable models as well!

I promised to write about my thoughts on the status of the field of neuroAI, some of the big challenges we are facing, and the approaches we are taking to address them. This is super selective on the topic of finding a good model but in my view it affects the field as a whole. Here we go. 🧵

There are different approaches to take, like, a new version of Occam's razor to find smaller models with high performance, baking in biological plausibility even at the cost of performance, or using only toy models where inductive biases still matter. But one other thought I wanted to share. 23/n

Some people have even proposed that this is inevitable, not because networks are overfitting to the data distribution, but because all networks will at some point, given enough data & enough parametric flexibility, approximate the true underlying function of the world. 14/n arxiv.org/abs/2405.07987

📢 We were extremely happy to host Marine Chimel for a Superlab (superlab.ca) Journal Club last week. She gave an extremely interesting presentation on her recent paper studying when and why motor preparation arises in recurrent neural network models of motor control. youtu.be/n62INaCuObg

Everyone knows that failure is bad. We devote a lot of time to trying to avoid it. But sometimes failure is good. A brief story: ~11 yrs ago, when my friends were all starting their own labs, I was starting my 2nd postdoc. My 1st postdoc (w/ Gord Fishell at NYU) had ended in disaster when 1/

An updated intro to reinforcement learning by Kevin Murphy: arxiv.org/abs/2412.05265! Like their books, it covers a lot and is quite up to date with modern approaches. It also is pretty unique in coverage, I don't think a lot of this is synthesized anywhere else yet

Check out our new paper 'Evoking stable and precise tactile sensations via multi-electrode intracortical microstimulation of the somatosensory cortex' on @NatureBiomedicalEngineering 🦾 🧠 ⚡ LINK: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

And then there's the word 'amount'. www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rtegh...

A lot of research in the last 10 years or so shows "context-dependence" of whichever brain mechanism under scrutiny Is this just a fancy way of saying "it's more complicated than we thought and I have no idea what's going on"? I've always been puzzled by the value of such claims...

**The ultimate systems #neuroscience paper!** Recording every spike, every stimulus, every action during person's first half of life to predict second half? The future of papers and neuro, are we almost there yet? That would great discussion to have online. www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

2-dimensional analogies are often used to motivate physical concepts in our 3+1 dimensional world. But a world with 2 space and 1 time dimensions would look *very* different from our world Some crucial differences:🧵 1/10

Ah, "How to name files", a topic that is near and dear to my 💜 My most recent (and semi-polished) iteration on this stuff was a 5-minute lightning talk for NormConf 2022. Here's the video & the slides: youtu.be/ES1LTlnpLMk?... speakerdeck.com/jennybc/how-...

Kinda crazy to see a macaque biped sprinting. Life finds a way I guess!

Ants integrate proprioception as well as visual context and efference copies to make robust predictions #sensorimotor www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Annual Meeting of the Japan Neuroscience Society (July 24-27, 2025) and organizers are inviting scientist from abroad. They give travel awards to enthusiastic, leading, non-Japanese neuroscientists coming to present their work- information below: neuroscience2025.jnss.org/en/internati...

Excellent work showing how climate scientists are perceived around the world!

This can be a game changer for embodied #NeuroAI. Or it *could* be, if it were open source. Just imagine the resources it takes to develop an open version of this model. Now think about how much innovation could come from building on this, rather than just trying to recreate it (at best).

The call for the very special 10th Mediterranean School of Complex Networks is out! @mscxnetworks.bsky.social This year, it will take place in Ortigia, a beautiful small island in Syracuse, Italy. The lineup of lecturers is outstanding! All info in the website: mediterraneanschoolcomplex.net