1/7 🧠 My journey into development begins with this work and question: how does the brain's spatial navigation system develop? We found that the neural networks for spatial navigation (tori and rings) are preconfigured and only later anchor gradually to the world with experience! 🧵

The Cowley Group at CSHL has an opening for a bioAI PhD student to start Fall 2026 to work on closed-loop AI models for visual processing (see below). You *must* have a Master's degree in a quant/eng/cs field. www.cshl.edu/phd-program/... Please reach out to me if interested! I'll be at Cosyne.

Join us at TENSS 2026 to open black boxes, explain how things/brains work and debate the impact (or lack or it) of various new technologies on understanding of the brain and on society. tenss.ro Apply by: March 15th!

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico? In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony. It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small! rdcu.be/e5H8G

CCN Neural Data Analysis Workshop @ FENS 2026 www.simonsfoundation.org/event/ccn_fe...

Come analyse some neural data!! 🍍🍍🍍

space cells

Mission: record hippocampal place cells in zero gravity Crew: 3 rats with electrode arrays Vehicle: Space Shuttle Columbia Status: data now publicly available on DANDI, 28 years later The ratstronauts' mission is finally complete. 🐀🚀 h/t NASA about.dandiarchive.org/blog/2026/02...

Applications are now open for the summer school: 𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐝𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐍𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 🧠 Apply before March 15: www.compneuronrsn.org 📍 Located in beautiful Eresfjord 🇳🇴 🗓️ Between July 6-24 Supported by the @kavlifoundation.org In collaboration with @kavlintnu.bsky.social

Go fit some neural models!! JAX, Pynapple, Poisson GLMs; what more can you ever wish for...

Pre-COSYNE Brainhack 2026 – Join Us in Lisbon! March 10–11, 2026 • Lisbon, Portugal pre-cosyne-brainhack.github.io/hackathon2026/ Kick off COSYNE week with two days of hands-on, team-based hacking around real electrophysiology data, open tools, and reproducible workflows. #brainhack #cosyne2026

Three weeks left to apply for the Neuroinformatics Unit Open Software Summer School, August 17-28 2026 in London, UK! Bringing together researchers and open source developers of ephys, behaviour and image analysis tools. neuroinformatics.dev/open-softwar... Deadline January 31st. Apply now!

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

A 🍍 spotted in the wild at @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social! Great crash course on neuro data processing with @pynapple.bsky.social and @spikeinterface.bsky.social delivered by @matthiashennig6.bsky.social, @wulfdewolf.bsky.social and Chris Halcrow. So nice to see both libraries working so well together

Really excited to share this Opinion piece we've been working on with fellow head-direction cell geeks @apeyrache.bsky.social @desdemonafricker.bsky.social and (bsky-less?) Andrea Burgalossi! While head-direction cells pop up in many cortical regions, we think that one of them is quite unique (1/8)

We present our preprint on ViV1T, a transformer for dynamic mouse V1 response prediction. We reveal novel response properties and confirm them in vivo. With @wulfdewolf.bsky.social, Danai Katsanevaki, @arnoonken.bsky.social, @rochefortlab.bsky.social. Paper and code at the end of the thread! 🧵1/7

Finally preprinted! TL;DR: thalamic head-direction neurons can shape their activity regardless of input. Big thanks to @apeyrache.bsky.social and master experimentalist @sskromne.bsky.social .

New workshop! Just before SFN, join the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Neuroscience of the Simons Foundation for a workshop on pynapple and NeMoS. Learn how to use these open-source packages to analyze and model neural data! Accommodation & meals provided. Link ⬇️

Excited to share our new pre-print on bioRxiv, in which we reveal that feedback-driven motor corrections are encoded in small, previously missed neural signals.

New paper from the lab: feedback from piriform cortex to the olfactory bulb carries identity and reward contingency signals in a multimodal (odor and sound) rule-reversal task. Feedback is re-formatted within seconds and reflects changes in the perceived rules of engagement. doi.org/10.1038/s414...

We are pleased to be partnering with The UKRI AI CDT in Biomedical Innovation at the School of Informatics (University of Edinburgh). These PhD projects have a strong translational focus and seek to develop & apply AI approaches to biomedical domains ✨. Apply by 20 Jan www.ai4biomed.io/how-to-apply/

Check our latest work towards understanding learning and local plasticity in the brain with @matthiashennig6.bsky.social at @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social 🧠 Published in a @neuripsconf.bsky.social workshop this year. Now out on arxiv - arxiv.org/abs/2501.02402

Both the people and the environment at CSHL made my summer there the best I've ever had. If you want to learn about neuroscience<->AI and meet interesting people, it would be a waste not to apply! for better visibility: video of the Olney house woodpecker that made sure I was up on time every day

PhD project! For those interested in NeuroAI: "Using large scale neural network models to bridge the translational gap from animal models to human insights in autism spectrum and neurodevelopmental disorders" Apply here: www.ai4biomed.io/research/pro...

Now! Or more likely, people should change what they think place cells mean.