Love the beautiful grid goodreads generated for me for 2025 fiction favorites were razors edge and cassandra at the wedding, nonfic faves were C. Gross and E Spelke’s excellent books For mixed doubles, the award goes to when we cease to understand the world

This book is amazing. The section about the historical context of matrix mechanics being adopted and arguments about the value of visualizable models especially.

It’s like my piano teacher always said: passive makes perfect

Do you love quantifying animal behavior as much as we do? We have just the tool for you! Presenting #OCTRON - a pipeline that helps you create rich annotation data and enables training of custom segmentation models. Have a look, particularly if you work with non-model / invertebrate organisms!

📢 Join us, the Haberkern lab, @uni-wuerzburg.de for a postdoc studying neural circuit mechanisms of navigation. You’ll spearheading neurophysiology experiments on our brand new 2P! ⏳ Apply by 28th February 2026 Details: www.haberkernlab.de/docs/ENPostd... #neuroscience #academicjobs #postdoc

Sleep dependent consolidation and replay that doesn’t require the hippocampus? Very beautiful work by Marcus Stephenson-Jones’ lab on sleep driven sequential skill consolidation in the striatum. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Real-Time Segmentation and Classification of Birdsong Syllables for Learning Experiments https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.19.695629v1

no epstein files today but as consolation it seems that they have finally chosen to declassify the infamous "MODIFICATIONS OF THE FLY FOOT FOR HUMAN NEEDS" technical report from the US Army Tank Automotive Command and it's even more salacious than anticipated apps.dtic.mil/sti/html/tr/...

The fastest way to human level AI is to build AI tools that make us progressively dumber and simply sit back and wait until we reach the idiocy nash equilibrium

Thinking again about my favorite blues singer: Leo Tolsoy

*First preprint from our lab* !!!!! How does the brain learn to anchor its internal sense of direction to the outside world? 🧭 led by Mark Plitt @markplitt.bsky.social & Dan Turner-Evans, w/ Vivek Jayaraman: “Octopamine instructs head direction plasticity” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Thread ⬇️

All lesions are partial some are useful

Searle being especially artful here in his description of a conversation…

Interestingly Gall loved to use birdsong as an example motivating functional localization. In this particular case he was on the money.

Have you ever wondered what you would find if you could keep your eyes on a bee for more than a few meters? Us, too! preprint (with videos!) + thread 🧵 Precise, individualized foraging flights in honey #bees 🐝 revealed by multicopter drone-based tracking www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 1/9

I wonder who this fictional scientist named Earl is based on?

This is all such cool work but i don’t understand the need to be quite so hyperbolic i.e. “Whales may have a communication system more intricate than our own”. They clearly have amazing vocal behaviors but the type of data that would be required to show something like this is far from available imo

Brushing up on my philosophy of mind

Very cool work and featuring one of my favorite recurring characters

Little known fact, Smilodons actually had the largest functional brain center controlling smiling out of all prehistoric cats

A reminder to anyone interested in #brains #birds or behaviour, our new book is available for FREE as an ebook in addition to print copies. #neuroethology #neuroskyence #ornithology 🧪🧠🪶 direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

Presenting this afternoon from 1-5pm!

Don’t forget to fill out your bingo card at the neuroethology social tonight #Sfn2025 #SfN25

LLMs get a lot of attention but if you are interested in the original (allegedly) stochastic parrots come to my poster Tuesday where I will present new work on the natural vocal behavior or parrots and its cortical control #Sfn2025 #SfN25

ok kind of a fun paragraph

New preprint: Neural manifolds that orchestrate walking and stopping Here we develop a new theory for neural generation of walking and how it can stop- Next we test the theory using Neuropixels probes in the lumber spinal cord of freely moving rats. See more: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Love this paper. One of my core scientific memories is learning that african grey parrots and crows have the roughly same number of cortical neurons as rhesus macaques (apologies for a cerebellarphobic post)

Is using the word innate to describe unlearned behaviors really that bad? I see people constantly citing polemics explaining why it’s bad but it seems no more imprecise than other potentially loaded words we use to describe behaviors i.e. adaptive or spontaneous

All models of ducks are wrong but some models of ducks are useful

What a time to be alive

sure, if you enjoy the horrifying limits of human perception

Injecting testosterone in female canaries induces singing. I always assumed this meant that the brain areas for song production would grow much larger but apparently not!

Manifesting a Kekulé style nap today

I will be recruiting PhD students via Georgetown Linguistics this application cycle! Come join us in the PICoL (pronounced “pickle”) lab. We focus on psycholinguistics and cognitive modeling using LLMs. See the linked flyer for more details: bit.ly/3L3vcyA

Very cool large comparative study on the distinctive avian trait neophobia (fear of novelty). Bernd Henrich apparently worked with some wild ravens that loved spaghetti and cheese puffs so much they would eat them out of his hand but became completely terrified if either food was presented in a pile

Counter example: as an infant my first utterance was the fully formed sentence “bring me a xylophone made out of carburetors and doorknobs you useless bureaucrats” In all seriousness I really enjoyed this paper which put me at ease.

Wow what a nice picture I wonder who took it :)