Where, exactly, does learning happen in the brain? Out today in @nature.com, we identify a synaptic locus of birdsong learning and show that the circuit can be tuned to make birds learn faster - but at a cost. Read on👇 #neuroskyence 🧪 #prattle 💬 #bioacoustics Shareable link: rdcu.be/fiyrS

Really excited to see this in print!

Our piece on language-like properties in animal vocal behavior is available today. Check it out! This is an incredibly difficult and thorny topic which is nonetheless of supreme importance and interest imco (in my current opinion)

Truly impossible to say enough good things about Carol!

I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Carol over the last few years through the Simons SoF, so it was a particular joy to interview and write about her for Stories of WiN! I deeply admire her scientific contributions as well as her mentorship and leadership - we talked about all that and more!

Awesome

I heard in mythos anthropic finally provided the model with a “strong beak”

New work w/ Zach Kelso and @madeleinecsnyder.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Our negative results on classical conditioning in planarian flatworms. This was surprising, given the long history of work (including sensational findings of memory transfer and retention through decapitation).

The fact that Mamdani just seems like a cheerful normal guy who's policies are things like "we're going to tax second homes to fund pothole repairs" or whatever and yet this generates panicked responses like "This is basically Stalin's great purge turned up to eleven" is... telling. It tells things.

If you haven’t read this Harper’s piece on the current AI culture it’s an incredibly well written and funny and sad portrait of our era harpers.org/archive/2026...

Researchers reveal the neural basis of evolving new capabilities by investigating behavioral and morphological differences between deer mouse subspecies. #neuroskyence By @siddhantpusdekar.bsky.social www.thetransmitter.org/evolution/ar...

Beautiful images of the arctic krill nervous system and circadian clock from Charlotte Helfrich-Förster’s lab (one of my earliest scientific heroes)

bayesian hierarchical model

I saw the greatest minds of my generation destroyed by cringe AI takes

i mean if i don't repost this asinine thing i made now, when will i

This conference is going to be so cool! Good science good people good location. Register ASAP! #neuroskyence www.fens.org/news-activit...

Finally a paper that covers my interest in the scientific study of language, children, schizophrenia and military combat

It’s too bad the human brain can’t compute gradients. Otherwise we could have invented calculus and used it to build MRI machines and fancy planes and stuff. Alas it’s just not biologically plausible 😔

Loving this charming paper suggesting narwhals may use their tusks for previously unobserved behaviors like play and investigating novel objects

Woah

This simply motivates me to grow comedically. Why become a scientist if your goal isn’t to absolutely crush in very challenging rooms

Language, Intelligence & Thought lab is looking for a lab manager! This is a 2-year postbac position that will allow you to gain experience in human neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI research prior to applying to PhD programs. Express interest here: forms.gle/npXEGUjGUbp5...

Happening now!

Born to be a poet, forced to fiddle with umap parameters

🧠🧪🧵1/37 Our new paper on how pinniped (seal and sea lion) brains evolved to unlock vocal plasticity is this week's @science.org cover. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Super excited to give a talk in the main auditorium at COSYNE in Lisbon about my ongoing PhD work on how the hippocampus supports vocal interactions in singing mice! 🐭🎤♬🧠 📍 Auditorium I 🗓 Mar 13 (Fri) 9:30–9:45 #COSYNE2026

Hello #cosyne2026! Sadly I am present only in spectral form 🔮 (i.e. in spirit) Luckily Zetian and I managed to send a distinguished representative Check out our poster Saturday (3-075) on cortical control of vocalization in parrots!🦜🏴‍☠️ M Loooong himself is presenting so go give him a hard time ;)

Pretty amazing stuff going on down here in Uruguay

The deadline for applying to the Methods in Computational Neuroscience summer course at MBL in Woods Hole is approaching (March 16)! An exciting course with an amazing lineup of lecturers in a beautiful location www.mbl.edu/education/ad...

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! 🧵

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Recurrent cortical networks encode natural sensory statistics via sequence filtering www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... #neuroscience

Interesting use of AI methods of self-supervised learning, to analyze canary song. Authors demo on seasonal changes Just published in Patterns: doi.org/10.1016/j.pa... Code: github.com/georgevenven... Data: datadryad.org/dataset/doi:... #bioacoustics #prattle 💬

🚀 Postdoc Alert! Are you passionate about social learning & cultural evolution? @dominikdeffner.bsky.social & I have a 3-year position with freedom to develop your research and work on cutting-edge multiplayer and immersive experiments. Apply by March 30! hmc-lab.com/SocialLearni... Pls share 🙏

Ugh it’s so fun doing science but it feels so bleak to be a postdoc right now. I had dinner with a very senior scientist/a group of trainees this week and his question to us was: how many of you are still seriously considering trying for faculty jobs and what countries are you willing to move to? 🙃

We have PhD positions and Post Doc positions available! www.med.uio.no/imb/english/... Please apply if you are interested in human invasive intracranial recordings or applied machine learning in a neuroscientific context. Deadlines 1st of March (Sunday!) and 4th of March. Please RT!

My latest: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Next column will address needed guardrails for private funding of science, esp. in light of #Epstein/ #Summers etc.

I no longer tell people I am a scientist I just say I am a “content creator who specializes in STEM”

Nice AI-image-generating tool, but it will never be as great an artist as Onfim, a child who lived in the Novgorod Republic in the mid-1200s and who scribbled these drawings and schoolwork writings on birch bark at the age of 6 or 7.

Ok Google, what is the dopest of all amines

XXXXX!

The arc of the long lab is long but it bends towards birds

1/6 Do neighboring #PlaceCells in #Hippocampus CA1 map neighboring locations in space? 🧠🗺️ Is there micro-scale spatial topography in the hippocampus? See our latest paper from @kavlintnu now out in @pnas.org www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

These workshops are amazing opportunities for deep discussions on how cognition is implemented in the brain, from theory to behavior and circuits. Apply by May 7 & spread the word!

Amazing! Yet another case of the lowly chick exhibiting innate high level cognitive abilities: see amodal completion, ability to recognize occluded objects, preference for right-side-up faces, bird-like objects etc.

Likewise, thrilled to be presenting for the "Future of Neuroethology" series @neuroethology.org with excellent company @shubhamtr.bsky.social and @benitoexplains.bsky.social! I'll present recent work identifying a cortico-basal ganglia locus of song learning www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I just finished reading M. Coe’s book on the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics which was stymied for ~100 yrs by an academic culture that spurned comparative work In the 1960s they embraced such an approach and 30yrs later the script was essentially solved I hope we follow Nanthia’s wise advice

The aesthetics of the bobo doll experiment are really something to behold

Extremely cool work in which they make an interactive vocal acoustic model that finches naturalistically engage with.