Our work with @pawa-pawa.bsky.social is out in Nature Machine Intelligence! The choice of activation function affects the representations, dynamics, and circuit solutions that emerge in RNNs trained on cognitive tasks. Activation matters! www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Excited to share more widely: I am starting the Dorkenwald Lab at MIT (McGovern Institute + BCS) in January 2026. We study the organizational principles of neuronal circuits using connectomics. And we are hiring postdocs & tech associates! dorkenwaldlab.com/join

Even colleagues who should know better are claiming that we are halting animal research. No, we're not. Now this NYT opinion piece appears (gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/o... You can't just move everything to cell culture, organoids, and computers. Even this NYT piece admits that. 1/3

🚨Our NeurIPS 2025 competition Mouse vs. AI is LIVE! We combine a visual navigation task + large-scale mouse neural data to test what makes visual RL agents robust and brain-like. Top teams: featured at NeurIPS + co-author our summary paper. Join the challenge! Whitepaper: arxiv.org/abs/2509.14446

From the popular series "Figures that look like Kraftwerk Albums". Fig. 3 in Georgopoulos et al. Science 1986. Contributions of individual neurons to a shared coding direction in state space — pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3749885/

Using calcium imaging with single cell resolution across brain areas while mice solve two VR navigation problems, we discovered that neural manifolds can change in size based on working memory demands! Check out Mika Diamanti's amazing work: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Working memory expands shared task representations in cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.29.679345v1

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

Thrilled that our new review "Motor Working Memory" is now in press at TiCS! @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social @cellpress.bsky.social By me + Hanna Hillman We argue that a dedicated research program on 'working memory for movements' is long overdue Link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lmMX4sIRv...

(1/8) New paper from our team! Yu Duan & Hamza Chaudhry introduce POCO, a tool for predicting brain activity at the cellular & network level during spontaneous behavior. Find out how we built POCO & how it changes neurobehavioral research 👇 arxiv.org/abs/2506.14957

Our latest project find shared representations while controlling for confounds is out www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Check @s-michelmann.bsky.social 's thread for the executive summary. Code in python and matlab: github.com/s-michelmann... — Now is play time 👨‍💻

🚀Excited to share our project: Canonical Representational Mapping for Cognitive Neuroscience. @schottdorflab.bsky.social and I propose a novel multivariate method to isolate neural representations aligned with specific cognitive hypotheses 🧵https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.01.673485v1

Wonder what kind of innovations publicly funded science has generated? Look no further than the device you may be reading this post on! Touchscreens started as a NSF funded thesis project at the University of Delaware. Learn more at: publicusaresearchbenefits.com/examples/202...

we're crowd-sourcing a searchable repository of tangible benefits stemming from federally-funded research. Come enjoy the great stories; or send in an idea; or volunteer to join the team. publicusaresearchbenefits.com please re-post so we get more great stories in there!

Big showing from the Rajan Lab at @cosynemeeting.bsky.social! We have posters on everything from multi-agent social foraging to neuromodulated neural networks. Catch us in Poster Sessions 2 & 3 🧠🤖 #Cosyne2025 #NeuroAI #CompSci #neuroskyence

New opinion paper in @cp-trendsneuro.bsky.social with Dan Bendor, where we argue that rodent studies provide only marginal support for the idea that replay supports real-time decisions (e.g. planning). Fictive learning and memory tagging are more consistent w/evidence. www.cell.com/trends/neuro...

Scientific data and independence are at risk: We need to work with community-driven services and university libraries to create new multi-country organizations that are resilient to political interference. By @neuralreckoning.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/policy/scien...

Do you want to build your own two photon microscope for in vivo imaging? We have made our design open: With complete building instructions, bill of materials, CAD designs — and even the optics simulations. Now peer reviewed: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

How to guide a micropipette into mouse hippocampus using two-photon microscopy - great protocol paper by Kevin Gonzalez and the Losonczy Lab: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Read more: www.janelia.org/news/mapmaki...

(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...

Cool experimental design by @simwieg.bsky.social's lab with optogenetics + calcium imaging: how place cells in CA1 are affected by stimulation of contralateral CA3. They observe less an induction of place fields but somewhat random shifts of existing place fields: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is legit - the organizers (including unions) are organizing. When I ask those in the know what we can do that will actually matter, the answer includes collective action of this type. I'm joining @nancykanwisher.bsky.social and all the others for this Thurs 3p ET effort. I hope you do too!

With the death of Twitter is the loss of years of cool papers. Let's start again #NeuroSkyence! What paper are you most proud of? This isn't my biggest or most cited, but the one I 🥰 most: www.jneurosci.org/content/35/8.... I found a type of gamma in CA1 that didn't involve PV baskets or PYRs 🤓

Let's see if bluesky = 2016NeuroTwitter: Two-Photon optophys people: Are you using a denoising step in your pipelines? If yes which?

Our new preprint: We found that during representational drift co-activation of neuron pairs is predictive of future effective connectivity. Drift is - in parts - just Hebbian plasticity. But we also need a stochastic process to account for our observations. doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Our first book, “Thinking about neuroscience: Essays from the field," highlights what some of our contributing editors, including @nicolecrust.bsky.social, Anthony Zador and @russpoldrack.bsky.social, think the field should prioritize over the next few decades. Check it out here: bit.ly/40iSUfx

Have you ever wondered how and why learning abstract things can literally change how we see the world? We'll start digging into this beginning Jan 1 2025 at @udelaware.bsky.social's department of Psychological & Brain Sciences​! More infos on schottdorflab.com