I'm proud to say we are releasing LAION-fMRI, a densely sampled 7T fMRI dataset of natural images, with very broad stimulus sampling for testing countless hypotheses and for deeply exploring brain representations. The dataset is now available at laion-fmri.hebartlab.com What does LAION-fMRI offer? 🧵

Finally, today is the day: Josefine Zerbe will present and release our new multi-echo 7T fMRI dataset LAION-fMRI during #VSS2026, with >30 fMRI session per subject and unprecedented stimulus diversity. Come to Talk Room 1 (Scene perception) today at 5:15. Details will follow in a separate thread!

Come work with us!

A new preprint from the lab: nailing down the timing (MEG) and the cortical localization (7T fMRI) of access to 15 elementary mathematical concepts from 3 categories: integers, fractions, and geometric shapes.

Bingo! Do I win a prize now?

The Shah Mosque (also known as Imam Mosque) in Isfahan, Iran

Now reading 📖 Cruz, Nicole (2026). Illusions of Understanding from Outsourcing Thinking to LLMs. Computational Brain & Behavior doi.org/10.1007/s421... 1/🧵

It's increasingly clear to me that scholarly publications need AI disclosure statements! Here's a very thoughtful proposal about how this should be done, based on CRediT: crln.acrl.org/index.php/cr... @ocul-libraries.bsky.social

Happy to announce the 3rd iteration of NEAT (Neuro-AI-Talks), which will take place in Osnabrück September 14th-15th 2026. NEAT is a (deliberately small scale) NeuroAI workshop that brings together researchers from neuroscience and AI. www.kietzmannlab.org/neat2026/ More information below 👇

bump for visibility!

by Aman Daharwal #art

Our new study (Debray*, Karami* et al.) explores how the brain encodes basic math concepts (integers, fractions, shapes). Samuel Debray led the 7T fMRI & behavioral work; I led the MEG. @danielavalerio.bsky.social @chrplr.bsky.social @standehaene.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 Applications are open! 🚨 Join MESEC’s 2026 Summer Workshop: ⭐️Computational Modelling for Consciousness Science: From Fragmentation to Integration⭐️ 📍 Carcassonne, France 📅 29 Aug–5 Sept 2026 🗓️ Deadline: 29 May 2026 More info and applications here: mesec.co/event/worksh...

Reading this thread reminded me of something I experienced recently.

Applications for the #CIFAR Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School open April 29! Join us in December to discuss "why consciousness matters": why we value it, why it might matter for moral status or exist evolutionarily, & why we have to get C-science right for society & our global future.

New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)

Students from 128 countries are looking for career guidance. Could you spare 3 hours this July? 🙋 Volunteer as a Professional Development Mentor with #Neuromatch or #Climatematch Academy. Add to your CV and make a difference! Fully remote! neuromatch.io/mentorship/

Join us for Cognitive Science for Climate Change on May 26 at ENS Paris 🌍 Exploring how cognitive science and computational modelling can help us better understand climate action. Conveniently scheduled for those coming to Paris for #SBDM. 🎟️ More details: www.eventbrite.com/e/billets-co...

Lovely work led by Dharsh Kumaran and his team at Google DeepMind shedding new light on the metacognitive profile of LLMs We show that LLM confidence estimates are both stubborn and brittle all at once Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s42...

New paper 🌟out now in Nat. Neurosci.: www.nature.com/articles/s41.... With advisors @davidpoeppel.bsky.social and @Nai! We show that, while LLMs are optimized to predict the next word, the human brain modulates prediction efficiency by strategically grouping words into constituents. 1/n More 👇

Number on Space! • N: Yapacani, Bolivia • U: Canyonlands National Park, Utah • M: Shenandoah River, Virginia • B: Humaitá, Brazil • E: Breiðamerkurjökull Glacier, Iceland • R: Florida Keys

The "Version of Record" of my paper with Mike Woodford is finally there. I am very glad with this paper that points to new laws of psychophysics, which we derived from a carefully considered principle of endogenous efficient coding.

New paper that merits a read (Im totally unbiased...not). Simple, straightforward, impactful message. Prediction a la LLM is nice. Constituent-constrained prediction is nicer. @jiajiezou.bsky.social and Nai Ding show brain, behavioral, MEG, ECoG data. www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

To accompany my textbook (Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience) and the class I taught this semester, I'm open-sourcing my lectures slides: gershmanlab.com/lectures.html I'll continue to update these as I improve them.

🧠 the Digital Brain Project is now live: $5M total · up to $500k per selected team Let's open-source the modeling of the human brain brain activity! ➡️Apply on: digitalbrainproject.org

New preprint, on a very different topic: a mathematical theory of evolution for self-designing AI. AI is increasingly designed by AI. What systems might emerge after generations of self-designing AIs competing for computing resources? ↓ arxiv.org/abs/2604.05142

New preprint! 🧠 How do RNNs learn abstract rules from sequences, independent of specific stimuli? By Vezha Boboeva, with Alberto Pezzotta & George Dimitriadis "From sequences to schemas: low-rank recurrent dynamics underlie abstract relational representations" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Just posted an update of this study, where we show how the receptive fields of number-encoding neural populations shift and rescale with the prior — "distributed range adaptation" — in line with (dynamic) efficient coding, and predictive of behavior. Check it out! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🚨New publication! I am extremely happy to share this new review article in elife on #Traveling_Waves! @erc.europa.eu @upcite.bsky.social elifesciences.org/articles/106...

Check the lecture notes I contributed to: a lecture note from Analytical Connectionism 2024 “A Computational Basis of Natural Intelligence” (PMLR, Analytical Connectionism 2024), based on lectures by Jonathan D. Cohen.

Academic friends, It's beyond heartbreaking to watch what's unfolding in Iran & the region. A few of us drafted an open letter calling for protection of civilians & of educational, research, medical & cultural institutions. Please read & sign if you agree: sites.google.com/view/protect... #IranWar

Applications are now OPEN for 13 PhD fellowships in the Doctoral Programme in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at CIMeC, University of Trento, Italy! 📅 Deadline: May 7, 2026 🧠 Research fields: brain, neuroscience, cognition, language, neuroimaging, vision and more. ℹ More info 🔗 phd.unitn.it/drcimec/

He is basically saying he will be performing euthanasia on Iranians He is threatening to end a civilisation tonight and then says God bless the people of Iran

I put forward an alternative to the language-of-thought hypothesis for geometry, the Wanderers Hypothesis for Geometry: Human geometry may originate from the interaction between ancient, navigation-like mental processes that approximate Euclidean geometry and our human capacity for natural language.

Sharif University in Tehran was just bombed Founded in 1965, it is one the most elite science and engineering institutions in the world. Alumni include the mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, first woman to win the Fields Medal Here is the list of other alumni en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

New preprint "A cortical semantic space integrating fractions and integers" We used 7T fMRI during number comparison to map the adult cortical representation of small integers 0-5 and basic fractions. Those abstract symbolic concepts are mapped in parietal cortex. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Wanna do neuroscience in Paris but can't find interesting lab? Want to come do a sabbatical but don't know who to collaborate? Check this webpage aggregating ~all the neuroscience labs (+200) in Paris. ⚠️only the information of 'verified' profiles is reliable⚠️ Please retweet 🙏 parisneuro.fr

JOB ALERT: PhD opening in my lab! @cimecunitrento.bsky.social in Italy, as part of an Italian FIS3 starting grant. The project will use advanced analysis methods of MEG data to investigate how our world's naturalistic hierarchical structure facilitates predictive neural processing.

100+ year old Pasteur Institute in Tehran was a premier infectious disease research institute and vaccine manufacturer It is a reason Iranian kids like me born in 60s had access to measles vaccines soon after they were developed in the west

Pasteur Institute of Iran, founded in 1920 now destroyed by Israel-US bombing😞 It played a pivotal role in developing vaccines & public health services, for over a century, now gone😞 A few days ago a pharmaceutical plant was bombed, accused of making anesthetic fentanyl #War #PasteurInstituteIran

Curious what a representation of "everything" you know might look like? Wonder how you might fill it in? Check out our demo and paper (led by @paxt0n4.bsky.social and now out in @natcomms.nature.com ), or read on to learn more! Demo: context-lab.com/mapper/ Paper: www.doi.org/10.1038/s414...

My lab is hiring a software engineer to support our #NeuroAI research: careers.epfl.ch/job/Lausanne.... Please consider applying if you want to build out the infrastructure enabling models of the human brain & mind (e.g., www.Brain-Score.org). We will start screening applications this week 🧠🤖

New preprint: our lab’s first Alzheimer’s paper! “Loss of neuronal population organization links pathology to behavior in a model of Alzheimer's disease” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧪🧵1/

Clarifying the conceptual dimensions of representation in neuroscience — a Perspective by Stephan Pohl, Edgar Y. Walker, David L. Barack, Jennifer Lee, Rachel N. Denison, Ned Block, Florent Meyniel & Wei Ji Ma www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Great guest post at @dailynous.com (Full disclosure: one of the authors is a former student whom I admire greatly.) One of the many ways in which academia systematically excludes people from the Global South is by hosting prestigious events only in rich countries-> dailynous.com/2026/03/10/h...

Please circulate widely! Open positions at the Vision Lab, Centre for Neuroscience, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) sites.google.com/site/visionl... How to Apply: forms.gle/vWa1PwUrcpWf... Deadline : March 31 2026

Pleased to share that our paper "Representation Biases: Variance is Not Always a Good Proxy for Importance" is now out as Theory/New Concepts paper in eNeuro! www.eneuro.org/content/13/3... 1/

Reassessing Number-Detector Units in Convolutional Neural Networks https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.07.710304v1

Like many things about AI, this mainly reveals and amplifies an existing quirk of the system. Professors are supposed to both do the best research (and as much of it and as fast as possible) while also working nearly 100% with trainees, whose growth & interests need to be prioritized.