New protocol paper (https://doi.org/10.37349/en.2026.1006138) describing Phases 4-5 of the Cam-CAN study of healthy ageing, led by Ina Demetriou Includes MRI and MEG data up to 14 years after baseline. Data available soon on https://cam-can.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/dataset/

New paper 🧵 What if the "landscape" that guides cell differentiation isn't fixed, but is sculpted, in real time, by the very cells moving through it? We call this a 'sandscape' : grains of sand that carve dunes as they move, while the dunes' shape simultaneously steers where the grains go next.

Presentation of some topics of "The Brain, In Theory" and discussion on the Neuroscience & Philosophy Salon www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV6k...

Is the brain a computer solved in 4 posts so that we never have to talk about this again (please please please). 1. It's not the same physically as a computer - it's made of meat. Hopefully this one at least is uncontroversial.

I went to ICIS in Panama last week, and the long trip back gave me time to think about how our field is doing and where it's heading. My general take is: there's not enough theoretical and methodological work in our field - but there's also reasons to be hopeful. A thread 🧵

New Preprint! We gave neural networks infant-like curiosity and let them free to explore. They grew brain-like architecture, followed human synaptic development, and even started to display compositional thought. So we think curiosity doesn't just come from a complex mind... it helps us build one 👇

Function is not tied to specific brain structures or time scales. The brain is not just a set of parts that each “do their own job”. Instead, networks are multifunctional and active across different speeds simultaneously. doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #neuroscience

Learning the wiring rules of a mammalian cortical column https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.09.737432v1

A single dynamical property can account for the capacity to learn, from artificial networks to the mammalian brain. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.09.737603v1

Super excited to share a new preprint! We asked a simple-but-big question: What changes in the brain when someone becomes an expert? Using chess ♟️ + fMRI 🧠 + representational geometry & dimensionality 📈, we ask: 1️⃣ WHAT information is encoded? 2️⃣ HOW is it structured? 3️⃣ WHERE is it expressed? 1/n

Spatially structured heterogeneity shapes large-scale cortical dynamics in a model of the human cortex www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Good news everyone! 🎉 The new version 3.0 of graph-tool is just out with major improvements! See below. graph-tool.skewed.de graph-tool is a comprehensive and efficient Python library to work with networks, including structural, dynamical, and statistical algorithms, as well as visualization. 1/N

Our paper "Neural timescales from a computational perspective" is finally out in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41... We discuss how computational models and methods can distill empirical observations on neural timescales into quantitative, testable theories of brain computation.

new preprint from our lab where Rikki Rabinovich used @trackingactions.bsky.social's CEBRA on human intracranial data to decode the progress of time in the human brain during decision making...

A fundamental discovery ! Immanuel Kant would have loved it.

July is many things but also preprint month, this time with another dive into non-isocortex territory 🤿. www.biorxiv.org/cgi/content/...

Enshittification in in one screenshot.

Outlook mobile: Yo, you have 3 emails. Me: Nice, wait, where are they? Outlook mobile: Where are what?

Our joint study with Takaki Komiyama @takakikomiyama.bsky.social is out in @nature.com! We found cell type-specific changes in the cortical circuit of Huntington’s disease mice. Optogenetic stimulation of VIP interneurons rescued circuit dysfunction and improved motor behavior.

To understand functionality, we have to follow perturbations, flows, time scales and the diversity of possible responses. Following-up my latest seminar, invted by @kayson.bsky.social & Petra Vertes, I summarize the main findings and the discussion here: manlius.substack.com/p/what-netwo... 1/

Both brains and RNNs can re-use components of computation across similar tasks or contexts. But what exactly are those “shared components”? How can they be used to solve several tasks? We address these questions in a new preprint with @avm.bsky.social! Link: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧠 New work showing prominent and widespread 𝘪𝘯 𝘷𝘪𝘷𝘰 pre-synaptic terminal reductions in people with schizophrenia.🧠 nature.com/articles/s41... Strongest effects in left hemisphere, but synaptic loss didn't track with MRI grey matter alterations, but did align with..👇1/4

Don’t miss one of the best conferences of the whole EU folks, if you do anything computational, present it at Bernstein we always appreciate more diversity of topics and methods.

In-scanner thoughts contribute to resting-state functional connectivity pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42365014/ I've long thought that this is the "elephant in the room" of resting state #fMRI esp. for comparing groups. If two groups think & feel differently in the scanner, of course rsfMRI will differ!

Interested in the principles shaping connectome architecture? See our latest in @cp-cell.bsky.social led by F Normand @nsb-lab.bsky.social A simple model using geometric eigenmodes captures cortical connectomes of different species. Paper: tinyurl.com/3r43spf5 Thread: tinyurl.com/vx74hp6u

New Nature paper with the brilliant @yarakyrychenko.bsky.social! Digital technologies are shaping the public sphere but were not designed as democratic infrastructure. We propose aligning social technologies with democratic principles of inclusivity, fairness, & representativeness. rdcu.be/fqnyw

Congratulations to Xiao-Jing Wang (NYU) for receiving the Valentin Braitenberg Award for Computational Neuroscience 2026! 🎉 The award ceremony and accompanying lecture will take place during the #BernsteinConference on September 29. 👉 bit.ly/3QRpXFp #BernsteinNetwork #CompNeuro

Learning shapes neural geometry in the primate prefrontal cortex www.nature.com/articles/s41...

My suggestion is to have Tokyo-level-busy slides full of text and equations all in different fonts that are just there for half of the talk. It always helps 🔥

🎉 Now published in Nature Communications! 🧠 We develop a novel computational reinforcement learning & habit model of Twitter data, and show that younger people & women are more behaviourally sensitive to 'Likes'. Read the paper: bit.ly/4f1vsKS

This is happening today at 3 PM UK time so last chance to register for the last Making Connections seminar of this term.

🚨 New paper 🚨 Did you ever wonder if the spatial similarity of receptor PET maps matters for their use in molecular-informed fMRI analyses? Here we systematically investigate this. 🧵

I just wanted a social media platform to talk nerdy and follow academic drama. Musk ruined Twitter man it had such a good run 😩 Look at us now, somehow people ended up on LinkedIn among all places and they’re either proud or thrilled or excited to announce stuff.

Can a single cell behave like a Bayesian agent? In this new paper by @maorknak.bsky.social, E Casacuberta & @multicellgenome.bsky.social show that eukaryotic cells trained with reliable cues survived stress better by using Bayesian guesses @ibe-barcelona.bsky.social journals.aps.org/prxlife/pdf/...

And after a hot (literally and figuratively) #OHBM, we're closing this term's seminar series with a presentation by Claus Hilgetag on Thursday this week. Here's more information + the registration link sites.google.com/view/makingc... Making Connections continues after the summer break. Don't worry.

Could you be a Guest Editor? #PhilTransB is open to theme issue proposals in all areas of biology - a great opportunity to create a landmark publication in your field. Find out more: bit.ly/PTBproposals

Updated this preprint. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Lots of new analyses, but among the coolest is the demonstration that communities -- defined from connectivity information alone (w/o distinguishing NTs/morphology/space) --recover neuronal lineages. Kind of neat!

And after a hot (literally and figuratively) #OHBM, we're closing this term's seminar series with a presentation by Claus Hilgetag on Thursday this week. Here's more information + the registration link sites.google.com/view/makingc... Making Connections continues after the summer break. Don't worry.

New neuromorphic/SNN paper with @pengfei-sun.bsky.social Zhe Su, @achterbrain.bsky.social @giacomoi.bsky.social and @danakarca.bsky.social: www.nature.com/articles/s42... Long story short: neat trick to augment SNNs with a tiny memory buffer to improve performance at low energy/param cost. 🤖🧠🧪

Fun "fact" I've been trying to estimate for a course on brains and neural nets: the human brain eliminates/re-creates somewhere between 1 - 170 million synapses per second, totaling to a mind-boggling 2 to 380 quadrillion changes over a lifetime. More on my guess below. Curious to hear feedback!

#Aging drives changes in the #brain and #metabolism, but how independent are these effects? This study by @asafarahani.bsky.social, @misicbata.bsky.social &co identifies two axes of brain-body associations, each primarily related to age or metabolic health. 🧪#AcademicSky plos.io/4eoIu3L

⏳️ Two weeks left to submit your Poster abstracts and Travel Grant applications for the #BernsteinConference 2026! 🗓️ Deadline: July 1 All information 👉 bit.ly/3vQYaIw #BernsteinNetwork #CompNeuro #Neuroskyence

Me: I have a Claude Fable 5: I’m done man talk to Opus 4.8 you cyberterrorist prick.

I am spending way toooo long playing around with this wonderfully curated list of R colour palettes. Color palettes emilhvitfeldt.github.io/r-color-pale...

Coming to #OHBM2026? We'll see you there! 🇫🇷 🥖 🥐 Make sure you check out the awesome work led by @ambrains.bsky.social 🥳 🙌: Poster #0903: The spatial extent of thalamic connectivity shapes the diversity and control of whole-brain dynamics Monday, June 15, 13:45-14:45 Tuesday, June 16, 12:30-13:30

Excited to see this out in PNAS. A fabulous project by Adam Pines and the Williams lab: across psychedelics (LSD, Psilo, MDMA), species, and datasets, a very consistent story—reduced propagation of activity into the default mode network (DMN). Congrats Adam! 🧠🍄 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Fifty years since a simple equation described the chaos of biology 🧪🌐 www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Cortical cooling reveals a role for visual cortex in generating visual responses in auditory cortex (in ferret) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... "Units responsive to sound, light, or combined audiovisual stimuli were found across all sampled auditory fields and cortical depths"; #neuroscience

Periodic reminder that, contrary to widespread claims in recent years, it’s not true that graphs encode “pairwise” interactions. Graphs encode neighborhoods—sets of nodes incident to other nodes—on which multivariate interactions can be defined. skewed.de/lab/posts/hi... 1/2

MeTrICS lab are at #OHBM 2026; largely our growing focus these days is towards mechanistic modelling the mechanisms of cortical folding and dynamics as a means to tailor predictions of outcomes towards individual cases. Posters in comments below: