Noise ceilings are really useful: You can estimate the reliability of your data and get an index of how well your model can possibly perform given the noise in the data. But, contrary to what you may think, noise ceilings do not provide an absolute index of data quality. Let's dive into why. 🧵

My reviewing style has changed over time. Rather than litigate every little thing, and pushing my own ideas, I focus only on 2 things: (1) Are the claims interesting/important? (2) Does the evidence support the claims? Most of my reviews these days are short and focused.

Watson was a racist who, "near the end of his life, faced condemnation and professional censure for offensive remarks, including saying Black people are less intelligent than white people"

New preprint led by @pablooyarzo.bsky.social together with @kohitij.bsky.social, Diego Vidaurre & Radek Cichy. Using EEG + fMRI, we show that when humans recognize images that feedforward CNNs fail on, the brain recruits cortex-wide recurrent resources. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/n)

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language. tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬 1/n

How does the brain find its way in realistic environments? 🧠 Using deep RL and neural data, we show that hippocampal-like networks support navigation, learning, and generalisation in partially observable environments—mirroring real animal behaviour. Now out: www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroAI

🚨 Check out our new preprint 🚨 A novel artifact-robust framework to investigate online effects of transcranial current stimulation (tCS). Further, we test this approach in an MEG study 🧲🧠 and find neural interaction between tCS and flickering visual stimulation. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The real problem isn’t p-values, it’s the epistemology behind them. Science shouldn’t depend on arbitrary thresholds that change with context. Knowledge should accumulate, not collapse into yes/no verdicts. Turning continuous evidence into discrete “significance” decisions is information loss

🚨Preprint: Semantic Tuning of Single Neurons in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe 1/8: How do human neurons encode meaning? In this work, led by Katharina Karkowski, we recorded hundreds of human MTL neurons to study semantic coding in the human brain: doi.org/10.1101/2025...

When #HHMIJanelia released the #Drosophila hemibrain in 2020, rendering all cell types at once with full shading/shadows was too hard, so the video showed them region by region. Technology has since advanced, and I went back and rendered them all together. I like how it shows the internal structure.

If the goal is inferential, researchers should report standard errors. Also, all ML researchers should take a statistics class.

Videos from the Natural Philosophy Symposium are coming online at last! We start with the opening plenary by David Chalmers @davidchalmers.bsky.social: Can There Be a Mathematical Theory of Consciousness? Commentary by Ryan Smith. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsve...

@dotproduct.bsky.social's first first author paper is finally out in @sfnjournals.bsky.social! Her findings show that content-specific predictions fluctuate with alpha frequencies, suggesting a more specific role for alpha oscillations than we may have thought. With @jhaarsma.bsky.social. 🧠🟦 🧠🤖

The viral "Definition of AGI" paper tells you to read fake references which do not exist! Proof: different articles present at the specified journal/volume/page number, and their titles exist nowhere on any searchable repository. Take this as a warning to not use LMs to generate your references!

Pssst.... there's so much good in the world. ❤️ Lego doesn't sell these kits. Instead, they've donated over 10,000 to hospitals around the globe.

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

It is finally out! Have you ever wanted to get into information theory, complexity, and networks? If so, this is the paper for you: a comprehensive tutorial review on information theory for complexity scientists specifically. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

here the trick is to unpack the word *understanding* it’s not about what each neuron does, but the rules shaping the behaviour of biological systems! "rules for development and learning in brains may be far easier to understand than their resulting properties" 👇👌 arxiv.org/abs/1907.06374

🔵 Tübingen SNS 2025 - That’s a wrap! 🔵 Two inspiring days full of groundbreaking talks and great discussions about systems #neuroscience! 🧠 A huge thank you to all our speakers, presenters, and participants for making #SNS2025 such a success 🙌 See you next year in Tübingen! 💙 📸 Highlights below!

Love it when a paper on arXiv includes a footnote reading "We stole this notion from Christof Koch (March 24, 2025, Mindscape podcast by Sean Carroll)." arxiv.org/abs/2510.03311

After stretching a bit last year, this year the Nobel committee was determined to give the prize to the physicsiest physics that ever physicsed.

Regardless of AI's impact on science, it's concerning to see academics using provocative language such as “AI is research misconduct” I feel it's unnecessarily polarizing, importing the current political tone into science and, ultimately, harming the scientific community than any technology itself

Nice demo by Mark Lescroart @neuromdl.bsky.social on EPI imaging of a single #fMRI slice. Great for teaching! :) vimeo.com/143701608?fl...

I've been arguing that #NeuroAI should model the brain in health *and* in disease -- very excited to share a first step from Melika Honarmand: inducing dyslexia in vision-language-models via targeted perturbations of visual-word-form units (analogous to human VWFA) 🧠🤖🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2509.24597

Glad to share the publication of our #newpaper (aka #blueprint) : > A Predictive Approach to Enhance Time-Series Forecasting By Skye Gunasekaran, Assel Kembay, Hugo Ladret, Rui-Jie Zhu, myself, Omid Kavehei and Jason Eshraghian www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience #AI #prediction #time

Great piece by @jonathanjarry.bsky.social on the descent of Sabine Hossenfelder, from science communicator to contrarian outrage-monger www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/...

My test of any new AI video model is whether it can make an otter using wifi on an airplane Here is Sora 2 doing a nature documentary... 1980s music video... a thriller... 50s low budget SciFi film... a safety video.. a film noir... anime... 90s video game cutscene... a French arthouse film

🚨 New preprint alert! 🧠🤖 We propose a theory of how learning curriculum affects generalization through neural population dimensionality. Learning curriculum is a determining factor of neural dimensionality - where you start from determines where you end up. 🧠📈 A 🧵: tinyurl.com/yr8tawj3

Yeah, finally AI cracked the hallmark of human behavior: the noisy TV problem

Turns out humans are not better that simple RL agents guided by surprise/novelty-driven curiosity when facing noisy TV problems! 📺 AGI is closer than we think 😉 #NeuroAI #neuroskyence #compcogsci

Are we moving toward a future where journals lose much of their importance, and most research is shared through open archives instead? If yes, how long might it take — 10, 20, or 30 years?

✨ Meet our speakers! ✨ Among our speakers this year at #SNS2025 we have Floris de Lange (@predictivebrain.bsky.social) Read the abstract here 💬 👇 meg.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de/sns_2025/abs... #neuroskyence

Why are we still sending our work to Wiley and other publishing companies so that they can profit from it? There's so many better options now, for example: psychopen.eu/journals/

✨ Meet our speakers! ✨ Among our speakers this year at #SNS2025 we have Tim Kietzmann (@timkietzmann.bsky.social) Read the abstract here 💬 👇 meg.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de/sns_2025/abs... #neuroskyence #compneurosky #NeuroAI

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Super proud of this collaboration with rockstar Ryan Raut - born out of playing in the sandbox in our last year of grad school! Multi-scale brain activity can be predicted from a simple measure of arousal like pupil diameter. Out with linear causality, in with dynamic systems to explain neurobiology

📢 Deadline extended! 📢 The registration deadline for #SNS2025 has been extended to Sunday, September 28th! Register here 👉 meg.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de/sns_2025/reg... PS: Students of the GTC (Graduate Training Center for Neuroscience) in Tübingen can earn 1 CP for presenting a poster! 👀

Here is our best thinking about how to make world models. I would apologize for it being a massive 40-page behemoth, but it's worth reading. arxiv.org/pdf/2509.09737

How can scientists apply efficient #AI tools to cognitive science? And what does it mean for how robots learn in new environments? #KempnerInstitute fellow Wilka Carvalho (@cogscikid.bsky.social l) + collaborators outline a new framework in 3 papers. Read more: bit.ly/47Fk9F9 #NeuroAI

Lab’s latest is out in Imaging Neuroscience, led by Kirsten Peterson: “Regularized partial correlation provides reliable functional connectivity estimates while correcting for widespread confounding”, where we demonstrate a major improvement to standard fMRI functional connectivity (correlation) 1/n

Human intelligence is overrated and not a useful yardstick for AI - a polemic. markusmeister.com/2025/09/15/w...

🚨 New paper alert 🚨 Using LLMs as data annotators, you can produce any scientific result you want. We call this **LLM Hacking**. Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2509.08825

Variance partitioning is used to quantify the overlap of two models. Over the years, I have found that this can be a very confusing and misleading concept. So we finally we decided to write a short blog to explain why. @martinhebart.bsky.social @gallantlab.org diedrichsenlab.org/BrainDataSci...

First day of my Philosophy of Cosmology class! I'm interpreting "cosmology" pretty broadly. There will be three main topics: 1) Anthropics and the multiverse; 2) The arrow of time; 3) Quantum foundations, especially Many-Worlds. The idea of self-locating uncertainties will be a common thread.

🔵 Tübingen SNS2025 🔵 Over the next few days, we’ll be introducing you to the brilliant scientists who will be deliver their talks at #SNS2025! ✨ Get ready to meet our speakers! ✨ We are starting with Liina Pylkkänen, from New York University 💬 meg.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de/sns_2025/abs...

I'm delighted to share that, together with @crowbrain.bsky.social our paper on time estimation in crows is now published in @natcomms.nature.com We found that crows not only keep track of time, but individual neurons prefer different time durations 🐦⏱️🧠 Check it out: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

TIL that IEEE doesn't allow authors to use the 'Lena image'. For those who don't know, the Lena image is a crop of a sexually-explicit picture taken from Playboy that was used as the standard test image in computer vision papers for decades.

We’re hiring! 🥳fully funded PhD and postdoc positions in human cognitive neuroscience @mpicybernetics.bsky.social M/EEG and brain stimulation methods to study timing/ prediction/ attention/ oscillations tinyurl.com/5dku4du9 @timingresforum.bsky.social @gtc-tuebingen.bsky.social please repost 🙏

🚀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

In the second meeting of 'Sensorimotor AI Journal Club' we covered: 📜 (B)ayesian (O)nline learning in (N)on-stationary (E)nvironments (BONE; openreview.net/forum?id=ose...) Many thanks to the first author Gerardo for an amazing presentation! 🎥 watch it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=49PP... 🧠🤖🧠📈