This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

"All intelligence is collective intelligence: each of us consists of a huge number of cells working together to generate a coherent cognitive being with goals, preferences, & memories that belong to the whole and not to its parts" @drmichaellevin.bsky.social paper pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37204591/

Awesome article on medical breakthroughs that came from basic neuroscience research in rodents. Major success examples in postpartum depression, non-opioid pain and migraine treatment. This is exactly why funding basic science is so important! www.thetransmitter.org/drug-develop...

2020s: AI "System Prompts" are lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "prompt engineers". 1980s: AI "Expert Systems" were lengthy, carefully constructed sets of expert rules about a particular domain, created by "knowledge engineers".

2026 started off right in NYC with an inauguration block party at city hall. Proud to be a New Yorker today. Happy new year, here’s to hope.

(Also, icyi, here are the 42 papers citing our non-existent paper which includes a "meta-analysis" - often called the evidence "gold standard" - of "LLM effects" in education 🤮 scholar.google.com.vn/scholar?star...)

Some people have argued that machines should be treated as model organisms, analogous to non-human animals. But I think this misses the motivations for why we use animals as model organisms, in particular the fact that they are specifically useful for answering evolutionary and biological questions.

We don't actually trust AI. We trust the companies behind it. As Maria Antoniak notes, every "private" chat flows through corporate systems with long histories of data misuse. If we care about AI ethics, we need to name power, not anthropomorphize models.

#MAIN2025 Looks like everybody has disappeared for lunch 👻 … Next up after lunch will be Ida Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social #Montreal #Neuroscience #AI

Brenda Milner showed the world that memory isn’t one thing — the hippocampus supports our life stories, while other circuits let us keep learning skills. Her research on patient H.M. built the foundation of cognitive neuroscience. #WomenInScience #MemoryResearch #NeuroHistory

Done with revision. It’s been so enriching to work on this philosophy paper in 2025. Presented early version in January at The American philosophical Association, submitted paper in the summer, & now the revision. Got to develop my ideas while commenting on The Brain Abstracted. Now back to ICLR.

Being Interdisciplinary feels like practicing non-attachment. Different disciplines come in & out of focus in waves, each a whole world. Engaging with philosophy gives access to different ontologies than engaging in neuroscience or AI. This helps us evaluate each field from within & outside itself.

🗣️ With the support of the @danafoundation.bsky.social, we are very excited to announce the Philosophy & Neuroscience Collaborative Mentorship Program! 🧠 For more details & submission requirements, visit: philandneuro.com/mentorship (This is 1/2 announcements we will make over the next 1-2 weeks.)

Simply the best.

"While other universities report that the humanities are shrinking, at Berkeley, the opposite is true. The music major is the fastest-growing major on campus. We are finding bigger classrooms because film is exploding. English is back to the numbers we saw 15 years ago. We are hiring" bit.ly/4ohKuOe

Pleased to share new work with @sflippl.bsky.social @eberleoliver.bsky.social @thomasmcgee.bsky.social & undergrad interns at Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, UCLA. Algorithmic Primitives and Compositional Geometry of Reasoning in Language Models www.arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15987 🧵1/n

MSR NYC is hiring senior researchers in AI, both broadly in AI/ML & in specific areas (post-training, test-time scaling, modular transfer learning, science of deep learning). aka.ms/msrnyc-jobs We're reviewing on a rolling basis, interviews in Nov/Dec. Please apply here: tinyurl.com/MSRNYCjob

Figuring out how the brain uses information from visual neurons may require new tools, writes @neurograce.bsky.social. Hear from 10 experts in the field. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

Can Only Meat Machines be Conscious? New paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, free download until November 26 with this URL: authors.elsevier.com/a/1luwh4sIRv...

Very excited to share that our work (together with co-first author Shanka Subhra Mondal and @neuroai.bsky.social ) on a brain-inspired architecture for planning with LLMs is now out in Nature Communications! www.nature.com/articles/s41... (thread below)

@science.org just dropped a story covering this preprint! Check it out below, and thanks to @cathleenogrady.bsky.social for the great write-up! www.science.org/content/arti...

Reading papers is a basic skill (and dare I say duty?) of scientists, and I include medical doctors in that group. Keeping abreast of the literature is a foundational part of our professions. There aren’t good shortcuts. In any case, reading papers regularly is fun. arstechnica.com/ai/2025/09/s...

Also to clarify, the cost is $100K per year of the visa, so it is actually $300K for a 3-year visa. As postdocs cost about $100K/year, this fee doubles the cost of postdocs on H1-B visas.

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

New book— just got my copy! I know people often don’t read book chapters but I think that’s a mistake. They are usually much more reflective and wide ranging than journal articles.

I have just dropped a new version of my academicdb project, which helps prolific researchers generate a CV automatically. Now with a web interface! If you are interested, please try it out and let me know what you think - it takes a bit of setup work but then runs easily using Docker.

The myth of optimality in human movement science www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well? We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics. 📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...

‪@benhayden.bsky.social‬ @tyrellturing.bsky.social‬ @jmgrohneuro.bsky.social‬ @pessoabrain.bsky.social I see a lot of talk on here about how we should avoid "x does y" talk because the brain is "a dynamic, reverberant, reciprocally interconnected system". But this does not follow. A thread...

This paper finds LLMs' ability to understand that others have different beliefs (Theory of Mind) comes from 0.001% of their parameters. Break those specific weights & the model loses both its ability to track what others know AND language comprehension Interesting implications for models (& minds?)

What are your pros/cons of using AI in science? Feel free to respond wrt use or harm in the design of experiments, coding experiments, coding analysis, brain storming analysis, summarizing literature, synthesis of ideas, modeling, novel model development, mathematical proofs, writing, editing.

An ancient and “nearly naked” black hole that astronomers believe may have been created in the first fraction of a second after the big bang has been spotted by the James Webb space telescope. www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

Today is publication day for this beautiful thing. I hope that it will tell a broad audience what historians of science have now long recognized: that alchemy was not a superstitious aberration but rather, an important phase in the history of ideas and of manufacturing.

“In the late 1960s, Dr. Rossiter was working on her Ph.D. at Yale, when a comment from one of her male professors puzzled her. Who, she had asked, were the women in science? There were none, he said. Another professor mumbled something about Marie Curie being the exception.”🙃

Where do some of Reinforcement Learning's great thinkers stand today? Find out! Keynotes of the RL Conference are online: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Wanting vs liking, Agent factories, Theoretical limit of LLMs, Pluralist value, RL teachers, Knowledge flywheels (guess who talked about which!)

This summer I have the great pleasure of working w incredible students! Grads: Thomas McGee (UCLA), Sam Lippl (Columbia), Millie Preece (Cambridge), undergrads: Salma, Kimberly, Ziwen, Pierce, the RIPS program at IPAM (Institute for pure & applied math) UCLA. Excited to share our new research soon📝.

Is the hippocampus best understood in term of discrete subfields or functional gradients? Functional gradients are recapitulated within each hippocampal subfield, supporting a role for both discrete & continuously changing computations. Neat work by Bouffard, @barense.bsky.social, & Moscovitch!

"The aim of science is not to open the door to infinite wisdom but to set a limit to infinite error.” - Bertolt Brecht The Life of Galileo

The rumors are true! #CCN2026 will be held at NYU. @toddgureckis.bsky.social and I will be executive-chairing. Get in touch if you want to be involved!

Are we in the new dark age yet?

This is unfortunate: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u... I wrote to the president of Harvard. I hope other faculty will speak their conscience, even if it means more struggle ahead.

A map of the halting problem, illustrated for root-finding methods: thoughtforms.life/halleys-meth...

We’re excited to announce our next keynote speaker: @neuroai.bsky.social (Microsoft Research) 🧠 Ida studies how humans and AI build world models for memory, exploration, and planning. Her talk will show how game-playing AI reveals insights into human and artificial cognition. Join us at #RLC2025!

1- The neuroscience & psychology chapters of Sutton & Barto 2nd edition. full PDF: incompleteideas.net/book/RLbook2... 2- A brief history of intelligence. Not neuroAI, but popular among grad students at RLC & our MSR interns as a deep conceptual introduction. www.abriefhistoryofintelligence.com/book

Propose some socials for RLC! Research topics, affinity groups, niche interests, whatever comes to mind! rl-conference.cc/call_for_soc...

If you're at ICML, check our work on AlgEval, toward algorithmic understanding of generative AI. I couldn't make it in person but am excited to say @taylorwwebb.bsky.social is there presenting our spotlight paper. P.S. If you see Taylor congratulate him on his professorship! arxiv.org/abs/2507.07544

Super excited to share this one!! Meta-learning sparsity and learning rate gives rise to brain-like gradients of complementary learning systems. So complementary learning systems emerge organically through behavior optimization, and it's not just two of them!!

My "Math, Revealed" series is freely available to anyone -- no paywall! -- in the thread below.

I've been building a model of how intrusive thoughts can warp cognitive maps (world model) in PTSD & derail goal-directed behavior. It combines successor representation & prioritized replay. I started off with a grid world, then embeddings. Today in a story recall task, reading the text was moving:

How does the brain stop thoughts? Find out in my article in @natrevneuro.nature.com with Subbu Subbulakshmi & Maite Crespo-Garcia www.nature.com/articles/s41... that integrates 25 yrs of psychology and neuroscience on this vital [email protected] sky.social #neuroskyence #neuroscience