On the invitation for a commentary on Mazviita Chirimuuta's The Brain Abstracted, I had the pleasure of writing on equating the brain with computation. The Ontological Reversal of Computation and the Brain in Philosophy & the Mind Sciences. Below see what I agree & disagree with in the book. 🧵 1/n

Book review 📚 ‘What are we doing here?’ The polymaths who searched for the meaning of life go.nature.com/4rmE9DB

Analogy and metaphor galore! I was interviewed by the @nightsciencepod.bsky.social podcast about metaphor and analogy in science: open.spotify.com/episode/1hqU... Pairs well with @sflusberg.bsky.social's interview on metaphor on the @manymindspod.bsky.social podcast disi.org/the-aura-of-...

My review of Michal Pollan's book on consciousness: www.science.org/eprint/FTJG7...

Behavioral biases drift in individuals. • Drift happens on many timescales • Drift rate depends on genetics and neuromodulators • It might be adaptive for rapidly changing environments elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Really enjoyed "Playing with reality" by @kellybclancy.bsky.social. Beautiful prose, well-organized, clearly written with deep subject matter expertise, and non-trivial broader social considerations. Enjoyable read and IMO underrated.

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks. @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @flatironinstitute.org @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social 1/14

neuroAI comparisons of ANNs to brains do have a range of problems. Even more than I had realized. And I was worried before: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Today we’re launching Open Climate Risk, a fully open option for U.S. building-level climate risk data. It’s unique because it allows you to see not only risk scores, starting with wildfire, but also the complete underlying dataset, methods, and codebase. carbonplan.org/research/cli...

Why did consciousness evolve at all? A superb special issue of @royalsocietypublishing.org brings together experts across disciplines to explore the functions of consciousness and why it emerged in some species but not others. @tecumsehfitch.bsky.social royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/issue/3...

Following up, I learned something broader & troubling. Apparently since Oct 2025, NYC’s Portuguese consulate is not offering appointments for long stay visas, open appointments for short stays are so rare that folks stay up till 2 AM to get one, & it’s worsened in 2026. Mass migration out of the US?

If you need a visa for Cosyne in Portugal, you need an appointment, which takes time & much vigilance to get, then you give them loads of documents & fees, then wait 3 weeks or longer to get a 7-day visa. I love Cosyne & am supposed to give talks, but might miss it (again) due to Visa challenges.

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal! Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/6)

Your Iranian colleagues are cut off from family back home & are in a state of collective grief, which has many faces. We may appear more aloof or be more impatient, may self-isolate, have more typos, may freeze or overwork to numb the pain, or find fear, memory, or hope in unexpected moments.

1/2 "The most striking finding we had is that the students that practiced math problems with ChatGPT without any guardrails did 17% worse on immediate subsequent exam where they did not have AI assistance." Hamsa Bastani of @upenn.edu at the Simons Institute. simons.berkeley.edu/talks/hamsa-...

New paper out in cognition with @arikahn.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, Cate Hartley, and @katenuss.bsky.social !! We show that children 👶 use predictive representations (e.g. SR) to guide their choices, providing an account of how they can make flexible choices in a changing world

Writing is thinking "On the value of human-generated scientific writing in the age of large-language models." www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Another cool paper from Iran: nature.com/articles/s41... Prenatal stress makes mouse offspring more anxious, hyperactive, forgetful, and more drawn to morphine while laterodorsal tegmentum cholinergic neurons become hyperexcitable. From Kerman, a city with reported violent crackdowns on protests.

My latest on Substack -- a write-up of the talk I gave at NeurIPS in December. aiguide.substack.com/p/on-evaluat...

It was a pleasure to share our work on how studying play helps us understand natural intelligence & develop AI at the MAIN conference, organized by @karimjerbi.bsky.social & other amazing scientists. Studying Play: What Games Reveal About Minds and Machines 1/n www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyTn...

One of my greatest disappointments w corporate culture is how shamelessly one is asked to lie, self-censor, mask authentic humanity. Sadly it's often by women who advertise "fairness". I'll never be ok with this. My advice: RESIST. Lying alienates you from yourself. www.youtube.com/watch?v=T__1...

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...