The prefrontal cortex across scales: laminar architecture, white-matter constraints, and distributed control in cognition link.springer.com/article/10.1... #neuroscience

Millie Preece presented studies in collaboration with Momennejad @neuroai.bsky.social‬ and Paul Fletcher, showing that different strategies in navigating an environment were related to participants’ psychological adjustment. ‪

Excited to be presenting this paper tomorrow! If you want to hear more about this, please come to the poster session tomorrow at 2:30pm @icmlconf.bsky.social.

Somewhat late but thrilled to share that our paper on Algorithmic Primitives & Compositional Geometry of Reasoning in Language Models was accepted to ICML 2026. Huge thanks to incredible coauthors, esp @sflippl.bsky.social @eberleoliver.bsky.social @thomasmcgee.bsky.social. Camera ready coming soon.

Is spatial navigation innate 🧠? Using #NeuroPixels we show that the #torus 🍩 underlying the #GridCell map exists already on day 10 in rats — before pups open eyes and ears and before they start upright walking. 🧵1:4 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New results! A model shows how complex brain-like dynamics can emerge from simple interactions between adaptation and network structure, even when individual neurons behave irregularly. work by @bwz-brain.bsky.social doi.org/10.48550/arX... #neuroscience

Ever wondered how the hippocampal cognitive map is read-out? @changmin-yu.bsky.social @zilong-ji.bsky.social with Jake & John, show that, during navigation, theta sweeps indicate remembered goal-directions (cf. current/next movements or perceptual targets) 1/2 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New paper! w/ @cocoscilab.bsky.social🧵Can large language models reason flexibly, or have they learned what reasoning looks like? We introduce a new paradigm to test this question—the riddle riddle—and find that humans and LLMs show opposite patterns of performance. 📜

Very excited to share that my lab will be moving to Princeton (Neuroscience & Psychology) this fall. I'll be recruiting at all levels (more info to come soon), please share / get in touch if you're interested in joining!

New work with Roberta Raileanu: A Compositional Framework for Open-ended Intelligence Open-ended intelligence is the capacity to adapt to novel problems & environments that are substantially different from those seen in training. But most models of open-mindedness don't have compositionality. 1/n

A worrying trend: ML/AI bros discover a field that existed for decades, brainstorm autocomplete obvious ideas w AI that the field recognizes as ongoing, then claim they’re scooped by new work of authors who shaped those ideas/AI’s brainstorm. Scarily similar to overascription of agency in psychosis?

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

This is so full of mind-expanding thoughts. e.g. "For me, Gödel’s theorems do not show that mathematics is limited, but rather that mathematics is much wider and more powerful than Hilbert’s finitistic view." www.quantamagazine.org/what-do-gode...

I went to go look, and this time last year, NSF SBE had funded 216 awards. This year, they have funded 2.

We are implementing a similar policy at @arxiv.bsky.social. If there is incontrovertible evidence of LLM slop in a paper, this means the authors did not take the time to read the LLM output and we can't trust anything else in the paper. Penalty is 1 year ban from arXiv followed by...

Somewhat late but thrilled to share that our paper on Algorithmic Primitives & Compositional Geometry of Reasoning in Language Models was accepted to ICML 2026. Huge thanks to incredible coauthors, esp @sflippl.bsky.social @eberleoliver.bsky.social @thomasmcgee.bsky.social. Camera ready coming soon.

Very excited to have this officially published: A neural state space for episodic memories A brief thread... #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition 🧪 @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social

Retractions never get proportional attention. This one should.

Dopamine in the ventral and tail of striatum supports global and local evaluation in reward-threat conflict https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.01.722240v1

New deep dive from me into the anti-science movement, it's structure, tactics, and impact on science and society. Some data analysis, unique testimonies, new infographics and also a first attempt at outlining broadly-agreed upon actions how to fight back. 1/ open.substack.com/pub/protagon...

the ppl we thank in acknowledgement sections are "a more relevant predictor of publication success than formal collaborations (i.e., coauthorship), even after matching for gender, seniority, methodological orientation, geographical location, and institutional prestige." www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

For many Iranian students, Neuromatch was one of the few bridges to the international neuroscience community. Iranian students and TAs have contributed so much to it. Many of us, including me, found neuroscience through Neuromatch. This decision by Trump’s gov is cruel, unjust and a loss for science

I was asked to speak with a graduate class today about research data management. I was asked, "How do people become convinced that beginning data management early on in a project is worth it?" Me: "Suffering. They usual have to suffer first." 😅

A stunning visualization born from a collaboration with @manlius.bsky.social : 55,486 galaxies and 29,555 streamlines tracing how matter flows across our local universe, built on data from the CosmicFlows-4 project. Article in the first reply 👇

An exciting astronomy milestone was hit last night, as DESI completed its original 5-year survey mapping 40 million galaxies in the night sky! DESI continues operation, now aiming for an 8-year survey and ~60 million galaxies. 🔭🧪 #cosmology newscenter.lbl.gov/2026/04/15/d...

Last Friday, Trump fired the National Science Board. The NSB is made up of distinguished scientists whose job is to oversee the National Science Foundation, setting research priorities by thinking beyond election cycles. It was designed to be independent. We don't know what this means, but it's bad.

📢Become an AI Sentience scholar. Apply by Tues April 28! @neddo.bsky.social & I are looking for a grad student/postdoc w expertise in survey studies/modeling & topic - 6 months part-time online collab - 8hrs/week June-Dec 2026 - Up to $5k stipend, $3k project costs neuromatch.io/ai-sentience... 1/n

Meta will begin keystroke logging US employees at work -- complete with mouse movements and periodic screenshots -- to train better AI agents. This comes after Boz posted about a future in which AI will "primarily do the work" at meta. It's a new era for tech labor. www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Congrats to Ziwen Pan, 2025 @ipamucla.bsky.social unergrad intern, future Yale Computational Biology PhD! One of my greatest joys is news of former interns/postdocs' landing dream positions. It heals & makes rejection sting less. It brings hope & rewards the challenges of leading complex research.

'Texas A&M philosophy professor Martin Peterson is leaving the university after administrators told him in January that he couldn’t teach Plato’s Symposium in his philosophy class; they said the ancient Greek philosopher’s work violated the system’s restrictions on gender and sexuality content.' 1/3

Wake up Samurai, RLVG IS BACK! 😎 We are happy to announce the awesome speakers of the second edition of the RLVG workshop: @alexkearney.com, @marloscmachado.bsky.social, Martin Singh-Bloom, Sam Devlin, Pete Wurman and @neuroai.bsky.social! Join us August 15th at @rl-conference.bsky.social!

Some people have misunderstood this. We literally saw how Claude itself, coded by Claude, turns one API call into a DOS of thousands upon thousands of API calls done in the sloppiest fucking way possible. This postmortem shows Bluesky vibecoded a function to DOS itself, in a similarly stupid way.

I recommend this episode of the Cognition Project Podcast by Tom Griffiths featuring Jerome Bruner. An intimate historical & personal account of the wildly interdisciplinary shaping of the cognitive revolution, intellectual currents that refused behaviorism, & the new science of the mind.

Skinner/any towering figure can contribute to sci but be wrong. Beyond being scientifically wrong about the mind, his 1971 book rejects dignity/freedom as outdated/harmful obstacles to his behaviorist vision: elites engineer society nixing human agency. That’s not humanism. Similar to AI risks? Yes.

The hardest part of science is posing the right question, not answering it.

Some reports say over 500 schools, 55 libraries, & 25 universities hit. You can debate the numbers, but hitting Sharif University & Beheshti is like hitting MIT & Stanford. I keep wondering: How would the scientific community respond differently if it was those universities? What’s the difference?

@neuroai.bsky.social gets it: philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph... I challenge you to find wiser advice: "our abstractions, kept alive as plural choices, visible as conceptual tools rather than hegemonic truths, can undo the ontological reversal, renaturalizing brains in flux".

This is only true for people who understand neither science nor economics. The NIH budget for this year is FIFTY times larger than OpenAI’s $1B pledge. The foundation of US science & innovation is public funding. The private sector cannot replace it. US science is being killed

after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...

More good news: the special issue on “The Brain Abstracted” by the great Mazviita Chirimuuta just dropped @phimisci.bsky.social. Check it out here: philosophymindscience.org/index.php/ph... (1/2)

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

$2.45 billion NIH grant cuts and ~2300 terminated active research grants were DOGE'd in early 2025 Who were most affected? www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.... Early career and women researchers

Really neat work by Fountas and colleagues at UCL: arxiv.org/abs/2603.04688 They propose that consolidation reflects a form of "predictive forgetting" that aids generalization.

A paid summer internship is available in Microsoft Research NYC for a *PhD student later in their degree*, with experience designing human questionnaires/experiments, collecting data on prolific, running statistical analysis, and writing papers. If you know exceptional candidates please ping me. 🙏

Going to Cosyne? There will be a "Biologically-inspired Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Opportunities" workshop on Monday 16th! 🧠 Exciting lineup of speakers alongside the opportunity to present your #NeuroAI poster, more info on program & poster signup below! #compneuro #neuroscience

Human hippocampal theta–gamma coupling coordinates sequential planning during navigation Impressive study from Dan Bush's Lab at UCL: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Small joys in dark times. Brooklyn Public Library and @simonsfoundation.org present Night in the Library: The Philosophy of Mathematics Free Event at Brooklyn Central Library Pi Day, Saturday 3/14 7 p.m. to 3:14 a.m Keynote Address by Werner Herzog www.bklynlibrary.org/night-library

Today is the 3rd slopiversary of us having to temporarily close submissions. The problem of "AI"-generated submissions hasn't gone away and is still a huge waste of our time. House policy remains the same: #noAI stories, translation, art, or anything else.