All cognition is theoretical! Assumptions are inescapable, but some are testable.

“Banger,” my neighbors hear softly through the walls

The field of neuroscience makes a lot more sense if you see it as a generation-long battle between the “Marrian” program of focusing on function and hoping a brain falls out and the “Markramian” program of building a brain and hoping function falls out and tbh I think they’ve both failed.

From “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to “Give me 100K”

What Is It Like to Be a Rat?

Turns out BTSP is not All You Need™️?

How s this possible? Unlike cortex, the thalamus lacks local excitatory loops. We found ADN neurons switch abruptly between silent and active states, a non-linear firing mode that can create structure from noise. This was described by @dlevenstein.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 9/13

I'm in two minds, I want non LUCA life of course! But I'm also really hoping that the 1st life we find isn't on Mars because 50% of life we know being "was there and got extinct at a boring stage" is really bleak

Interesting question if this is a “similar photoreceptors and visual system” kind of effect or a “platonic representation hypothesis” kind of effect.

Ok is this a LinkedIn kind of social media platform, or a pre-Musk Twitter kind of social media platform?

Such a fun collaboration to be a part of! Turns out, like many things in the brain, inhibition-stabilization is the answer. 👀🧭⚖️

“If everything is everywhere, why have distinct areas? Here we show that the function of a brain area is more related to how different types of information are combined (formatted) in neural representations than merely whether that information is present.”

Found in the depths guarding a bunch of zonaite… #TOTK #IYKYK

TBH I think “blueskyism” is just a euphemism for stanning @internethippo.bsky.social and sign me up.

If you adopt “my way or the highway”, it’s a mess. My take is that “emotion” is like “memory”. It’s not one thing you shape a theory around. But we haven’t yet agreed on how to carve up the things.

Everything everywhere all of the time but also sometimes only somewhere some of the time.

I think this is the right view. But it’s worth adding that a large section of neuroscience defines specialization by what areas ‘encode for’, defined predictively. Rather than the bell tolling for local specialization, it might be tolling for that ‘functional’ stim-response paradigm

The only rule without exception in biology is that there is an exception for every rule, and I'm not even sure about that one.

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My working model is that Claude is a clever djinn, and I should just expect trickery and plan accordingly

“Agency” in the ethics/responsibility sense and “agency” in the cybernetics/autonomy sense are on a collision course and won’t this be fun.

There seems to be an implicit assumption here that reality monitoring requires consciousness. Why couldn't the brain in principle monitor reality without being subjectively aware of it? (Note that I'm not arguing against the empirical facts of the matter, just the functional argument.)

Beyond the 2-body solution: how theorists can be hubs in cross-disciplinary collaborations. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Oof. The Swartz meeting in 2016 was my first non-sfn conference, and my first poster presentation. Met @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social. Sad day for computational neuroscience.

Now here’s the really cool part: theory predicts medial temporal lobe (MTL) first stores memories, but cortex is the final storage site. Our models show this after one night of sleep! MTL models decode presleep, while frontal cortex (FC) decodes postsleep, but not vice versa. 5/6

The good news is that “NeuroAI and Dynamics of Sleep lab” is a great name. The bad news is that the acronym…

Uh oh.

The thing about being a PI they never warn you about is how the email becomes a flood. Just kidding they all warn you about that and guess what turns out it's true.

Is there a desktop app for @bsky.app that auto-refreshes/scrolls your feed?

We started watching (re-watching for me, first-watching for @paigevryan.bsky.social) the Ken Burns Jazz documentary this weekend and 1) holy crap it’s still quite good 💯 recommend, and 2) it’s quite interesting to see, from 2025, a documentary made in 2000, about things that happened in 1900-1960

The shitty first draft is and always will be the number one strategy for writing well. Editing is a craft you can hone. Writing from scratch is a different dumpster fire every time you put a pen to a blank page.

On a related (perhaps different?) note, at the SNAP philosophy of neuro meeting, there was an undercurrent of thought that consciousness required biology. This really confused me because it felt a bit like “we need bio-magic” for consciousness. What am I missing?

Probably most of you who care to know about this already do, but just in case. The Gloaming live still slaps something fierce 🎧🤘

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

Great conversation with Heather Douglas on the value-free ideal of “pure” science, how the 20th century social contract based on it has broken down, and the need for a new one.

If a mouse behaves in a forest and no one is around to experiment it, does it really have a “task”?

Mirror neurons making a comeback?

There is a middle ground here. AI isn't a miracle that will soon replace humans. But simultaneously, it is incredibly impressive technology that will be used in quite a lot of places

It was an honor to write this, but also great fun. A chance to look back at the classics, and think about the path forward. #Physics is a beautiful human endeavor. journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

“NeuroAI should not remain limited to learning statistical relationships, but should also help in building mechanistic and causal models of neural activity. These models will incorporate biological properties of neural circuits, including cellular characteristics and network properties.” 💯💯💯

I personally think the American Robin Wikipedia page needs an entire section on egg-content variation, which is why I should never be allowed to touch it.

So, #AcademicSky PIs, a few completely random questions for you: What’s something you wish you had known/did when you started your own lab? -or- What’s something you did when you started your lab that worked out well? Asking for a friend...

Starting to think this might not be about microwaves after all…

I continue to think interneuron circuits are an untapped inspiration in neural network design for context-dependent computation.

Sure but also I have so many questions about the parties/icons listed on this graphic.

Looks like it’s “what do people think about big questions day” in science today. What’s life and what’s stuff?

I'm going to be no fun and suppress the impulse to make fun of that, because it actually raises an interesting point. Can the emergent macroscopic 'whole' reach down and control the otherwise random quantum goings-on within it?

📢 Calling all senior neuro postdocs: SYNAPSES brings postdocs from around the world to Yale to share their work during an in-person symposium on October 23, 2025. Apply today to present your research, talk with faculty members in 1:1s, & interact with Yale postdocs! 🧠🧪 Deadline Sept 7. #neuroskyence

Inhibition seems so important for SWRs. One question I find myself asking lately is if this is just a matter of the SWR generating mechanism, or if inhibitory networks are a critical part of replay’s function.

theory is kind of like scifi writing in this way actually. you paint pictures of "what if" scenarios.