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...

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵 #neuroskyence 1/

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans. Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

Ex-Israeli minister Ayalon: "There is no famine in Gaza." Me: "Why does the IPC say there is a famine?" Ayalon: "The IPC changed the criteria." Me: "That's a lie. What criteria did they change?" Ayalon: "They changed many criteria." My full interview with Danny Ayalon: zeteo.com/p/danny-ayal...

We are still accepting applications for the #postdoc opportunity in the lab 🕵‍♀️ 🧠 More details 👇 Postdoctoral position: lnkd.in/g4TkRxpM Research directions: lnkd.in/eV2iMKGf Our team and philosophy: lnkd.in/eh3nnNgq ⏬

Can we use what we’ve learned about cognitive maps to understand social cognition, including theory of mind? If you’re interested in answering this question then this is a fantastic postdoc opportunity with @mkwittmann.bsky.social in collaboration with @summerfieldlab.bsky.social and my lab.

Our new paper is out! When navigating through an environment, how do we combine our general sense of direction with known landmark states? To explore this, @denislan.bsky.social used a task that allowed subjects (or neural networks) to choose either their next action or next state at each step.

How long is the world going to allow this horror to go on?

We have a Research Assistant position available in Rushworth Lab to help us with projects involving fMRI, TMS, and TUS. Find out more here my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

“This whole generation is being targeted. They will suffer from memory problems, developmental delays … And the problem is even if nutrition becomes available later on, the damage is permanent,” www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

Our new paper out now in Science explores how neural activity in the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) *drifts* over time - and *jumps* at key boundaries - to help organize events in memory. 🔗 www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... Here's a quick summary of what we found 🧵👇

It's officially published!! In my main postdoc work with @markplitt.bsky.social and @lgiocomo.bsky.social, we found that the hippocampus simultaneously encodes an animal's spatial position and its experience relative to reward in parallel population codes. 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm pleased to share our new work, “Spatio-temporal organization of network activity patterns in the hippocampus”, out in @cp-cellreports.bsky.social ! With Demi Brizee & David Dupret, we track how oscillations and spiking behaviour map onto hippocampal layers using an LFP-based embedding. (1/13)

Completing the mouse, ANN, human trilogy of projects, here are two openings to study cognitive map deficits in human psychosis patients with the inimitable @mattnour.bsky.social Using functional neuroimaging and planning tasks. If you’re keen to join us then apply!

It's that time of the year again... Applications are open for students and teaching assistants for Introduction to Computational Neuroscience 2025 summer school. Applications are open till May 15th. Apply now and Repost! #ArabCompNeuro25 #neuroscience #education

This is not to be missed. You’ll spend your day trying to make RNNs psychotic. And we’ll pay you for it!

2 weeks to go!

“GAZA -- Israeli authorities have blocked supplies -- including food, medicine and fuel -- from entering the Gaza Strip for more than 50 days.” abcnews.go.com/amp/Internat...

Fantastic to be part of this unique conference in Pipa, Brazil. Great science, inspiring students and the weather wasn’t bad either. Massive thank you to @vitorlds.bsky.social @andressaradiske.bsky.social and @rhythmicspikes.bsky.social for organising. Onwards and upwards for the global south!

How do cognitive maps fail? And how can this help us understand/treat psychosis? My lab at @oxexppsy.bsky.social is hiring a Postdoc tinyurl.com/2p935hhz and RA tinyurl.com/3myfpb78 to answer these questions in mouse models. Here's why you might want to join: 🧵

I so desperately want to focus on my work but it's extremely challenging given the sheer lack of empathy and courage a large population of the world is showing in the form of a basic understanding of what apartheid is, or ethnic cleansing, or fascism. Nevermind the attack on science and minorities.

Happy to share the latest version of our work on compositional maps in hippocampus with Jo Warren, @jcrwhittington.bsky.social, @behrenstimb.bsky.social. We propose hippocampus constructs maps from cortical building blocks in replay – now with empirical support! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 1/9

New paper from our lab now in @nature.com . We show that our brains use basis functions or "building blocks" to navigate social interactions. Rather than tracking every individual separately, social information is compressed into patterns that can be flexibly combined. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Ramadan Mubarak :)

❗RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES❗ We're hiring for an ambitious @wellcometrust.bsky.social project exploring brain mechanisms of planning/inference in psychosis 🧠 Tackled at multiple scales: from single neurons to human behaviour/fMRI and neural networks. Opportunities for 1 post-doc 1 clinical fellow 👀

Cognitive psych is often traced back to the 1950s. Psychology is often traced to Wundt's lab in 1879. Textbooks speak of "proto-psychologists" like Fechner & Helmholtz in the 1800s... Westerners all. Have you heard about Ibn al-Haytham, whose work predated them by 100s of years? 1/4

There are lots of good reasons why replacing traditional closed book exams with open book ones is a good idea. Framing it to be about “reducing attainment gaps” doesn’t help anyone. www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01...

This is an elegant dispatch summarising our study on mFC schema from Sina Tafazoli Adel Ardalan and @timbuschman.bsky.social Really beautifully explained! "Cognitive neuroscience: How the brain navigates abstract task spaces" www.cell.com/current-biol...

The Genomic Code: The genome instantiates a generative model of the organism arxiv.org/abs/2407.15908 (revised version, following peer review)

I am devastated to share the news that Professor Eleanor Maguire has died at the age of 51 after 3 operations and proton beam therapy for a spinal tumour. She was internationally renowned for her work on navigation, episodic memory and brain plasticity. #neuroscience #psychology

Old school unconditional racism is just not fashionable any more - Elon Musk’s racism is second order - “I’ll tolerate you if you’re useful to me (eg H1B visa saga) - if not, I‘ll relentlessly demonise you and disproportionately highlight crimes committed by your people”

I wrote an introduction to RL for neuroscience last year that was just published in NBDT: tinyurl.com/5f58zdy3 This review aims to provide some intuition for and derivations of RL methods commonly used in systems neuroscience, ranging from TD learning through the SR to deep and distributional RL!

Delighted to share that I’ll be joining @oxexppsy.bsky.social as a group leader/Faculty next spring. My group will investigate how our cells build models of the world and of our internal goals, and how this goes wrong in disorders like schizophrenia.

We're going all out to try and understand mechanisms of cognitive symptoms in psychosis - including human neuroimaging with @mattnour.bsky.social, computational work with @mariaeckstein.bsky.social and @drrickadams.bsky.social and mouse electrophys/optogenetics with me ... watch this space!

Friends, this is urgent. Families in Gaza are starving and need our help. I have donated to and been following this soup kitchen since they started. They provide hot meals to thousands & they need funds to keep going. Please consider donating & sharing. gofund.me/aab9459d

New paper out in #Neuron: A general theory of sequential working memory in prefrontal cortex and RNN/SSMs with their exact neural mechanism. Plus unifying this new mechanism with the alternate mechanism of hippocampal cognitive maps! (1/9) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

What do you get if you ask a recurrent network (like the PFC or Entorhinal cortex) to generalise a transition structure? Turns out different things depending on how intimate they are with an external memory (like Hippocampus). Elegant theory led by @jcrwhittington.bsky.social

This study shows that spike sequences carry information beyond what rates and latency to first spike do: www.nature.com/articles/s41... My reactions: 1) Cool to see this in humans. 2) Are people still surprised that spike times carry information beyond rates/first-spike latency?!?!?! 🧠📈 🧪

A bit late to the Bluesky party but here’s our work showing a coordinate system for behavioural space, and an algorithm for computing behavioural sequences in the mFC: www.nature.com/articles/s41...