1/35 New paper out! @jamesTstroud and I dive into why long-term studies are crucial for understanding evolution. They reveal processes impossible to detect in short timescales and capture rare events that transform our understanding of evolutionary dynamics. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Really nice experiment from Zutshi et al. looking at how the hippocampus encodes non-spatial variables, like auditory cue tones, while animals solve a spatial task: doi.org/10.1038/s415... #Neuroscience #Hippocampus #BrainScience

‘Ancient Cave Discovery Reveals That 8,000 Years Ago, the Sahara Was Green’ scitechdaily.com/ancient-cave...

Why Tononi et al's defense of IIT fails to convince me. medium.com/@kording/86f...

Read: www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

"Randall hosted a morning town hall Saturday in Bremerton that filled up in minutes. Rather than turning the overflow crowd away, she immediately held a 2nd session. 'I want to hear from everyone who took the time out of their day to be here,' she wrote online..." www.advocate.com/politics/hug...

Hippocampal neuronal activity is aligned with action plans www.nature.com/articles/s41... - really nice work from G. Buzsaki and colleagues, reinforcing an affordance-laden view of neural coding

And then Vance gives Trump a little there-there pat on the arm to Grandpa Ranty. This did not go as they expected

This is excellent. Moving all controls to touchscreens is one of the worst features in new cars.

One of the most memorable places I have been to: the Archaeological Museum in Heraklion. These are just four of the thousands of beautiful urns, jars, cups, and other vessels on display. And, of course, the octopus is a star!

President's Day rallies

The case for proper scientific study of unidentified flying and subsea objects. Whatever you think of that, this long paper is full of fascinating case histories. www.arxiv.org/abs/2502.06794

Our paper on how neural codes track prior events in a narrative and predict subsequent memory for details, led by @collinsilvy.bsky.social, is now out in Communications Psychology! rdcu.be/d93Vc #neuroskyence #psychscisky

"Europe must now start the painful process of “de-risking” its relationship with the US, looking for areas of dangerous dependence on America and stripping them out of the system.” from @gideonrachman.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/11f1...

Chris Fields and I on the origin of life: www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.... 🧪

OMG Sarah Cooper is brilliant www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cJ1...

In case anyone was wondering why the government was so heavily invested in scientific research (pre-DOGE) here is a clear explanation from one of the workers on the chopping block:

Now watching: Neuroscience vs Philosophy | Full Debate | Margaret Boden, Barry Smith, Steven Rose, Roger Bolton www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_yp...

‘The greatest propaganda op in history’: Trump’s reshaping of US culture evokes past antidemocratic regimes. Yes. Psychological warfare is more accurate term. Suggest reading my book, The Cult of Trump- all about mind control.

I wrote an op-ed for voters in a red state about how devastating NIH indirect cuts are. This type of writing isn’t my comfort zone, but I think we as scientists need to get the word out. Happy to chat with others looking to do the same in their communities! www.tennessean.com/story/opinio...

The "Podcast" ECoG dataset for modeling neural activity during natural language comprehension https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.14.638352v1

Linguistic coupling between neural systems for speech production and comprehension during real-time dyadic conversations https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.14.638276v1

This thread says it all. What insanity!

Is there an innate sense of number in the brain? doi.org/10.1093/cerc... #neuroscience

This, exactly 👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽

Constrained roads to complex brains - Neural development and brain circuit evolution converged in birds and mammals www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What these nihilistic vandals are doing to dismantle science & medicine—generations of expertise & public service & life improving benefits—is cultural revolution level national self harm. No foreign foe could inflict such brutal damage & senseless suffering on US so fast & effectively & unresisted.

Must-read for anyone interested in cognitive maps & the hippocampus.

Learning produces an orthogonalized state machine in the hippocampus rdcu.be/d9HOD

“Do not bend your neck for that which cuts necks.” A Sumerian proverb, as relevant today as it was thousands of years ago.

🚨 Big plesiosaur news 🚨 Our paper is out. We describe pigment cells and scales in a Jurassic plesiosaur. Small scales are found at the limbs which enforced them. Body and tail are scale-less. Many thanks to lead-author Miguel Marx & the team. www.cell.com/current-biol... #Science #News #Nature 1/3

Rethinking Brain Mechanisms in the Light of Evolution with Paul Cisek youtu.be/CnT7jaQX4X8?... - if you want to understand what brains are for (and their functional organisation), this is the way... 👍👏

There is as much evidence that it's ghosts pushing the electrons into interference fringes. It's fine to make up stories to aid our flailing intuition, but I'm talking only about what the quantum formalism permits us to say.

🎉 We're excited to share our new research in @nature.com ! We reveal that crocodile head scales self-organize through compressive folding of the skin - a mechanical twist on their development & evolution! Please read & share 🐊🔬 @genevunige.bsky.social

AI in medicine: preparing for the future while preserving what matters. #BMJ

The first half of the 20th century was extraordinarily social—but now Americans are spending more time alone than ever. @dkthomp.bsky.social reports on the technological, sociological, and political forces that fueled an anti-social society: theatln.tc/NnZyqTgA

An Independent Coding Scheme for Distance versus Position in the Hippocampus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.27.629676v1

This video is chock full of insights about the 2024 SOTA in AI from vision to LLMs. From @latent.space www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT63...

Great write up on the 10 bits/s paper. Conjecture: this slow information flow rate is the price we pay for better generalization. We learn to pay attention to “slow varying features” for better generalization (a la slow feature analysis, Wiskott and Sejnowski).

This thread on X is a good example of the apocalyptic stuff on social media. Will the world change a lot in the next few years because of AI? Very likely. Do we know how it will change? No. Will things get better or worse? No idea. Who will benefit and who will lose? Your guess is as good as mine.

It’s hard to tell at this moment of peak hype before shortcomings begin to be found, but the fact that #o3 uses good old-fashioned search during inference makes it more likely to survive the hype. At the same time, it may make the system less scalable.

In my latest column for @theneweuropean.bsky.social I consider what AI is doing for the life sciences right now, and what's to come. www.theneweuropean.co.uk/critical-mas...

A significant body of research has investigated why, as city populations grow, so do violent crime, contagious diseases — and per-capita GDP. A new paper now finds that cities with strong interconnectivity show a marked economic benefit, even beyond normal scaling. www.santafe.edu/news-center/...

A little late on the 🦋🚂, but happy to share a new(ish) preprint - the culmination of three years of postdoc with @tyrellturing.bsky.social and @apeyrache.bsky.social, and my first real foray into #NeuroAI as a tool to study the sleeping brain 🧠🟦: biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/🧵) c’est parti!

A little update to include a few more interesting examples (and tiny typos corrected 🤓) thanks to those who gave feedback! ❤️🥳 #AI #ML4Neuroscience arxiv.org/abs/2411.15234

Great, @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social is here with an exciting event (organized by @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social @shamkakade.bsky.social Bernardo Sabatini ) on the horizon

A very useful guide to the uses of AI tools.

Fun fact related to this thread: Do you know what brought the ReLU activation function back into vogue in AI? It was this paper from Yoshua's group, which was motivated by the observation that ReLU is a better match to real neurons' IO-functions! proceedings.mlr.press/v15/glorot11a 🧠📈 #NeuroAI

Punishing temporal judgement boosts sense of agency and modulates its underlying neural correlates https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.12.628000v1

thoughtforms.life/diverse-inte... my talk on diverse intelligence, and downloadable content - the slides, and an old book and citation library of papers on plant intelligence. 🧪