my excellent colleague KongFatt WongLin has an opening for a 10-month RA position in NeuroAI (suitable for people with an MSc that don't require a visa to work in the UK) www.linkedin.com/posts/kongfa...

Congrats to Ella for her new paper! She asked a really interesting question about how the brain represents uncertainty during hidden state inference, and in a lovely crossover with theoretical work, she shows that in mice, acetylcholine dynamics play a crucial role. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Foraging as an ethological framework for neuroscience From the amazing @lauragrima.bsky.social and colleagues - definitely looking forward to reading this! #neuroskyence #psychscisky #cognition

New paper with @statsepi.bsky.social and @deevybee.bsky.social in which we show there's really no evidence for a link between the gut microbiome and autism www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

With my great advisors and colleagues, @achterbrain.bsky.social @zhe @danakarca.bsky.social @neural-reckoning.org, we show that if heterogeneous axonal delays (imprecise) can capture the essential temporal structure of a task, spiking networks do not need precise synaptic weights to perform well.

Confusing stats language: The "linear" is linear regression means "linear in the parameters". It does not mean "can only fit straight lines", and things like polynomials and splines can be included in linear models. online.stat.psu.edu/stat501/less... 1/2

I am super happy to share that our project on training biophysical models with Jaxley is now published in Nature Methods: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Y'all. N>3,800. !!!!!!! Goodness gracious.

We did a thing. 😬

The link between the gut #microbiome and autism is not backed by science, researchers say. Read the full opinion piece in @cp-neuron.bsky.social: spkl.io/63322AbxpA#microbiome @wiringthebrain.bsky.social, @statsepi.bsky.social, & @deevybee.bsky.social

MiniThread: I was reading this paper and through it was worth a comment because the results are very counterintuitive to me (and the authors too) Miller, G. A., & Selfridge, J. A. (1950). Verbal context and the recall of meaningful material. The American journal of psychology, 63(2), 176-185.

What aspects of human knowledge do vision models like CLIP fail to capture, and how can we improve them? We suggest models miss key global organization; aligning them makes them more robust. Check out LukasMuttenthaler's work, finally out (in Nature!?) www.nature.com/articles/s41... + our blog! 1/3

In the end, even basic brain connectivity is different between rodents and primates, with primates having more specialized, sparsely connected brain regions. academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

Happy to share our review "Investigating hierarchical critical periods in human neurodevelopment” in @npp-journal.bsky.social! We examine neurobiological, environmental & behavioral evidence for human critical periods in sensory and association cortex +discuss new research directions rdcu.be/eMkVU 🧵

"Anyone who thinks the 21st century will not see the biggest global movement of peoples in history has not been paying attention." David Runciman on the combination of population decline in affluent countries and climate stress in the less affluent...

Gosh that's a very good long read, but not an easy one :) scottaaronson.blog?p=9030

unclear if Watson made a net positive or negative contribution to science. Without him would the double helix have been figured out sooner or later? Perhaps CSHL would not have grown to its eventual status Perhaps a swathe of women and non-white researchers would not have been lost from science

Endorse, and I'd also add that it's nice to mention a few things you liked about the paper at the start of the review.

My reviewing style has changed over time. Rather than litigate every little thing, and pushing my own ideas, I focus only on 2 things: (1) Are the claims interesting/important? (2) Does the evidence support the claims? Most of my reviews these days are short and focused.

Talks from #SNUFA 2025 are now available on YouTube: youtube.com/playlist?lis... 🤖🧠🧪

"studies have found little evidence for uniformly increased sensory precision in autism, but instead point to aberrant context-sensitive modulation of prediction errors"? which explains "why autism is associated with both hyper- & hyporeactivity to sensory input"? www.cell.com/trends/cogni... review

Watson was a racist who, "near the end of his life, faced condemnation and professional censure for offensive remarks, including saying Black people are less intelligent than white people"

I saw Jim Watson speak in the flesh only once, in 2013. During the talk he mentioned the "historic curse of the Irish, which is not alcohol, it’s not stupidity. But it’s ignorance." www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2013/03/21/w...

Delighted to announce with my colleagues Prof Yvonne Daly, Dublin City Uni; Prof Dave Walsh Walsh, De Montfort Uni; Prof Bennett Kleinberg, Tilburg Uni, we have secured an ERC Synergy grant entitled JUSTICE (or ‘Joining Unique Strategies Together For Interrogative Coercion Elimination).

The world’s first trillionaire initiated a move that has left more than half a million people dead, most of whom are children.

Personally I have never used an LLM to: - review a paper - review a grant - mark student assessments These are tasks I do not pass to LLMs because I am getting paid to do them and because I was asked to provide my individual professional judgement on their quality

LLMs are already reviewing science... just often not declared

My prediction is that LLM peer review will slow down science. It will do this for precisely the same reasons that contemporary peer review does and some extra ones. Start by reading @hansonmark.bsky.social thread below, then read on. 🧵

The advances we've made in statistics, experimental study design, and causal inference over the past century are remarkably useful for understanding our world. But there is never been a push to make people use them like we are seeing with generative AI. Perhaps take a moment to consider why.

Getting nervous for the talk I'm about to give at a workshop about "using AI to drive impact" which features slides such as these.

We must change this mindset that the essential and most critical work in a field is always the first one. That distorted view has caused a lot of problems in psychological science already. The first work is just that—the start. Every field should be evaluated based on the complete body of evidence.

Reactions to the "debunking" of the original 1956 cognitive dissonance work baffles me. A whole area doesn't die just bec the first work is faulty. That's novelty bias & theory ownership in psych talking. Mendelian genetics did not die when Mendel's original results were found too good to be true.

My favorite comment on the FT story

how much of this concession is just shareholder fear that "if Musk walks away our stock value will fall"?

Elon Musk is boosting the British right - and this shows how

not the first and almost certainly not the last time I am asking ChatGPT: what's the difference between a research aim and an objective

2/n Scientific heroes from the past had v different experiences / opportunities. His wife "..ran their households, hosted exuberant parties and raised their children. In short, she provided an environment in which Crick had the luxury of devoting all of his energy to his intellectual life." and..

🌟Prof @lizcoulthard.bsky.social 🌟discussing blood tests for dementia www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Many of our big insights into brain function come from trying to mimic it, writes @timothyoleary.bsky.social. This lesson should guide how we organize research programs. www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur... #neuroskyence

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language. tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬 1/n

Europe's MSCA postdoctoral fellowships are now attracting many researchers who would have gone to the US. So the payline has dropped below 10% (~1,600 fellowships to 17k applicants). Super tough situation. One more reason to double the next Horizon budget, as proposed by the EU Commission.

How does the brain find its way in realistic environments? 🧠 Using deep RL and neural data, we show that hippocampal-like networks support navigation, learning, and generalisation in partially observable environments—mirroring real animal behaviour. Now out: www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroAI

I’ve spent many years explaining/defending biorxiv’s “no reviews” policy. The logic was always that opening Word and opining is a far lower barrier than doing actual research, so noise’d be >> signal and we didn’t want to make subjective quality judgements. LLMs mean it makes even more sense 1/2

An MP needs to read out this quote in the House of Commons and ask the government why they are still on twitter cc @columeastwood.ie

Elon Musk, "These lovely small towns in England, Scotland and Ireland, they've been living their lives quietly. They're like hobbits" "And so one day, 1,000 people show up in your village of 500 and start raping the kids" "This has now happened, God knows how many times in Britain"

I was driving my kids to school one day and they were fighting in the back seat, so I said "ok, I want you to say 3 things you like about the other person". Bit of silence, then one of them said... "can we start with don't likes?"

Reminder everyone that #SNUFA is next week! Make sure to register in advance to get emailed the link to join.

It's only Donegal tweed if it's from the Tír Chonaill region of Ireland. Otherwise it's just sparkling wool 😉 Good article on the fight to get Donegal tweed a protected status www.ft.com/content/54f5...

Excited to share the latest from the lab on the molecular mechanisms of silencing and un-silencing a hippocampal engram ensemble. Was fun using a variant of the EPSILON technique developed by Adam Cohen's lab. (1/2) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...