Why was π afraid of θ? Because θηζ.

I made a little Instagram reel about this image because it’s just so frickin’ cool

Deeply honoured to have been awarded a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award to study how competition is encoded in the brain. This builds on the discoveries of outstanding past/present lab members. Grateful to mentors/collaborators/colleagues for their support. We are recruiting postdocs/PhD students.

Wanna do neuroscience in Paris but can't find interesting lab? Want to come do a sabbatical but don't know who to collaborate? Check this webpage aggregating ~all the neuroscience labs (+200) in Paris. ⚠️only the information of 'verified' profiles is reliable⚠️ Please retweet 🙏 parisneuro.fr

Really excited to share a new preprint! 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗱𝗼 𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘆 𝗿𝗼𝗯𝘂𝘀𝘁 & 𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗹𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗯𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘀𝗲? We explore how! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We built Connectome-based Neural Networks (CoNNs) using Drosophila wiring (larva&adult) & compared with random networks with same sparsity.

Proud to have supported James on this great project its an example of one of my favourite types of computational/theoretical neuroscience studies: first identifies an underappreciated but severe problem for current brain theory then goes and uses maths and clever sims to figure out the solution 😀

Non-random brain connectome wiring enables robust and efficient neural network function under high sparsity https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.30.715411v1

Excited to read this! Non-random brain connectome wiring enables robust and efficient neural network function under high sparsity www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

@thetransmitter.bsky.social is doing a lot of the heavy lifting these days, bringing attention to how astrocytes shape behaviour. Here's a nice list of their recent reports -

If all goes according to plan, in a few hours, a crew of astronauts will begin a journey that will take them on a loop around the moon. Here's a video that NASA put together to help people visualize the journey through space, first orbiting the earth before looping around the moon and flying home 🔭

Preprint out arguing that we should build the techology to translate (compile) molecularly annotated connectomes into dynamics. I think this is incredibly important. arxiv.org/abs/2603.25713

Why do schizophrenia GWAS signals look so flat across the genome? In our recent preprint, we explored why psychiatric disorders — and, more broadly, brain-related traits involving the central nervous system — appear to have unusual genetic architectures. 🧵1/n

Huge congratulations to Jes (not on Bsky) for her paper in @plos.org Computational Biology! A really elegant modelling study on how the brain discovers hidden structure and uses it to guide behaviour. @uclnpp.bsky.social @ucllifesciences.bsky.social 🧪 📈 🧠 journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

If you're interested in emerging ideas in neural interfaces, I humbly suggest my lab's latest: www.nature.com/articles/s42... Neural interfaces create dynamic interactions between the brain & devices. This means mean we need new engineering approaches beyond typical ML to "decode" a static brain

❗We are recruiting❗ A PDRA based in the Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University, investigating the #molecular and #cellular changes in 🐭 models for #schizophrenia #MURIDAE @mrcmousenetwork.bsky.social Please see link 👇 tinyurl.com/32u753js

New paper in PNAS! When the mind wanders, it often drifts to the body. We call this "body-wandering". These thoughts are often negative, but are associated with reduced ADHD & depression symptoms, driven by a distinct interoceptive-allostatic brain signature. pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2520822123

East End vs West End of a city you've never been in: which part would be more posh? Quite weirdly, in almost every historical city that you heard of (that is, in the Northern Hemisphere!), East would be poorer than the West. Even up to now, in many cases! Why? Because of the wind! 1/5

Job! My lab is hiring a pre-doctoral research assistant to work on the neural computations of foraging, seeking common cross-species algorithms. In collaboration with @brainapps.bsky.social & Nathan Lepora. Closes April 21st Pls share! jobs.nottingham.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx...

AI conference organizers hid LLM prompts in conference text, instructing LLMs to use specific words as watermarks when generating conference abstracts. This led to the disqualification of 497 submitted papers. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Ok this is getting embarrassing for me, so #stats people you know the Akaike information criterion (AIC) right? Uh ... how do you pronounce Akaike? I gotta verbally say it sometimes in teaching, and am tired of making a fool of myself lol

"We are watching two disciplines trade their worst habits. Neuroscience is mistaking benchmarked prediction for understanding, and machine learning is mistaking mechanistic language for mechanism. ..."

I had a great time talking to Meenakshi about my trajectory through neuroscience! Tune in for electric fish, imaging the hypothalamus, and trying to find a path in theory that stays relevant to the brain. Also, my early phd experiences of trying to do science when real life rears its head.

Once a year I ask my students to imagine a red star. It’s cognitive psychology and we are about to talk about whether “imagery” is the same or different from “perception”, but first, I like to check in on what our class experience when we imagine something. Friends, the results NEVER disappoint!

But now that we know more about aphantasia, it’s possible that the whole debate came out of scientists from different ends of the imagery spectrum shouting about their own experiences, and not believing that others’ experiences were real!

Statement by the Senate of Tel Aviv University

A Kerfuffle … UK research funding (and in defence of Sir Ian Chapman) ... by @profserious.bsky.social profserious.substack.com/p/a-kerfuffle

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc. The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic! www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

Anytime I hear the phrase "We need to restore trust in (news, higher ed, science, government, democracy, etc.)" there's a refusal to acknowledge the well-funded, right-wing machine at the heart of destroying that trust.

Same gap in the US. But the community represented by the universities is very much us

Convincing the public of Unis' value is not my job as an on-the-ground lecturer. I don't have the skills or reach to influence public opinion. It is the duty of university leadership, comms and marketing teams, who are currently failing to tackle this existential crisis.

As we heard in Germany in December - thanks to my translator - teenagers on a bus home say 'our teacher sets our homework using ChatGPT, we do it using ChatGPT, and he marks it using ChatGPT'

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.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, New York.

My quote of the day Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy. William Butler Yeats

Féile Pádraig sona daoibh! ☘️ Happy St Patricks day everyone! ☘️

Minus the croissant metaphor, which is brilliant, this is the strategy I always use when I give scientific talks regardless of audience.

Sharing “Neural Thickets”. We find: In large models, the neighborhood around pretrained weights can become dense with task-improving solutions. In this regime, post-training can be easy; even random guessing works Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.12228 Web: thickets.mit.edu 1/

A heartbreaking message from a brilliant med student in Iran, determined to pursue neuroscience. She graduated only one week before the war started and now is volunteering to care for the injured. What would you tell her? (Part #4, especially). Please share your thoughts and comments. #IranWar

feel this also applies to scientists. The best presenters restate the big picture stuff that may be 'obvious' to other field experts in the room, because expertise is always a minority position So easy to forget how much you have absorbed that would be exciting & cool for early career researchers

hard to process that this is real

How does the brain build a memory? A common assumption is that the neurons activated during an experience collectively form the memory engram. In our new Nature Neuroscience paper (finally out!), we show that this is not the case. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

During learning, the hippocampus activates multiple neuronal ensembles at different moments of the experience. But these neurons are not equivalent. Some participate in the experience… others become the actual memory trace.

"Frith can’t have it both ways, claiming high ground based on evidence (that she hasn’t kept up with) & then referring to a “belief” as support for such a sweeping & readily debunked statement dismissing commonalities autistic people share." @ejwillingham.bsky.social: buttondown.com/TPGA/archive...

Exciting news! The @yorkpsychology.bsky.social are recruiting 3 new ART (research and teaching) lecturers! One role will be prioritised for cognitive, affective and/or social neuroscience. #neuroskyence #cognition #psychscisky #neurojobs

I tracked every keyword in 22 years of Cosyne abstracts to map how computational neuroscience evolved — from Bayesian brains to neural manifolds to LLMs — and where it's heading next.

5000% the number one factor of PhD success is supervisor match. PhD is so unlike taught undergrad/masters experiences where you are learning from a large group of academics

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico? In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony. It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small! rdcu.be/e5H8G

'Only four in 10 UK PhD graduates remain in academia just over a year after completing their degrees with many more heading overseas for research jobs than in previous years, a major national poll suggests.' 1/3

I also think it's possible to accept the extreme heterogeneity of autism without resorting to a discrete subtypes model. 'Subtypes' to me implies clusters of individuals with similar symptoms, and few individuals between the clusters. No good evidence for such clusters afaik.