Please take a minute to scroll through this—and share it. It's the story of our time. The Authoritarian Stack: How Tech Billionaires Are Building a Post-Democratic American—And Why Europe Is Next. www.authoritarian-stack.info

Today we celebrate the birthday of not one, but two amazing women in science! 🤗🎉Marie Skłodowska-Curie (1867), who discovered #radium & #polonium & pioneered #radioactivity, & Lise Meitner (1878), whose brilliance uncovered the physics behind #nuclearfission. Happy birthday, trailblazers! ✨

A reminder:

Happy Halloween

15 million Americans are going to lose their health care.

People emphasizing circles in dimensionality reduced trajectories are emphasizing the wrong thing imho. In a spatiotemporally low-pass world, dimensionality reduction literally reveals the fourier bases.

Scans shed light on changes in brain when we zone out while tired. Study finds lapses of attention in sleep-deprived people coincide with wave of cerebrospinal fluid flowing out of the brain. 🧪🧠 #neuroskyence www.theguardian.com/science/2025...

The NIH institute director firing last Friday is very bad. I made a video explainer about why. Stay for last post, w link to @science.org story from @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social 1/4 🧪

It’s not the thought that counts: Allostasis at the core of brain function www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... #neuroscience

We talk about an “attention crisis,” blaming poor academic performance on students’ attention deficits. But are long-term traits (ADHD symptoms) really to blame? Or is it our immediate focus? We test this - by measuring brain-to-brain synchrony as students learned from short educational videos. 🧠

iai.tv/articles/eme... Is "Emergence" really good for nothing? Or is this just a debate about semantics? philpapers.org/archive/HEIT...

One of my two last (ever) papers on tDCS: Does anodal tDCS over M1 really enhance motor sequence learning? A non-replication of earlier findings in a double-blind, pre-registered large-sample study in humans www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Faculty position in Biomedical Engineering in New York City at our lovely campus. Please re-post! cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

M1, not so low-d after all: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

And 93 of mine ...

This is a very impressive system. Ultrasound brain stimulation with 256 transduces and simultaneous fMRI. Results suggest focal stimulation of LGN, a visual nucleolus deep inside the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Path

The time between fucking around and finding out for messing with the climate and environment is long, and attribution is sometimes difficult. So conservative politicians have gotten away with appointing imbeciles to positions of power in these areas. However, no such luck for them in public health.

This rule would have meant I couldn't do my Ph.D. in America. I did do it in America. Became a professor. 12 thriving U.S. labs are now headed by trainees from my research lab. Like me, they are all working hard to enrich American knowledge and society. With this self-harming rule, none of that.

Bernie Sanders: Kennedy Must Resign www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/o...

Delighted to share our work on replay and successor representations! We find replay during very short task pauses in human visual cortex that is linked to learning SRs & happens when learning is implicit. Study led by @lnnrtwttkhn.bsky.social #compneuro #neuroskyence www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Excited to share our new paper w/ @cibaker.bsky.social in @natcomms.nature.com linking active vision & memory! We provide evidence that gaze reinstatement & neural reactivation are deeply related phenomena that jointly reflect the experiences constructed during recall. doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵1/9

Are top-down feedback connections enough for robust vision? We found ConvRNN with top-down feedback exhibiting OOD robustness only when trained with dropout, revealing a dual mechanism for robust sensory coding with @marco-d.bsky.social, Karl Friston, Giovanni Pezzulo & @siegellab.bsky.social 🧵👇

I had totally missed this development of "fast weight programming" (FWP). This review makes a fascinating connection between recurrent networks and transformers with FWP right between the two. Supper interesting.

Please sign! Science funding got strong support from the Senate but is now in the House! docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Our study is out in Nature! Using wireless Neuropixels we recorded hippocampal activity in freely flying bats and uncovered replay and theta(less) sweeps, revealing striking differences from classic rodent models. 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This new paper on memory of stories makes perfect sense to me: we remember those topics better that get more time in the narrative. Nice work.

"The BBC World Service has compiled material on over 160 cases where children have been shot in Gaza, and found that in 95 cases the child was shot in the head or chest. In most of these cases the victim was under 12 years old." www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjP6...

Nice work modeling behavior and EEG as dynamical systems. The State space model is similar to the "dynamical causal model" (without all the fantastical claims). Their code seems to work well in high dimensions, whereas DCM has only been used in small problems, despite both using the EM algorithm.

The word “Research” is doing way too much work. We need separate words for “creating new verifiable knowledge” and “looking shit up on the internet”

How reliable is OPM-MEG, and how does it compare to other neuroimaging modalities? 🤔 In a new preprint with ‪@s-michelmann.bsky.social‬, we evaluate the reliability of OPM-MEG within & between individuals, and compare it to fMRI & iEEG during repeated movie viewing. 🧠 📄 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Here is another idea from biology on how to make ANNs learn more efficiently during continual learning. Adjust weights in first layers early in development [to learn shared representations] and keep higher layers plastic for longer [to learn new tasks]. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧪 After the workshop on 7/7, the FDA and NIH are asking for public comments on implementing novel methodologies and other strategies to reduce the use of animal testing by 7/14: www.fda.gov/news-events/...

Together with @repromancer.bsky.social, I have been musing for a while that the exponentiated gradient algorithm we've advocated for comp neuro would work well with low-precision ANNs. This group got it working! arxiv.org/abs/2506.17768 May be a great way to reduce AI energy use!!! #MLSky 🧪

Do you know how crazy the weather has been? It is about to get crazier. www.intellinews.com/southern-oce...

Clever and simple idea of how to make vision models see the "big picture" rather than relying on coincidental details in an image: Train it first with blurry, colorless, low-contrast images, and only gradually improve them during development. Apparently that is how humans learn to see. So cool!

Congress is trying to kill new investment in solar and wind power. Meanwhile global warming is accelerating. This is a death wish, on a national and global scale.

We developed new state-of-the-art AI to detect breast cancer in MRI. This foundation model was trained on 30,000 MRI exams. Paper: doi.org/10.1148/ryai... Code: github.com/lkshrsch/Bre...

I still use this as an example of storytelling with visualization when I teach #datavis

A breakup letter to ChatGPT www.nytimes.com/2025/06/18/l...

No Kings in Kingston, NY #NoKingsDay

"Generative A.I. chatbots are going down conspiratorial rabbit holes and endorsing wild, mystical belief systems. For some people, conversations with the technology can deeply distort reality." www.nytimes.com/2025/06/13/t...

Routine immunization of U.S. children born 1994–2018 will prevent an estimated 419 million illnesses, 936,000 deaths, and $1.9 trillion in societal costs over their lifetimes. Newer vaccines like HPV are on track to reduce cervical cancers by tens of thousands of cases...

Evidence in support of the "Brain from the inside out": Response to movies is dominated by intrinsic brain dynamics. The dynamic itself is barely alternatered by the task of watching movies. Human intracranial recordings from 5000 electrodes, now out in eLife. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

I updated my funding curves last night. Here are the results for new and competitive renewal grants. The rate of investment has dropped substantially. This is apparently due to a requirement for DOGE review. I am calling this effect the "Downward DOGE" 1/2

I’m filled with overwhelming dread at Google’s launch of Veo 3 in Gemini. The amount of harm this AI generator will cause can’t be overstated. If it’s online it’s not to be trusted. Don’t believe your eyes or your ears. Don’t believe me? I’ll post some of Veo3 AI videos in this thread.

The intrinsic dynamic of the brain dominates its response to external stimulation. ... Think of waves on a quiet lake in response to pebbles you throw in. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

1/6 Why does the brain maintain such precise excitatory-inhibitory balance? Our new preprint explores a provocative idea: Small, targeted deviations from this balance may serve a purpose: to encode local error signals for learning. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... led by @jrbch.bsky.social