Cortical field coupling (aka volume conduction) lamina-to-lamina (1) and column-to-column (2). (1) www.jneurosci.org/content/41/3... (2) www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

1 To predict the behaviour of a primate, would you rather base your guess on a closely related species or one with a similar brain shape? We looked at brains & behaviours of 70 species, you’ll be surprised! 🧵Thread on our new preprint with @r3rt0.bsky.social , doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Well done Swissuniversities! @snsf.ch et al. once again leading the charge (see previous special issue announcement). Funders and institutes hold the cards. If they don't pay the profiteers, we researchers will just adapt. We don't need Nature. Nature needs us. #SciPub #ResearchIntegrity

And here I thought naively that my uptick in citation in 2025 on Google Scholar was due to my terrific scholarly contributions. Turns out, EVERYONE I know has had an uptick in citation in 2025. 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Academic publishing is broken. Anyone in the business of stringing words together is on notice.

Horrifying glimpse into a possible future of the scientific information ecosystem. Fake papers cited dozens of times in real journals, and indexed in our most commonly used databases -- As this grows, it could become a corruption of the literature impossible to undo. 1/2 #academicsky 🧠🟦

Wow. In fMRI, up is up and down is down, sometimes, but sometimes it's the other way around. This finding trashes the main claim on the default mode network, which states that it's brain areas have higher neural activity during internally oriented throught. Turns out, it's the other way around. 😂😂

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

We should just use standardized test scores + grades to admit students into college. Everything else is way too easy to game, allowing the extremely rich to dominate access to prestigious colleges. www.nytimes.com/interactive/... I've been saying this for a long time, but the data makes it clear.

Taming the chaos gently: a predictive alignment learning rule in recurrent neural networks www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social was a beloved friend and mentor. He was taken from us too soon. His was a beautiful mind who understood the beauty of minds. As ever before, his kind voice guides me and his work will continue. We miss you Jonny. www.cbs.mpg.de/news/obituar...

What is the most profitable industry in the world, this side of the law? Not oil, not IT, not pharma. It's *scientific publishing*. We call this the Drain of Scientific Publishing. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2511.04820 Background: doi.org/10.1162/qss_... Thread @markhanson.fediscience.org.ap.brid.gy 👇

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!