New preprint from Satoshi Kuroki & Sébastien Royer Grid cells encode reward distance during path integration in cue-rich environments www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-7...

Dynamics of Dentate Gyrus Place Cells and Dentate Spikes Signal Spatial and Nonspatial Changes in Environments https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.24.684382v1

🤖📈 How do LLMs use their depth? Akshat Gupta led a fun project to find out! We leverage TunedLens (~linear decoding of tokens) to explore how LLMs' internal representations change from layer to layer. Preprint: arxiv.org/abs/2510.18871 1/

🧠 Thrilled to share our NeuroView with Ellie Pavlick! "From Prediction to Understanding: Will AI Foundation Models Transform Brain Science?" AI foundation models are coming to neuroscience—if scaling laws hold, predictive power will be unprecedented. But is that enough? Thread 🧵👇

Our work with @pawa-pawa.bsky.social is out in Nature Machine Intelligence! The choice of activation function affects the representations, dynamics, and circuit solutions that emerge in RNNs trained on cognitive tasks. Activation matters! www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Environmental Novelty Modulates Rapid Cortical Plasticity During Navigation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.21.683723v1

Large-scale cellular-resolution read/write of activity enables discovery of cell types defined by complex circuit properties https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.21.683734v1

Hebbian learning accounts for the effects of experience and novel exposure on representational drift in CA1 of hippocampus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.21.683686v1

To plan the future, the PFC represents a step-by-step map of actions, and at every step, this plan moves to the past like a conveyor belt. This proposes a simple subspace architecture for planning. A toy environment can clarify it. A🧵with my toy model and notes: #neuroskyence #compneuro #NeuroAI

Sequential Development of Task Representation from Hippocampus to Prefrontal Cortex Supports Goal-Directed Spatial Navigation "We found this ring-like structure evolved after learning, in a way that the hippocampal-prefrontal manifolds converged to a shared geometry" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I disagree that the Turing Test is a test for consciousness in any way. We explore the difficulty of testing for C in this article: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38485576/ ... (1/2)

Distinct neocortical and entorhinal networks for time, space, and reward https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.13.682150v1

Hippocampal transformations occur along dimensions of memory interference https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.13.682242v1

Really interesting work by Bakhurin and colleagues challenging the reward prediction error hypothesis of dopamine: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I love this figure which both echoes and undermines the famous figure from Schultz et al. (1997).

It is finally out! Have you ever wanted to get into information theory, complexity, and networks? If so, this is the paper for you: a comprehensive tutorial review on information theory for complexity scientists specifically. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Everyone knows that temporal contiguity is important for associative learning. As the interval between a cue (e.g., a light) and an outcome (e.g., shock) gets longer, the conditioned response (e.g., freezing to the tone) is acquired less quickly.

That's what we're saying people should try to do here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

here the trick is to unpack the word *understanding* it’s not about what each neuron does, but the rules shaping the behaviour of biological systems! "rules for development and learning in brains may be far easier to understand than their resulting properties" 👇👌 arxiv.org/abs/1907.06374

A study led by Cina Aghamohammadi is now out in ‪@natcomms.nature.com‬! We developed a mathematical framework for partitioning spiking variability, which revealed that spiking irregularity is nearly invariant for each neuron and decreases along the cortical hierarchy. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nice paper from Fuentealba et al. (2025) looking at the involvement of hippocampus in the emulation of conspecifics: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... #Neuroscience #Hippocampus #PlaceCells #SpatialLearning

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So I get that a Neuroscientist Couldn’t Understand a Microprocessor, and TBH I’m ok with that. But could a neuroscientist understand a deep RNN? Because that seems like a more pressing issue. *assuming you think the brain operates through the parallel activity of many connected input/output units

Introducing CellTransformer, a new AI tool developed with UCSF that makes it easier to explore massive neuroscience datasets and identify important subregions of the brain. 🧵

For XAI it’s often thought explanations help (boundedly rational) user “unlock” info in features for some decision. But no one says this, they say vaguer things like “supporting trust”. We lay out some implicit assumptions that become clearer when you take a formal view here arxiv.org/abs/2506.22740

It's officially been 75 years since the proposal of the Turing Test, a good time bring up 'The Minimal Turing Test': www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In honor of the 75th anniversary of the Turing test, I'm re-upping my short essay, "The Turing Test and our shifting conceptions of intelligence". www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Using a new genetically-encoded voltage indicator in an all-optical approach to measure synaptic plasticity in awake behaving mice. Great work by @jacquescarolan.bsky.social and colleagues. Check out www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Interesting paper suggesting a mechanism for why in-context learning happens in LLMs. They show that LLMs implicitly apply an internal low-rank weight update adjusted by the context. It’s cheap (due to the low-rank) but effective for adapting the model’s behavior. #MLSky arxiv.org/abs/2507.16003

“Mapping ion channel function” doi.org/10.7554/eLif... isn’t exactly a citation slayer, but it’s still one of my favourites (& my first independent project). Today we push pt 2, where we trace code origin & unite almost all channel models in a common expression. Boom! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Do AI reasoning models abstract and reason like humans? New paper on this from my group: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02125 🧵 1/10

Hippocampal Fos-expressing neurons stably encode boundaries in novel environments https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.06.680713v1

Neuropixels Ultra! By @steinmetzneuro.bsky.social, who led a big collaboration www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our paper on 'mini analysis' is now published in @jphysiol.bsky.social If you are recording mPSCs or sPSCs, I hope this helps with analysis. Interpretation of these datasets is not as easy as it seems..! Happy to discuss if you are interested physoc.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/...

1/8 How can the brain create countless unique memories using a single, universal metric of space? We’ve been waiting for the answer to this for two decades! Read it here: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

1/5 How does the brain turn the low-dimensional, universal grid cell metric into the rich, diverse codes needed for memory in hippocampal place cells? 🧵 Preprint link 👇 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A better way to track problem solving during agentic coding - the latest in my Better Code, Better Science series russpoldrack.substack.com/p/a-better-w... - I have found this relatively simple approach to work very well.

I have just dropped a new version of my academicdb project, which helps prolific researchers generate a CV automatically. Now with a web interface! If you are interested, please try it out and let me know what you think - it takes a bit of setup work but then runs easily using Docker.

Thanks to @pessoabrain.bsky.social and @thetransmitter.bsky.social for featuring our paper and to @aliyarumana.bsky.social and Peter Tse for engaging so generously with the ideas! 😊 www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

Perhaps of interest: www.nature.com/articles/s44...

In his new book, published today, artificial-intelligence researcher @blaiseaguera.bsky.social draws from computer science, machine learning and neuroscience to provide a nuanced examination of the fundamental aspects of intelligence. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/learning/wha...

New preprint! How can you remember an image you saw once, even after seeing thousands of them? We find a role for humble mid-level visual cortex in high-capacity, one-shot learning. doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.22.677855 🧵🧪1/

Congrats @natrevneuro.nature.com! I enjoyed your editorial. Things have come a long way in the last 25 years, haven’t they? I admire shaking things up a bit on big birthdays; may we all. And thank you for including me in your first WorldView. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

New preprint! What happens if you add neuromodulation to spiking neural networks and let them go wild with it? TLDR: it can improve performance especially in challenging sensory processing tasks. Explainer thread below. 🤖🧠🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

What happens in your brain when you make up your mind? Postdoc (soon faculty at U. of Utah) @thomas-zhihao-luo.bsky.social and ex-grad student (now Shanahan Fellow at Allen Institute) @timkimd.bsky.social have some answers in this new paper out in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧵 1/6

Spatial predictive coding in visual cortical neurons https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.17.676794v1

Memory-specific E-I balance supports diverse replay and mitigates catastrophic forgetting https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.09.19.677474v1

in my 2006 PhD interview in Edinburgh I showed a slide with the "rotating snakes" illusion and said I want to understand how it works in the brain... thought I was being clever Could never I have dreamed that 19 years later people would be figuring out this kind of thing in such mechanistic glory