There seems to be a broad perception across psychology and neuroscience that work shouldn't be "too technical" in order to reach the broadest possible audience. While I think we should strive for accessibility, I feel that this attitude can also be self-defeating: why are we dumbing down?

Come learn some programming with a healthy helping of critical thinking; something no genAI can take away from you :) Also Prague is great fun ;)

Our latest publication grapples with how the brain could implement gradient descent by sending learning targets top-down, gating plasticity with dendritic inhibition, and updating synaptic weights with biologically observed learning rules like BTSP. www.cell.com/cell-reports...

If you are into networks, development, and dynamics don't miss my poster [3-072] this afternoon at #cosyne2026 🤠🧠

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.

This paper on how the brain may do gradient descent is very cool: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How can RNNs learn continuously without forgetting? 🧠 Our new preprint shows how a predictive learning rule organizes recurrent dynamics into orthogonal manifolds, reducing task interference. Congrats Zihan @zihan-liu.bsky.social ! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🧪🧠 New preprint: helping resolve a decades-long debate in synaptic plasticity NMDA receptors are central to Hebbian learning. Yet for >30 years, the existence and function of presynaptic NMDA receptors have remained controversial. 📄 doi.org/10.64898/202... 1/6

Learning sculpts orthogonal task manifolds for continual skill learning in recurrent networks https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.15.705283v1

Zajzon, Bouhadjar, Fabre, Schmidt, Ostendorf, Neftci, Morrison, Duarte: SymSeqBench: a unified framework for the generation and analysis of rule-based symbolic sequences and datasets https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24977 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.24977 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.24977

Retinotopy constrains the topology of neural manifolds in macaque visual cortex https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.22.695909v1

This report in Nature on the costs of competing for & administering scientific grants is shocking: "In other words, European taxpayers will have spent more on the funding process than on the funding itself, and the scientific ecosystem has been drained." www.nature.com/articles/d41... 🧪

SAVE THE DATE! On June 16-17, 2026, the NEST Initiative is excited to invite everyone interested in Neural Simulation Technology and the NEST Simulator to the NEST virtual Conference 2026. Registration and abstract submission will open soon! nest-simulator.org/conference

0/10 Thanks for the interest in our preprint. Some takes say it negates or fully supports the “manifold hypothesis”, neither quite right. Our results show that if you only focus on the manifold capturing most of task-related variance, you could miss important dynamics that actually drive behavior.

Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way. We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere: This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA It’s quite the opposite! (thread)

BTSP in V1 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

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...

Undecided which workshop to attend at #BernsteinConference ? We put together a stellar lineup for a satellite workshop on the effects of top-down signals on neuronal dynamics! 🧠✨📣 Join us tomorrow in room 0.101 ! bernstein-network.de/bernstein-co... With @ackurth.bsky.social

On the first workshop talk (Monday), I'll make the case that everything might be everywhere when you decode, but that is not the end of the story: different regions have very different dynamics and encoding geometries. This workshop is organized by @aitormg.bsky.social and @ackurth.bsky.social

Jonas Oberste-Frielinghaus, Anno C. Kurth, Julian G\"oltz, Laura Kriener, Junji Ito, Mihai A. Petrovici, Sonja Gr\"un: Synchronization and semantization in deep spiking networks https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12975 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.12975 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.12975

Jakob Stubenrauch, Naomi Auer, Richard Kempter, Benjamin Lindner: Stochastic synaptic dynamics under learning https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13846 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.13846 https://arxiv.org/html/2508.13846

Our current approach to defining neural populations is largely arbitrary. We need new methods for grouping cells, ideally by their dynamics, writes @markdhumphries.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur...

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪

Undecided whether to attend the #BernsteinConference2025 ? @ackurth.bsky.social and myself put together a stellar lineup for a satellite workshop on the effects of top-down signals on neuronal dynamics! 🧠✨📣 bernstein-network.de/bernstein-co...

New preprint alert 📣📣📣 New results showing how strong the link between brain dynamics and structure is 💫👀🧪 "Spontaneous spiking statistics form unique area-specific fingerprints and reflect the hierarchy of cerebral cortex" 🐾🧠 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

📣 New & better method to compare matrices just dropped! 📣 Ever wanted to compare things like connectivity matrices or large matrices of neuron responses in trials? There is a new way to do so in town ✨🧪 Singular Angle Similarity (SAS) journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst... 🧵

The NEST virtual conference is gearing up! Join us June 17-18, 2025 for a chance to exchange ideas and learn about developments in simulation science! Interested in contributing? The abstract submission deadline has been extended to **April 30**. Visit nest-simulator.org/conference. #nestsim

New preprint: "The geometry of the neural state space of decisions", work by Mauro Monsalve-Mercado, buff.ly/42wVHD5. Surprising results & predictions! (Thread) We analyze neuropixel population recordings in macaque area LIP during a reaction time, random-dot motion 1/

The unbearable slowness of being: Humans still clock in at just 10 bits/s. Even after peer review :) Share link: authors.elsevier.com/a/1kHVa3BtfH.... ArXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234

DAY 10: Advent of Comp Neuro 🎄🤖🧠🧪 Modular spiking networks that are connected randomly usually fail to propagate signals, but there is a way to overcome this: topographic connectivity! "Passing the Message: Representation Transfer in Modular Balanced Networks" www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...

DAY 6: Advent of Comp Neuro 🎄🤖🧠🧪 This nifty theory predicts how intrinsic timescales depend on network structure, neuron properties and input. A nontrivial task! “Microscopic theory of intrinsic timescales in spiking neural networks” tinyurl.com/43esfrrk By @avm.bsky.social and @albada.bsky.social

DAY 2: Advent of Comp Neuro 🎄🤖🧠🧪 Heterogeneous connectivity brings network dynamics closer to criticality! "Second type of criticality in the brain uncovers rich multiple-neuron dynamics" www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

DAY 1: Advent of Comp Neuro 🎄🤖🧠🧪 Feedback in RNNs can rotate the neural subspace to separate different source signals! "Invariant neural subspaces maintained by feedback modulation" elifesciences.org/articles/76096