ATTN: Two faculty positions are available in my department (neuroscience) at the University of Minnesota. This is a general search with no topic focus. November 20th application deadline. Apply here: hr.umn.edu/jobs/Find-Job Assistant Prof job code: 364920 Associate/Full Prof job code: 364921

Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s4...

I wrote an explainer about the mass firings—the RIFs. The RIFs all year have been clearly illegal. Russell Vought is using them to lawlessly clean out federal agencies. Lower court judges have said so. But the Calvinball Supreme Court has allowed them. 1/

Pleased to share new work with @sflippl.bsky.social @eberleoliver.bsky.social @thomasmcgee.bsky.social & undergrad interns at Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, UCLA. Algorithmic Primitives and Compositional Geometry of Reasoning in Language Models www.arxiv.org/pdf/2510.15987 🧵1/n

Fisher meets Feynman! 🤝 We use score matching and a trick from quantum field theory to make a product-of-experts family both expressive and efficient for variational inference. To appear as a spotlight @ NeurIPS 2025. #NeurIPS2025 (link below)

Want the freedom of a fancy fellowship, but not the year-long wait or arduous application? Come join my lab! Work on neuroscience and AI, explore your creativity, be independent or work closely with me, collaborate widely, and have a lot of fun! my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

Hotter take: We should only be reporting nonasymptotic confidence intervals using empirical Bernstein inequality or something similar. Dividing by sqrt(n) is incorrect unless n = infinity. (To be clear, I am 100% trolling)

Looking for a PhD program where you can study computational neuroscience? NYU has a fantastic array of researchers covering the field: groups.google.com/g/systems-ne...

A new essay on the crazy, all or nothing approach to work happening in AI today, the looming human costs, and the lack of a finish line. I wouldn't say it's okay, but I'm not sure how to fix it. www.interconnects.ai/p/burning-out

Excited to share our new work with @engeltatiana.bsky.social! RNNs are often used to explore how the brain may solve specific tasks. We show that, depending on the architecture, RNNs find distinct circuit solutions, behaving differently when exposed to novel stimuli. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

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 🧪

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

Delighted to share our new paper, now out in PNAS! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... "Hierarchical dynamic coding coordinates speech comprehension in the brain" with dream team @alecmarantz.bsky.social, @davidpoeppel.bsky.social, @jeanremiking.bsky.social Summary 👇 1/8

🚨Pre-print alert! 🚨https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.17.683171v1 Our new study tackles the question: do all neurons in motor cortices (MC) encode movement & coordinate as we move? Answering this question will be key for effectively targeting motor representations in BCIs.

Today in Nature Machine Intelligence, Kazuki Irie & I discuss 4 classic challenges for neural nets — systematic generalization, catastrophic forgetting, few-shot learning, & reasoning. We argue there is a unifying fix: the right incentives & practice. rdcu.be/eLRmg

This one hits close to home. Jim is my office neighbor. Absolutely devastating.

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...

Over the past year, my lab has been working on fleshing out theory + applications of the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. Today I want to share two new works on this topic: Eliciting higher alignment: arxiv.org/abs/2510.02425 Unpaired learning of unified reps: arxiv.org/abs/2510.08492 1/9

Finally out: our recent work with Nick Betley is a view into how the brain reshapes its behavior in the face of competing survival needs- and also a potential angle on treatment targets for enduring pain. A brief rundown... www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Six of the nine Nobel Prize winners this year work in the U.S. Three of the six were born outside the U.S., which is the pattern most years. No country has benefited more from welcoming immigrants from around the world. www.nobelprize.org

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

Federal workers are speaking out on how the Trump regime is harming Americans: "We stand here today at a moment of the greatest assault of our lifetimes on our freedoms. The US Constitution is being shredded... We are here to call on Congress to stand up and stop it." youtu.be/uw1KwIBgrCw?...

The neural control & computation lab is recruiting! If you're interested in using large-scale neural population recordings to study how the brain learns to produce complex and flexible behaviours, please get in touch. www.ncclab.ca

Many treat uncertainty = a number. At Apple, we're rethinking this: LLMs should output strings that reveal all information of their internal distributions. We find that Reasoning, SFT, CoT can't do it - yet. To get there, we introduce the SelfReflect benchmark. arxiv.org/pdf/2505.20295

Did you know that facial expressions reveal more than meets the eye? 🤯 Our new study shows that even a mouse's face 🐭 can reflect hidden neural computations🧠. Turns out, facial expressions are more than just emotions! We're so excited to see this paper out @natneuro.nature.com 🎉 🔗: rdcu.be/eIQzO

Interested in doing a Ph.D. to work on building models of the brain/behavior? Consider applying to graduate schools at CU Anschutz: 1. Neuroscience www.cuanschutz.edu/graduate-pro... 2. Bioengineering engineering.ucdenver.edu/bioengineeri... You could work with several comp neuro PIs, including me.

(1/n) How can we infer single-trial communication between 🧠 regions? Check out our ICML 2025 paper: “Accurate Identification of Communication Between Multiple Interacting Neural Populations,” by Belle Liu and @jsacks.bsky.social in my lab: arxiv.org/abs/2506.19094

I still think the major funders should all set up their own PLoS One-style journals (peer reviewed for rigour but not impact) and mandate that if you take their money, you publish the resulting research there, full stop

Please share with anyone who cares about NSF support for graduate students and take 30 seconds to sign and leave a comment. The deadline for the 2025 Graduate Research Fellowship Program is about one month away and literally no one can apply. #NSFGRFP jasonjwilliamsny.github.io/grfp2025/

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...

I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real: I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job! I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗

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/

Schulman thinks Jay isn’t a hardened cynic who is carrying out MAHA marching orders, but an idealist who has naively stumbled into being used as a tool of authoritarianism. He’s just too gosh darn nice & devoted to reason to do this willingly. This view is far too charitable.

A deep dive into the destruction of US cancer research by @jonathanmahler.bsky.social “It’s an absolutely unmitigated disaster,” a former top official at NIH told him. “It will take decades to recover from this, if we ever do.” Gift link: nyti.ms/48iH3Cr

Though it’s traumatic for me to bring this up, I was targeted by a group allied with Turning Point USA in 2018, with the help of Tucker Carlson on Fox. My home address circulated online and I got death threats. 1/

Great opportunity to learn to use fancy neural data analysis tools developed at the @flatironinstitute.org. Sign up for this workshop at SFN 2025!

🎉 Deadline is *tomorrow*! Join the @flatironinstitute.org workshop on pynapple & NeMos @sfn.org this November to analyze and model neural data pynapple: analyze neural time series NeMoS: model neural population dynamics Meals + accommodation included 👉 neurorse.flatironinstitute.org/events/2025/...

New workshop! Just before SFN, join the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Neuroscience of the Simons Foundation for a workshop on pynapple and NeMoS. Learn how to use these open-source packages to analyze and model neural data! Accommodation & meals provided. Link ⬇️

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We are not safe on Utah education campuses. State laws allow open carry guns and our politicians fan the flames of hate and division. The USA will never be a “free” country until something is actually done about gun violence! I fear for where we are heading 😢

⏳ Deadline is next Friday! Apply now to join our #SfN25 workshop on pynapple & nemos. Learn to analyze & model neural data using software developed at @flatironinstitute.org Accommodations + meals included! 👉

#Cosyne2026 is now open for business! Show us what you got both for the main meeting & workshop proposals 🧠🥳🧠🥳🧠

Of potential interest to those keen on motor control and/or multi-task networks. Congrats to Elom and Eric. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Led by @stanford.edu's @suryaganguli.bsky.social, our Simons Collaboration on the Physics of Learning & Neural Computation will study AI's fundamental scientific principles: www.simonsfoundation.org/simons-foundation-launches-collaboration-on-the-physics-of-learning-and-neural-computation/ #science

We all know that correlation doesn't imply causation. So we took some correlations and tested if they were causal. Here's what happened: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Finding correlates of the same signal in different brain areas is not evidence against specialisation, it is evidence for interconnection. When I flush my toilet, the level in the tank and the flow rate in the supply pipe become perfectly correlated. Yet these toilet areas have distinct functions.

Excited to share new computational work, led by @jzv.bsky.social, driven by Juan Carlos Fernandez del Castillo + contribution from Farhad Pashakanloo. We recover 3 core motifs in the olfactory system of evolutionarily distant animals using a biophysically-grounded model + efficient coding ideas!

New work with @shiyanliang.bsky.social‬, @roxana-zeraati.bsky.social, @intlbrainlab.bsky.social, Anna Levina. We uncover the principles that organize single-neuron timescales across the entire brain, unifying regional specialization with universal brain-wide dynamics: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Thrilled to share this work, long time in the making! Carried through creatively by @siddjakes.bsky.social after initial design & piloting by @trackingskills.bsky.social, with help from @trackingactions.bsky.social. Modeling in collaboration with Massimo Vergassola & Nicola Rigolli.

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.