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.

My lab has been pushing into explainable, robust, & theoretically-tractable AI models for science 💪 New! Accepted to #ICCV2025 we introduce #DISTIL - led by amazing PhD student @mirzious.bsky.social - we propose a trigger-inversion method for DNNs that reconstructs malicious backdoor triggers 1/4

Wrote a eulogy for the yellow letters in my office window. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

ATTN🚨: I will be looking for PhD students through NYU's Center for Data Science PhD program this year. Applicants should have an interest in either NeuroAI (specifically biological attention or AI interpretability) or ML for Remote Sensing. Visit my lab website for more info: lindsay-lab.github.io

A short, must-watch video. Thanks to these scientists for sharing. We really need more scientists standing up against the assault on research. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/24/o...

And now for an update on my office window. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

I wrote an op-ed on the world-class STEM research ecosystem in the United States, and how this ecosystem is now under attack on multiple fronts by the current administration: newsletter.ofthebrave.org/p/im-an-awar...

Very excited to lead this new @simonsfoundation.org collaboration on the physics of learning and neural computation to develop powerful tools from physics, math, CS, stats, neuro and more to elucidate the scientific principles underlying AI. See our website for more: www.physicsoflearning.org

Our new Simons Collaboration on the Physics of Learning and Neural Computation will develop powerful tools from #physics, #math, computer science and theoretical #neuroscience to understand how large neural networks learn, compute, scale, reason and imagine: www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/08/18/s...

Wanted to share a new version (much cleaner!) of a preprint on how connectivity structure shapes collective dynamics in nonlinear RNNs. Neural circuits have highly non-iid connectivity (e.g., rapidly decaying singular values, structured singular-vector overlaps), unlike classical random RNN models.

The story told here doesn't feel quite complete, especially with respect to the role of money in Democratic politics, but this is the first piece in a mainstream outlet I can remember that seriously tries to figure out why Democrats are the way they are.

One of the joys of being a scientist is the ability to think about a problem for a long time. Our new preprint solves a mystery that has been bugging me since I was a graduate student (which was, ahem, a while ago). 🧪🧠🧵1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We're hiring!!! Princeton Psych has an Assistant Prof search in cog neuro (joint with @princetonneuro.bsky.social). Apply apply apply! puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/app...

Mind reading seems to be possible, but so could mind ~passwords~. More incredible work by the BrainGate2 team. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/s...

@davidpoeppel.bsky.social points out the elephant in the conference: whichever direction of the planet we look, things are bad. Einstein, chomsky and arendt point out to us that silence is not neutral 👏 #CCN2025

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

Are similar representations in neural nets evidence of shared computation? In new theory work w/ Lukas Braun (lukasbraun.com) & @saxelab.bsky.social, we prove that representational comparisons are ill-posed in general, unless networks are efficient. @icmlconf.bsky.social @cogcompneuro.bsky.social

Excited to announce that my first postdoc paper is now online! Links: www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/eAcN7 In it, we examine the perennial question: what changes in the brain when learning a new motor skill? Read more below to find out 👇

Neuroscience students asked us to teach a PRACTICAL course on experimental methods, and it is now on YouTube! Please like and repost to help us get the word out! www.youtube.com/playlist?lis... Lecture 1: Signals and data acquisition Focusing on hardware, digital/analog I/O, synchronization 🧵

Research Fellow position open at @gatsbyucl.bsky.social to work with me and Jason Hartford on Causality in Biological Systems! Apply at link, deadline is 27 August: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

The @flatironinstitute.org is hosting a 2-day workshop on Python packages for neural data analysis ( @pynapple.bsky.social NoMoS) prior to #SfN2025: neurorse.flatironinstitute.org/events/2025/.... Apps due Sept 8. And best of all, it's free, including meals and lodging! Go check it out!

Our paper on foraging is now published in Neuron! Read it here: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... This project was co-led by Michael Bukwich (not on Bluesky) and me, with major contributions from all co-authors. Huge thanks to the whole team!

Happy to have some good science news - our new study with @aqperkins.bsky.social is out in @plosbiology.org! dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour...

BREAKING NEWS: a government watchdog confirmed the Trump administration is breaking the law by blocking NIH funds.   How many kids with cancer or grandmas with Alzheimer’s have to get closer to death while crucial research is stalled?  Trump must end this illegal funding freeze.

✨ We’re #hiring Theory Fellows!✨ Janelia is recruiting early-career scientists to join our collaborative research environment and use #computation & #theory to tackle bold questions in #biology. 🔗 Apply by Nov. 3 👉 janelia.link/theoryfellow... @hhmi.org

🚨 Excited to announce our #NeurIPS2025 Workshop: Data on the Brain & Mind 📣 Call for: Findings (4- or 8-page) + Tutorials tracks 🎙️ Speakers include @dyamins.bsky.social @lauragwilliams.bsky.social @cpehlevan.bsky.social 🌐 Learn more: data-brain-mind.github.io

In neuroscience, we often try to understand systems by analyzing their representations — using tools like regression or RSA. But are these analyses biased towards discovering a subset of what a system represents? If you're interested in this question, check out our new commentary! Thread:

Coming March 17, 2026! Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.

🚨 Upcoming postdoc openings 🚨 We will soon be hiring postdocs to work on neural data analysis & modelling in the context of a recently awarded ARIA grant aimed at "precision control" of neural population dynamics (w. collabs. across the UK) Reach out if interested! www.aria.org.uk/opportunity-...

🏆 Excited to announce that we will feature Best Paper and Best Reviewer awards! 🎁 Winners will receive paid NeurIPS registrations! 👉Submit your work openreview.net/group?id=Neu... 👉 Sign up to review forms.gle/tDE4kJqVubES... See you in San Diego! 🚀

We are looking for a Postdoc (up to 5 years) who wants to study neural mechanisms of spatial memory in honeybees. This includes tetrode recordings in behaving honeybees. Application Deadline is 1st of October 2025. More details: www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/services/...

It looks like all NSF/NIH grants to UCLA (including mine and all fundamental neuroscience grants) have been suspended. www.science.org/content/arti...

We've studied a lot how synaptic plasticity refines mammalian circuits. But in the development of the Drosophila nociceptive system other factors might play a bigger role to maintain synaptic density during development. Check out this work led by Ingo and André www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...