Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Neuroscience has become increasingly concerned with prediction, and machine learning with causal explanation, with each field adopting methods from the other, writes @gershbrain.bsky.social. Will this bring us closer to understanding neural systems? www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

New preprint: our lab’s first Alzheimer’s paper! “Loss of neuronal population organization links pathology to behavior in a model of Alzheimer's disease” www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧪🧵1/

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc. The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic! www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

We are recruiting PhD students and postdocs at UIUC ECE interested in learning dynamics, spiking networks, and dynamical systems. Details: rainerengelken.github.io/join/

Today I received a note from a grad student who lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future. rezashadmehr.blogspot.com/2026/03/hope...

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico? In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony. It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small! rdcu.be/e5H8G

Psyched to announce our COSYNE workshop on social behaviors (Mar 17th, Cascais). We have a stellar lineup of speakers on topics from animal cooperation and aggression to the social dynamics of LLM agents. Co-organized with Libby Zhang (Allen Institute + UW). cosyne-social-behavior.github.io

I am totally pumped about this new work . "Task-trained RNNs" are a powerful and influential framework in neuroscience, but have lacked a firm theoretical footing. This work provides one, and makes direct contact with the classical theory of random RNNs: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We’re looking for a new Research Tech! Our research tech is heading to graduate school (very exciting!), which means we’re recruiting someone new to join our team. The position involves hands-on neuroscience research in a collaborative environment. brandeis.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Jobs/job/Bra...

This obviously very stupid but is it also smart? We’ll talk to some liars after this break.

The U.S. Senate must be clear: no war with Iran.

Excited to launch Principia, a nonprofit research organisation at the intersection of deep learning theory and AI safety. Our goal is to develop theory for modern machine learning systems that can help us understand complex network behaviors, including those critical for AI safety and alignment. 1

New preprint from the lab! Ábel Ságodi developed a theory of approximating dynamical systems that goes beyond finite time. #theoreticalNeuroscience Follow @neurabel.bsky.social Universal Approximation Theorems for Dynamical Systems with Infinite-Time Horizon Guarantees. . arxiv.org/abs/2602.08640

News from central Jersey: I'm running to represent New Jersey's 12th Congressional District. By entering the fray, I hope to bring ideas of repairing our frayed republic. Not only to defend it in 2026, but to build something stronger, for generations to come! samwang.substack.com/p/entering-t...

New paper out at PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Revisiting the high-dimensional geometry of population responses in the visual cortex with @jpillowtime.bsky.social. The review took forever because a reviewer was doubtful our new estimator can infer eigenvalues beyond the rank of the data! (1/6)

Our new work is out in Science Advances. We show that neural activity in the striatum reflects not just cortical inputs, but also often-underappreciated thalamic inputs. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

As tens of thousands across America protest the violence that ICE sows with impunity, federal agents shot and killed another person in Minneapolis today.

ICE terrorizes our cities. ICE puts us all in danger. Abolish ICE.

We must stop funding DHS.

At @elife.bsky.social you can now include explainer videos with every figure. Like going to a seminar while you engage with the paper. First example here elifesciences.org/articles/106... Click the arrows next to each figure to get a video of @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social explaining it for you!

i personally think “don’t fund the gestapo” is a relatively small ask in the face of an illegal violent occupation of a US city that has killed at least one citizen and terrorized countless more. any elected who cannot clear even that modest bar is dead to me

Interested in the latest advances in neuroscience (neural dynamics and internal models) and how they can be leveraged to build smarter, adaptive AI? ➡️ My first real solo piece 🖤🫶 @natneuro.nature.com rdcu.be/eWVmA

The recent days have been horrific. We can't become numb to repeated instances of illegal and unconstitutional action by government agencies. It's even worse when public officials are blatantly lying in ways that contradict dozens of pieces of video evidence.

By the way, if you’re interested in working together on problems like this, I’m starting my lab at UCSF this summer. Get in touch if you’re interested in doing a postdoc! More info here: wj2.github.io/postdoc_ad (7/7)

We're excited for the Pre-COSYNE 2026 Brainhack! March 10–11 in Lisbon 🇵🇹 We'll be using CON²PHYS: same dataset, same questions, many truths? 🔹2 days 🔹team-based 🔹real ephys data 🔹open tools 🔹mini-presentations 🔹all skill levels Apply now! 👇👇👇 pre-cosyne-brainhack.github.io/hackathon202...

📣 Pre-COSYNE Brainhack 2026 – Join Us in Lisbon! 🧠✨ March 10–11, 2026 • Lisbon, Portugal pre-cosyne-brainhack.github.io/hackathon2026 Kick off COSYNE week with two days of hands-on, team-based hacking around real electrophysiology data! ✅ Apply now via the event website (limited spots).

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

The “prosecute the former regime at every level” candidate has my vote in 2028.

Excited to share @rbrianroome.bsky.social ‘s beautiful paper on development of the dorsal horn of the mouse spinal cord @science.org This is how the anatomical organization and cell types that process pain, touch, body position and more are laid down. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

also by shooting people. that's especially unsafe, I feel

We introduce epiplexity, a new measure of information that provides a foundation for how to select, generate, or transform data for learning systems. We have been working on this for almost 2 years, and I cannot contain my excitement! arxiv.org/abs/2601.03220 1/7

Joint junior faculty position in Computational Neuroscience, between Ctr for Computational Neuroscience at @flatironinstitute.org and the CUNY Graduate Center @thegraduatecenter.bsky.social . Application deadline: 16 Jan 2026! www.simonsfoundation.org/flatiron/car... cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/...

🚨 New preprint! Why do some insights from spikes translate to field potentials while others don't? In this paper we compare visual memory representations in spikes and LFPs to propose a general framework that answers this question. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵 (1/10) 🧠🟦 🧠💻

Comically over-lawyered and under-inspiring. Just resign, man. Take a lobbying job or something. This is why Democrats look to a mayor like Zohran Mamdani for national leadership.

🥴

first as tragedy then as farce. then as farce again. then farce one more time. a little more farce after that. then some farce. and then another farce and more farce after

Highlights of 2025 Ayesha Vermani defended her PhD thesis this year. She helped jump start a new direction in integrative neuroscience: Vermani et al. (2025), Meta-dynamical state space models for integrative neural data analysis. ICLR 👉 openreview.net/forum?id=SRp... 👉 youtu.be/SiXxPmkpYF8

I keep telling this to students. If you really want to do SAE research, just find a great classic paper on topic modeling and reimplement it using SAEs. I don’t think anyone would really notice.

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Applications are due in one month for our Workshop on Canonical Cortical Computations: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2025/11/13/simons-foundation-now-accepting-applications-for-workshop-on-canonical-cortical-computations/ #science #neuroscience

At #NeurIPS2025! 🎉 Excited to present Conditionally Linear Dynamical Systems (CLDS). We leverage the dependence of neural dynamics on task covariates to yield an interpretable, flexible model of dynamics. Come meet and check it out! 📍: Poster #2209, Hall C,D,E on Thu Dec 4, 11 am–2 pm, PST. 🧵/6

This is joint work with amazing collaborators: Amin Nejatbakhsh (@aminejat.bsky.social), David Lipshutz ( @lipshutz.bsky.social), Jonathan Pillow (@jpillowtime.bsky.social), and Alex Williams (@itsneuronal.bsky.social). 🔗 OpenReview: openreview.net/forum?id=xgm... 🖥️ Code: github.com/neurostatsla...

We are excited to announce that the Cognitive Computational Neuroscience meeting (CCN 2026) will be held at New York University from August 3–6, 2026. 2026.ccneuro.org

We are opening a FACULTY POSITION (tenure track, permanent) in the University of Cambridge at the interface of control and biology, interpreted broadly. Theorists and wet lab quantitative biologists with backgrounds in control, EE, applied math, ... apply by Jan 28! www.cam.ac.uk/jobs/univers...

Under Trump, the NIH is giving fewer grants to fewer scientists. The grants awarded are smaller and scientists have less time to spend them. Projects in cancer, diabetes, aging, neurological disorder, and more are going unfunded. “Make America Healthy Again.”

The latest superlab journal club: @hritz.bsky.social discussing his latest preprint investigating task switching in brains and machines. youtu.be/MdOkOjSa7JA

@thetransmitter.bsky.social’s “New Lab Directory” features a list of new neuroscience labs that opened in 2024-2025, and some set to launch in 2026. Check out the list to learn about the work of more than 50 new neuroscience labs. www.thetransmitter.org/community/th... #StateOfNeuroscience

Thank you for the great summary, @thetransmitter.bsky.social, and the shout-outs from scientists we admire. There is so much we don’t know about how sex hormones modulate behavior and we’ll keep exploring!

Intuitive cell types don't necessarily play the ascribed functional role in the overall computation. This is not a message the field wants to hear as it suggests better baselines, controls, and some reflection. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre... 2/2

This week the Trump CDC attacked science — and our health, and our kids’ health — by twisting the truth on the CDC website. There’s things to say about the playbook they used, and that’s helped by a little explanation about scientific truth in practice. New vid explainer from me: 🧪 part 1/