If you are looking for a book to read and are interested in computational/systems neuroscience or AI, I have a suggestion: trialsanderrors.substack.com/p/a-recommen...

A very clear, detailed, and fair account on the (obscure?) French way to distribute positions in academia, and then manage to actually do some research! Thanks Olivier

In case this is helpful for anyone, here is a post on how to get a job in french academia : trialsanderrors.substack.com/p/getting-a-... Aimed at non-french scientists who are curious, but french ones may find it useful too.

Neuropixels and Optogenetics are delighted to announce the birth of Neuropixels Opto Combining high-resolution electrophysiology and optogenetics Today in bioRxiv 960 sites, 28 emitters, 2 colors By Lakunina, @karolinazsocha.bsky.social, Ladd, et al www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... (1/2)

Some people see spontaneous faint flickering flashes in their visual field, a condition known as Visual Snow Syndrome (VSS, not to be confused with @vssmtg.bsky.social). Maybe a visual equivalent of the auditory tinnitus? Here is a very nice study from the lab of @sengelweb.bsky.social.

Seeking input: A standardized nomenclature for the rods and cones of the vertebrate retina A number of us have been working on a proposal to bring various disconnected naming systems for the vertebrate rods and cones across species into alignment. The basic proposal looks like this:

If you are interested in the contribution of Ibn al-Haytham to vision science, and if you don’t mind reading French, I recommend the book of Michel Imbert “La fin du regard éclairant” www.vrin.fr/livre/978271...

as a side effect of a sort of "false-fusion" cos the binoc pair acts like a spatial filter. A binoc extension of the previous filter model does the trick, reproduces the newborn results. The results don't imply an "innate neural face representation". The inference was flawed. doi.org/10.1111/desc...

New post: What chess (may have) taught me about neuroscience. trialsanderrors.substack.com/p/what-chess...

Good resolution of 2025: start a blog for thoughts that cannot go in papers (too speculative or preliminary).

Besides being beautiful, the different grouping principles on display across the different artists here is fascinating. It would be fun to see how consistent each person is in terms of how they approach lots of different patterns! #VisionScience

Clever study that explores the debate between those who claim that color categories are 'innate' and those who argue that they are dependent on language. It turns out that monkeys, unlike humans, do not have consensus color categories, suggesting cognitive mechanisms such as language are required.🧪🧠

🧠 Wonderful speaker in the Neurocolloquium on Jan 23, at 4.15pm: Emilie Macé, Prof in the EXC Cluster Multiscale Bioimaging in Göttingen on how "Visual objects refine the encoding of head direction", live & in Zoom Host: Robert Ohlendorf @maxplanckcampus.bsky.social Sign up forms.gle/RoxUFPrj6Dyr...

My first Bluesky post is to announce a Tenure-Track Faculty Search at the Jules Stein Eye Institute of UCLA. We are considering applications at the Assistant and Associate professor levels. Apply here: recruit.apo.ucla.edu/JPF10092. DM or email me with any questions. Please distribute!

Do you want to study cognitive science and live in Paris? Our master’s program in Cognitive Science at @ENS_ULM, @psl_univ, and @EHESS_fr is now accepting applications for 2025-2026. All courses are in English. Deadline: 13 March 2025 More info: master-cognitive-science.ens.psl.eu/en

What if… spontaneous neural activity 🧠 reflects the baseline rumblings of a brainwide dynamical system initialized for learning? We find that the rumblings have macroscopic properties like those emerging from linear symmetric, critical systems 🧵 #neuroscience #neuroAI www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Very likely that the record will be broken tonight ! 10 days earlier than the previous one, what an amazing feat !

How can the brain make predictions, and signal prediction errors ? Together with Simone Ebert, Thomas Buffet, Bruno Cessac et al, we studied this question in the retina in this paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41... A thread

Our paper on how the neuromodulator nitric oxide modulates a subset of mouse retinal ganglion cells is finally published in @elife.bsky.social doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Great work by @dgonschorek.bsky.social together with the lab of @oliviermarre.bsky.social and @matigoldin.bsky.social, ...

Spherical code of retinal orientation-selectivity enables decoding in ensembled and retinotopic operation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.01.08.631850v1

Thrilled to announce that my lab has been awarded the Research to Prevent Blindness Career Development Award! Now the lab has a *funded* opening for a post-doctoral fellow interested in studying neurodevelopmental disorders in the retina. More info here! www.vlasitslab.org/joinus

If you are not following the Vendee Globe ( www.vendeeglobe.org/en/tracker ) yet, it is about time. A thread about why:

This was a really fun collaboration and I hope everyone enjoys the paper! Please let us know if you have any feedback! media.giphy.com/media/pbG8W7...

"The Illusion-Illusion: Vision Language Models See Illusions Where There are None" osf.io/preprints/ps... (this is a more systematic examination of the thing I was looking at a few days ago)

We all learned the center-surround, rod and cone structure, but this is a lot of detail about glia and blood vessels in the retina and what happens in degeneration. doi.org/10.1016/j.cu... #MATLAB #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

My Christmas gift to you fellow neurophysiologists: "Theory of axo-axonic inhibition". www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Horace Barlow, by all accounts, was thinking about 30 years ahead of his time. Here is a transcript of the opening keynote I gave at a symposium honoring Horace's scientific legacy: markusmeister.com/2024/12/14/h....

Christmas motion illusion. The trees are completely stationary. I am currently studying the explanations for this kind of illusion.

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

This was 2020. Fast forward a few years and it became clear this was not working as intended: Many models, even very implausible ones, explained the data equally well. We also tried this with other variables, often with the same result. 9/n

I am thrilled to announce that Rich Kramer and I are co-directing a BRAND NEW hands-on visual neuroscience course at the MBL. August 1-16, 2025. Details in this flyer. Trainees please apply. And everyone, please spread the word!

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 🧵

🚨 Preprint! We combine our recent open dataset of #APC prices with the article counts per journal-year from #OpenAlex to estimate how much the academic community has paid in APCs over the last 5 years. A. $8.349 billion ($8.968 B in 2023 USD) $2.5B in 2023 alone. arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551 #metasci

I'm a bit puzzled why the retina never makes it into these big consensus think pieces. Last I checked, it was just as much a part of the CNS as the brain and spinal cord, and also where a lot of the early single-cell work along these lines was first done.

Visual and auditory object representations in ventral visual cortex after restoring sight in humans www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... by @katarzynaraczy.bsky.social @rainergoebel.bsky.social et al.; #crossmodal #neuroscience

Great review [two labs] on current knowledge about LCA (longitudinal chromatic aberration) - LCA for accommodation: if the retinal image has blue fringes where it's out of focus, you should focus closer - Does LCA it have a big role in myopia? Maybe! www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Transcriptomic changes in retinal ganglion cell types associated with the disruption of cholinergic retinal waves https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.05.627027v1

(2023) Cortico-cortical feedback engages active dendrites in visual cortex www.nature.com/articles/s41... When the source and target of feedback represent the same (different) area of visual space, feedback is relatively suppressive (facilitating).

GABAergic amacrine cells balance biased chromatic information in the mouse retina https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.08.584060v1

New @bioRxiv #preprint with @chiarafornetto.bsky.social and @teuler.bsky.social : www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Just published! Even when we 'fixate' on a scene, our eyes are constantly moving, yet we do not perceive that motion. How do we do that? @josiedangelo.bsky.social provides some insight into the process in our paper, just published in PNAS. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... Read more below... 1/4

Hi all! I’m a postdoc in the Schmidt Lab at Northwestern University studying how light impacts physiology and behavior 👁️🐭. Excited to be on the job market this year and so happy share my recent preprints!!! - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... - www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Do you ever wonder whether the work you do matters? Like whether anyone needs to hear what you have to say? I do. A 🧵 Funny thing happened to me this week. I was giving a talk where I reviewed my work. I started with the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP). 1/

This diagram was made by Christine Liu, PhD - creator of two photon art @christineliuart.bsky.social I think you’ll love it :) @odedrechavi.bsky.social

How do visual prosthetics stack up in everyday life? 👁️🧠🧪 Our latest study reveals a significant gap between researcher expectations and the actual usage of bionic eyes by recipients: tvst.arvojournals.org/article.aspx... #BionicVision #NeuroTech #Blindness #Accessibility

Evaluating cognitive penetrability of perception across the senses Review by Petra Vetter, Stephanie Badde, Elisa Raffaella Ferrè, Janina Seubert & Barbara Shinn-Cunningham Web: go.nature.com/4hOrQeV PDF: rdcu.be/d0K0k #psychology #psychscisky #cogpsy

🧠📈 New research from the lab of Günther Zeck: www.bionic-vision.org/research-gro... Differential intrinsic firing properties in sustained and transient mouse alpha RGCs match their light response characteristics and persist during retinal degeneration www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Our backwards retina. Found an anatomical diagram that shows how the RGC axons turn around and make their way past the photoreceptors to exit the eye at the optic nerve. Couldn't find a diagram like this previously