Episode #34 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On balanced neural networks – with Nicolas Brunel theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn34 Cortical neurons seem to receive about the same amount of excitation and inhibition. One of the founders of this key idea in 1990s explains.

Yes, our intelligence is our ability to work around our limitations. If we were omniscient we wouldn't need intelligence because we wouldn't need to work anything out, we'd just know it. Arguably this is close to the case for chess computers. Not for language, but training on all written text helps!

My prediction is that LLM peer review will slow down science. It will do this for precisely the same reasons that contemporary peer review does and some extra ones. Start by reading @hansonmark.bsky.social thread below, then read on. 🧵

🚨Job alert🚨 The lab has up to *3 postdoc openings* for comp systems neuroscientists interested in describing and manipulating neural population dynamics mediating behaviour This is part of a collaborative ARIA grant "4D precision control of cortical dynamics" euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383909

Now in PRX: Theory linking connectivity structure to collective activity in nonlinear RNNs! For neuro fans: conn. structure can be invisible in single neurons but shape pop. activity For low-rank RNN fans: a theory of rank=O(N) For physics fans: fluctuations around DMFT saddle⇒dimension of activity

Personal bias but I liked this transmitter article: www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neur... “You won’t catch an engineer trying to formulate a grand unified theory of the brain” “Engineers know how to make things work […] This is what makes engineering closer to biology than to other […] sciences”

I’d be the first to switch from NHPs to humans if I could decide where to record and do it under proper lab conditions. And I might even see the day when brain electrodes are completely safe, and I can record from healthy volunteers. But we’re not there yet (and it will take some 🐵s to get there).

Proud to have contributed to @gaiabianchini.bsky.social and @flor-iacaruso.bsky.social new paper on how the superior colliculus temporally integrates multisensory information

Is science too obsessed with metrics, large-scale projects & “blockbuster” outputs? Desai & Jun argued that preserving the "auteur" spirit of individual creativity, exploration and risk-taking is essential for maintaining the creativity that drew us into science in the 1st place.

NEW from me: Political hostility, high visa fees and (in the case of the UK) stagnant incomes are making the UK and US less attractive destinations for top international talent. That steep decline in the appeal of moving to the US after 2016 is 👀

🚨New spotlight paper at Neurips 2025🚨 We show that in sign-diverse networks, inherent non-gradient “curl” terms arise, and can, depending on network architecture, destabilize gradient-descent solutions or paradoxically accelerate learning beyond pure gradient flow. 🧵⬇️ www.arxiv.org/abs/2510.02765

Not a lake

I beg your pardon?

ladies and gentlemen...we got him

The International Criminal Court (ICC) will switch its internal work environment away from Microsoft Office to Open Desk, a European open source alternative. The switch comes amid rising concerns about public bodies being reliant on US tech companies. www.euractiv.com/news/interna...

Revised version of our #NeurIPS2025 paper with full code base in Julia & Python now online, see arxiv.org/abs/2505.13192

Cheating with an LLM is the easiest thing in the world for a student to do, but it creates a massive, laborious headache for a prof, if you intend to take it seriously. There’s meetings, emails, discussions, moral dilemmas. It’s just incredibly burdensome, on top of everything else right now.

#EPFL has an open faculty position - tenure track or tenured!! - in AI driven biophysics. Deadline is Nov 15th. Please spread the word! www.epfl.ch/about/workin...

🧠 Thrilled to share our NeuroView with Ellie Pavlick! "From Prediction to Understanding: Will AI Foundation Models Transform Brain Science?" AI foundation models are coming to neuroscience—if scaling laws hold, predictive power will be unprecedented. But is that enough? Thread 🧵👇

We further show that RNNs with different activation functions exhibit distinct dynamics, as characterized by the configuration of fixed points and trajectory end points, with tanh RNNs consistently displaying significant divergence from ReLU and sigmoid ones.

🚨Postdoc job offer🚨 Are you interested in beta bursts? Want to help drive methods for laminar inference with MEG? Now hiring a postdoc: run head-cast MEG experiments, help build our laMEG toolbox, and collaborate across Lyon–Marseille–Strasbourg. emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/CDD/U... Please repost! 🧠📈

For your enjoyment (by @jagarikin)

. THE WHITE HOUSE HAS JOINED BLUESKY. CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR A LIST OF THIER ACCOUNTS SO YOU CAN BLOCK THEM. . bsky.app/profile/did:...

[PhD track in Cognitive Science at Département d'Études Cognitives, ENS-PSL] Applications are now open for the PSL PhD Track 2026–2027 in Cognitive Science! This 5-year integrated program is aimed at talented students eager to tackle the scientific challenges of the future and to start shaping 1/2

What if we did a single run and declared victory

We are greatly happy to have taken our NMA-born project to Bernstein! We got feedback & ideas about moving ahead & importantly, we got to meet in-person after more than a year virtual collaboration :) Thanks you @bernsteinneuro.bsky.social and @neuromatch.bsky.social for supporting our journey!

“When we realised these jewels were only stolen to inflate the share price of a company whose entire value relies on the wholesale theft of other people’s art, we had no choice but grant immunity,” Genius from @waterfordwhispers.bsky.social waterfordwhispersnews.com/2025/10/20/l...

Want to make publication-ready figures come straight from Python without having to do any manual editing? Are you fed up with axes labels being unreadable during your presentations? Follow this short tutorial including code examples! 👇🧵

Ouch. This one cuts to the bone.

👉Also Sorbonne bsky.app/profile/sorb... pulled out of 'THE' University Ranking 👇 Important step in times of massive, systematic gaming by Universities, being a main incentive for Hyperprolific Publishing, Citation Cartels, Paper Mills & Junk Science! #researchintegrity, #Chemsky, #CompChemSky

Excellent funding opportunity: $100k/year for two years for a postdoc position in Montreal. Apply if you're interested in joining Montreal's thriving #NeuroAI ecosystem.

Loved working with our amazing outreach team on this short video about representational drift! @crmatematica.bsky.social 🧠🧪 In it, I explain the points we make in our recent review in CONEUR: doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Letters of rec batch done, too.

My cartoon for this week’s @newscientist.com

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...

What we die from vs. what we hear in the news. Terrorism and homicides account for less than 1% of deaths, but for more than half of all media stories about death in the US — whether in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or Fox News.

The @crick.ac.uk is recruiting Early Career Group Leaders - Lab set-up, research costs, salaries for up to 5 researchers - Support for up to 12 years - Access to our core facilities - Competitive salary - Fantastic colleagues - All areas of biology Deadline 27 Nov www.crick.ac.uk/careers-stud...

RIP tDCS

A speech about what drives me, how science and open source are bitter victories, unable to make improve the world if society does not embrace them for the better: gael-varoquaux.info/personnal/a-...

Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014... A short thread [1/5]👇

I think I will miss a meeting at 17.30 Nov 6...🙈

Confusing take. The evolutionary distance between the two species is a beautiful mystery. The evidence in monkeys isn’t nearly as strong, nor has the same sophisticated experiments, but the mechanism was first proposed in that context. It's an amazing coincidence? Is it silly? Nature's fault!

CDS Asst. Prof. @neurograce.bsky.social has launched a YouTube channel, “5 Minute Papers on AI for the Planet,” translating climate-AI research into short video explainers, inspired by her course at CDS, “Machine Learning for Climate Change.” nyudatascience.medium.com/cds-grace-li...

After a few days of extensive discussions about curiosity at @rtg2906-curiosity.bsky.social's retreat, I realized—perhaps for the first time—that the word curiosity in Persian (کنجکاوی) literally means "exploring corners"! It's such a vivid way to express curiosity! so amusing to think about it!

Regardless of what explainability/mech interp in AI is actually after, and whether or not they know what they’re searching for, we can confidently say they’re pursuing what systems neuroscience has pursued for decades, with very similar puzzles and confusions.

There's probably nothing more influential or w/ more explanatory power in neurosci than attractors and more generally computations through population dynamics. In comparison, the level of evidence for fast plasticity being relevant for cognition is close to zero It's more of a heckler than a debate

😅

postdoc, in an esoteric field, preparing for the job market