I think we finally made really significant progress on the biggest unsolved "developmental AI" problem: learning from human-scale data. Key idea: zero-shot world models that support concept extraction via approximate causal inference. amazing collab w/ @mcxfrank.bsky.social @khaiaw.bsky.social

Today I am relaunching my newsletter as Neural Flows, inspired by my forthcoming book "Brain Flows" The newsletter asks: How does the improvised symphony of flows inside our heads generate our minds? Check out the intro post to the new newsletter here: open.substack.com/pub/neuralfl...

Quick bit of advice for everyone on Bluesky: We should switch to using the For You feed as our default feed. It will make things better

Inspired by Edinburgh’s legacy of big ideas (e.g., Hume), on a train leaving the city, I crafted a proposal for a book about big ideas in network neuroscience—how brain activity flows generate representations that together compose our minds. The rest is history, and this new book: shorturl.at/3p100

Inspired by Edinburgh’s legacy of big ideas (e.g., Hume), on a train leaving the city, I crafted a proposal for a book about big ideas in network neuroscience—how brain activity flows generate representations that together compose our minds. The rest is history, and this new book: shorturl.at/3p100

How does the visual cortex coordinate neural activity over spatial and temporal scales? We found broad θ waves organize local γ bursts and spiking, forming a flexible spatiotemporal code to multiplex feedforward/feedback signals. Now out in full @natcomms.nature.com: doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵

Our recent study, "Distributed cortical network dynamics of binocular convergent eye movements in humans" is out in Network Neuroscience, where we move beyond simple brain mapping to show that binocular convergence is driven by the flow of activity across distributed neural networks. 1/8

This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!

10) Please check out the full paper here: “Dynamically shifting from compositional to conjunctive brain representations supports cognitive task learning”, doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Excited to see our paper with @mwcole.bsky.social finally out in peer-reviewed form @natcomms.nature.com! We examine how the human brain learns new tasks and optimizes representations over practice…1/n

2/3 Imagine if NFL coaches were hired because they were friends with the White House. You’d end up with bad football teams pretty fast. Same deal with NIH IC Directors and science.

Wanna better understand what society has gained from research? This website crowd-sources societal benefits that stem from US government-funded research publicusaresearchbenefits.com

Lab’s latest is out in Imaging Neuroscience, led by Kirsten Peterson: “Regularized partial correlation provides reliable functional connectivity estimates while correcting for widespread confounding”, where we demonstrate a major improvement to standard fMRI functional connectivity (correlation) 1/n

New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Malte R. Güth, Travis E. Baker, et al: Right posterior theta reflects human parahippocampal phase resetting by salient cues during goal-directed navigation doi.org/10.1162/IMAG...

Ask courageous questions. Do not be satisfied with superficial answers. Be open to wonder and at the same time subject all claims to knowledge, without exception, to critical scrutiny. Be aware of human fallibility. Cherish your species and your planet. - Carl Sagan.

I still get chills Meet Mike *30+ years severe depression *first hospitalized @ 13y *20 meds *3 rounds of ECT *2 near-fatal suicide attempts Mike felt joy for the first time in decades after we turned on his new brain pacemaker or PACE see videos, read paper, follow thread doi.org/10.31234/osf...

“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures” doi.org/10.1038/s415... Small contribution in this piece by @frosas.bsky.social and colleagues on how we need both types of research culture in neuroscience. #neuroskyence

Exciting new preprint from the lab: “Adopting a human developmental visual diet yields robust, shape-based AI vision”. A most wonderful case where brain inspiration massively improved AI solutions. Work with @zejinlu.bsky.social @sushrutthorat.bsky.social and Radek Cichy arxiv.org/abs/2507.03168

1/ New paper by Hame Park, (@AraziAyelet), Bharath Talluri, Marco Celotto, Stefano Panzeri, Alan Stocker & Tobias Donner published in Nature Communications – “Confirmation Bias through Selective Readout of Information Encoded in Human Parietal Cortex”: rdcu.be/etlR7. Here is a summary:

Check out my newest preprint to see the TCP dataset in action! 🤘🧠 Brain network dynamics reflect psychiatric illness status and transdiagnostic symptom profiles across health and disease: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

The President's Budget request as released yesterday will gut scientific research. Why should you care? 1) Science is fundamentally a jobs program. Many 100,000s are employed to do science and work for you, the US taxpayer.

I'm celebrating my Friday by reading this recent review published in @nature.com by @lucinauddin.bsky.social and Bharat Biswal on the history and future of rsfMRI. It's a great read for anybody interested! 🧪 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Whelp. See you later 1.8 Million in NSF research funds -- all designed to better understand learning mechanisms in early childhood so we can develop effective early childhood educational interventions. Proud of Harvard for standing up to fascism, though. We will persist.

Thanks to scienceimpacts.org for mapping the impacts of cutting NIH indirect costs & making it easy for local news to focus on the impacts to their community Thanks to @sciencehomecoming.bsky.social for helping researchers write op-eds for their hometown newspapers about the impacts on science 4/

A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.

My lab will be at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference in Boston Four lab members (including myself) will be at the conference – I hope to see you there! We will be presenting the following 4 posters: ... [1/n]

The network of Alzheimer's Disease Research Centers is one of the most amazing NIH projects of all time: 33 sites collaborating to fight Alzheimer's in the lab and in the clinic at the same time. All of it in turmoil because the new funding is blocked.

Studies show that funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) contributed to 354 of 356 drugs (99.4%) approved by the FDA from 2010 to 2019. Recklessly slashing NIH funding will mean that patients will be waiting much longer for life-saving treatments.

Join us! Science Homecoming helps scientists reconnect with communities by writing about the importance of science funding in their hometown newspapers. We’ve mapped every small newspaper in the U.S. and provide resources to get you started. Help science get back home 🧪🔬🧬 🏠 sciencehomecoming.com

Firings happening right now at the NSF.

1/8. This week I had a few different conversations with scholars who, in the face of the attacks on science and institutions of learning in the U.S., are wondering what to do. One suggestion I have is: keep doing your work. It matters in and of itself. Why do I say that? A few reasons.

Sabotage. Criminal sabotage. "[The NSF] is planning to lay off between a quarter and a half of its staff in the next two months, a top National Science Foundation official said Tuesday." www.eenews.net/articles/sci...

I’m an NSF panel reviewer that was scheduled to meet today. Just got notice that all NSF panels were canceled today. I reviewed some innovative proposals in support of students. Devastating if these scholars don’t get to do this work. For the love of science & students I hope this is just a delay.💔

NIH appears to have canceled/postponed all of its study sections—the independent review panels that approve federal grants for health research. Such grants fund the work/salaries of 300k people at more than 2,500 institutions

Maybe a good time to remember that mice have tiny hyperconnected brains. An estimated 97% of all possible connections between brain areas exist in mice, vs ~62% in macaques and marmosets. No wonder everything is everywhere in mice, they have all-to-all connectivity! doi.org/10.1093/cerc...

New results for a new year! “Linking neural population formatting to function” describes our modern take on an old question: how can we understand the contribution of a brain area to behavior? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧠👩🏻‍🔬🧪🧵 #neuroskyence 1/

Received bad news about Carl Olson. Sad to hear that he passed away. Carl was a major influence on my early years as an Assistant Prof, with our labs down the hall from each other. He was a highly rigorous neurophysiologist, with a wry sense of humor. Please see attached images for more info.

This journalistic piece nicely summarizes some advantages of our functional connectivity biomarker for psychosis. Special thanks to my co-authors in making this work possible (Yonatan Abrham, @mwcole.bsky.social @carrisacocuzza.bsky.social, Boyang Hu, Brent Johnson).

“Cognitive flexibility as the shifting of brain network flows by flexible neural representations”, a solo paper by yours truly, making the case that brain activity flow shifts are essential to mental flexibility (and quite interesting too!) Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Is it Bad to leave Twitter? No. Here are 7+ years of insights from my lab’s research that explain why. Featuring work w/ @williambrady.bsky.social @killianmcloughlin.bsky.social 🧵

Banning #smartphones in over 400 schools led to: -decreased psychological symptoms among girls by 29% -decreased bullying by boys and girls by 43% -increased GPA among girls by .08 SDs Effects were larger for girls from low SES families openaccess.nhh.no/nhh-xmlui/bi...

The global COVID-19 vaccination effort is estimated to have saved around 20 million lives — in just its first year.

A thread... Lab’s latest at PLOS Comp Biol, led by @carrisacocuzza.bsky.social: “Distributed network flows generate localized category selectivity in human visual cortex”. This one changed how I think the brain works! Even "localized" functions are likely generated by distributed processes [1/N]

Super-psyched to share this preprint from my student Yicong (Alan) Zheng: "Recurrent Inhibitory Dynamics in the Entorhinal Cortex Support Pattern Separation" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... It's a new biologicaly-based computational model of the entorhinal-hippocampal system. Thread (1/?)

I agree that flow questions are how questions.

These numbers are one reason NIH has consistently had bipartisan support on the hill and groups such as congressional neuroscience caucus👇 have been, and hopefully remain, influential. So please stay active and ask your professional organizations to interact with your representatives

Thought I'd make a starter pack for what I'm currently obsessing over - everything brain dynamics: dFC, network dynamics, attractors, state shifts, info flow, etc! Please comment to be added, plenty of room! Esp. #EarlyCareerResearchers 🧠 go.bsky.app/HfAkczr #CompNeuroSky #Neuroskyence

💡 Tip: You can set your website as your username on Bluesky! This is one form of self-verification, and we especially encourage official organizations and brands to do this! Examples include @npr.org @react.dev @duolingobrasil.com.br. Here's our guide for how to do this: