🚨 I’m excited to say that my CIHR Project Grant was funded! My NHP lab is now full-speed-ahead, and I’m hiring experimentalists (postdoc, PhD student, and/or a tech/manager). We’ll do multi-region ephys during reaching/grasping in macaques, with behavioral and spinal perturbations.

📰 I really enjoyed writing this article with @thetransmitter.bsky.social! In it, I summarize parts of our recent perspective article on neural manifolds (www.nature.com/articles/s41...), with a focus on highlighting just a few cool insights into the brain we've already seen at the population level.

FUNDING OPPORTUNITY: Motor Learning and Neuromotor Ethics Our Reality Labs EMG Foundational Research team is pleased to announce an RFP! The topic is on motor learning for EMG-based HCI and the related neuromotor ethics. Submissions are due September 1! www.meta.com/blog/reality...

Open-sourced EMG data plus training/testing scripts to make contact with our results at 100 users for each three tasks (discrete gestures, 1D wrist navigation, and handwriting). github.com/facebookrese...

Careful dissection of motor sequence learning by @andpru.bsky.social and @mkashefi.bsky.social. In my humble opinion this should be an instant classic 😏. www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

Pleased to announce that our paper on "Identifying Neural Dynamics Using Interventional State Space Models" has been selected for a poster presentation in #ICML2025. Please check the thread for paper details (0/n). Presentation info: icml.cc/virtual/2025....

Comment: The brain works at more than 10 bits per second www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/N How do neural dynamics in motor cortex interact with those in subcortical networks to flexibly control movement? I’m beyond thrilled to share our work on this problem, led by Eric Kirk @eric-kirk.bsky.social with help from Kangjia Cai! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Which classical monkey reaching studies do you want replicated/investigated at mass-Neuropixel scale?

Our new preprint from Rajan lab (Harvard): "Deep RL Needs Deep Behavior Analysis: Exploring Implicit Planning by Model-Free Agents in Open-Ended Environments" Sophisticated & sometimes insect-like planning, exploration, predator evasion, and foraging strategies by DRL. arxiv.org/abs/2506.06981

All our motor control modelling efforts focus on closed-loop systems for this reason: "...closed-loop and open-loop training produce fundamentally different learning dynamics, even when using identical architectures and converging to the same final solution." arxiv.org/abs/2505.13567

A warning: "Seldom do more than a few of nature’s secrets give way at one time. It will be all too easy for our somewhat artificial prosperity to collapse overnight when it is realized that the use of a few exciting words like information, entropy, redundancy, do not solve all our problems."

J'ai une question pour les francophones ici (ou n'importe qui si vous êtes bilingues): C'est quoi la meilleure façon de dire « It was a humbling experience » ? Il me semble qu'on n'a pas un mot qui est exactement équivalent à « humbling » en français...

Fred Crevecoeur @fredericcrevec1 🚨preprint time by @harikalidindi.bsky.social for our work on neural population dynamics: we show that features of neural population activity during reaching emerge from a simple linear body-network system 🧵👇 biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Scaling models across multiple animals was a major step toward building neuro-foundation models; the next frontier is enabling multi-task decoding to expand the scope of training data we can leverage. Excited to share our #ICLR2025 Spotlight paper introducing POYO+ 🧠 poyo-plus.github.io 🧵

Interested in motor control or cerebellar function? We have two openings for graduate students for Fall 25. Join the sensorimotor superlab - our interdisciplinary research group Paul Gribble and Andrew Pruszynski. Application instructions at diedrichsenlab.org. Please repost 🙏

Top-down feedback is ubiquitous in the brain and computationally distinct, but rarely modeled in deep neural networks. What happens when a DNN has biologically-inspired top-down feedback? 🧠📈 Our new paper explores this: elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Job Alert (please repost)! We are looking to hire a Research Assistant to join us in an exciting project looking into Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) and how brains learn to control them.

We’re excited about this project! We present a model of motor savings without the need for context.

Excited to share my latest work with @oliviercodol.bsky.social, supervised by @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and @paulgribble.bsky.social, where we introduce a context-free model of savings in motor learning: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happening today at #COSYNE! Board 70.

At #Cosyne2025? Come by my poster today (3-047) to hear how sequential predictive learning produces a continuous neural manifold with the ability to generate replay during sleep, and spatial representations that "sweep" ahead to future positions. All from sensory information alone!

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @paulgribble.bsky.social #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor https://superlab.ca/posts/2025-03-28-list288.html

Very excited for the upcoming Cosyne in Montreal! I’ll be presenting my poster [2-126] Brain-like neural dynamics for behavioral control develop through reinforcement learning, on the Friday session at 13:15. Feel free to drop by! The related pre-print is also out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Lots of interesting, diverging opinions on this. One proposal catches my eye, that both scalers and non-scalers should agree on & mutually benefit from: More standardisation of data formats across modalities and *behaviours*. Moving away from in-house scripts & toward collaborative, shared repos.

Going to #Cosyne2025? Check out two posters from the lab, presented by @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and @mkashefi.bsky.social.

If you want to do work like this as a PhD student or a post-doc, get in touch!

Western U is a top place for research in neural control of movement. My time there was foundational in my scientific journey. Could not recommend more!

I'm looking for postdocs who'd like to apply for the @connectedminds.bsky.social PDFs with me and collaborators to work on the following potential projects: 1. explainable neuroAI for ANN / SNN models of motor control 2. neuromorphic robotic control 3. neurorobotic artistic performance ... /1

One of the best conferences ever, on the coolest neuroscience topic ever (motor control), at a terrific and exotic location this year: Panama City!

This week's sensorimotor superlab reading list is out @andpru.bsky.social @diedrichsenjorn.bsky.social @paulgribble.bsky.social #neuroskyence #psychscisky #Sensorimotor https://superlab.ca/posts/2025-01-10-list277.html

I highly recommend that one! Beautiful modeling work combined with excellent, large-scale data. It answers questions about when, how and why the brain can leverage expectations about future perturbations for motor control.

Jon’s science has long inspired me and this paper is a great example of why. Check out his latest work, years in the making! Very excited to see this out and honoured to have been given the opportunity to contribute.

📢📢📢 I am very excited to share this new study from the lab! Leveraging large-scale neuropixel recordings across cortex and thalamus, we show how motor circuits do sensory planning and how this improves reaching.

Can the motor system use sensory expectations to prepare for unexpected events? Excited to share my latest work with @andpru.bsky.social – where we establish that sensory expectations shape neural population dynamics in motor circuits! 🧵 and paper below 1/

Very interesting study that changes how I think about working memory encoding. They show that active cue encoding quickly transfers to silent ensembles through short term plasticity. Curious what people more accustomed to WM literature think of it! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

People use uncertainty to negotiate the explore-exploit trade-off in reinforcement learning. Do they do something similar during mental planning? This is what @haoxuefan.bsky.social, with me and @fredcallaway.bsky.social, has shown: osf.io/preprints/ps...

All models are wrong, some models are artificial neural networks.

The reality is that the time from preprint to journal acceptance is starting to be longer than the average postdoc contract. 🤯

The problem with current SSL? It's hungry. Very hungry. 🤖 Training time: Weeks Dataset size: Millions of images Compute costs: 💸💸💸 Our #NeurIPS2024 poster makes SSL pipelines 2x faster and achieves similar accuracy at 50% pretraining cost! 💪🏼✨ 🧵 1/8

Any suggestions for high quality lab swag? Shorts, mugs, etc.?

Winter is here folks! Excited to do some awesome science with the best view ever, Montréal in the snow.

Any European PhDs interested in working with me as a post-doc via the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowships scheme, drop me a line ([email protected] or on here). Happy to chat topics, with a focus on perceptual learning, affordances, etc (please RT :)

Really happy to have the superlist on bsky! Make sure to give it a look if you’re interested in sensorimotor control and learning in the brain. Comes by weekly courtesy of the sensorimotor superlab

Delighted to be in Leeds joining the School of Computing! Fantastic first impressions — like a "less offensive London" (youtu.be/watch?v=_6_VVLgrgFI). Stay tuned for a PhD position starting next October. Meanwhile, drop me a message with your CV and research interests—I'd love to hear from you!

Anne Gagneux, Ségolène Martin, @quentinbertrand.bsky.social Remi Emonet and I wrote a tutorial blog post on flow matching: dl.heeere.com/conditional-... with lots of illustrations and intuition! We got this idea after their cool work on improving Plug and Play with FM: arxiv.org/abs/2410.02423

Just under 2 weeks left to submit your panel and individual talk proposals for #NCM2025 in Panama. Dec 2nd deadline. There's still time to put together a panel proposal if you haven't already! Details at ncm-society.org/submission/

Should we just re-brand NeuroAI to cybernetics?