Episode #38 in #TheoreticalNeurosciencePodcast: On extracting spiking network models from experiments - with Richard Gao @rdgao.bsky.social theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn38 How to fit spiking network models to experimental data when there is no unique parameter set giving the best fit.

Wrote a blog post on where the training signals for the brain come from. open.substack.com/pub/kording/...

If you want to tackle the "biggest problem holding neuroscience back right now" - comparing mechanisms of cognition across species - join us in @ox.ac.uk and @tcddublin.bsky.social . Please share! 3x Job Details below: (fantastic article @suthanalab.bsky.social ) #neuroskyence #neurojobs

Future @ohbmofficial.bsky.social meeting dates just annouced: * 2027 - Toronto, Canada * 2028 - Yokohama, Japan www.ohbm-com.com/blog/futurem...

What happens when we can't use recursive belief to compete? We can use anomaly detection instead! Here, we (led by soon-to-be-Dr @nitalon.bsky.social ) devise a multi-agent account where compression & reward expectation are used to notice deception jair.org/index.php/ja...

The revised version of our paper on the impact of top-down feedback is now out @elife.bsky.social: doi.org/10.7554/eLif... tl;dr: we show that using human-brain-like feedback/anatomy in a deep RNN leads to human-like visual biases! This work was led by @tmshbr.bsky.social #NeuroAI 🧠📈 🧪

[Cognitive capacity nobody understands] is very important. However, the underlying neural mechanisms remain enigmatic. Here we show that [stimuli somehow related to the capacity] can be decoded from [spatiotemporal description]. Our results show that we can do what we did.

bsky.app/profile/did:... another custom bluesky feed using regular expressions, this time for jobs in the realm of neuroscience 🙃 matches: (brain|psycho|neur|cogni|physio) and (postdoc|phd|coordinator|professor|fellow|researcher) and some keywords like job/opportunity/hiring/...

I guess this is not unusual for an academic? Good to know.

Happy birthday to one of my favourite haters, Charles Darwin

NSD-synthetic, the out-of-distribution companion dataset of NSD consisting of 7T fMRI responses to 284 artificial images, is now published. #NeuroAI #CompNeuro #neuroscience #AI doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks. @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @flatironinstitute.org @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social 1/14

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

Today I'd like to honor the memory of my mentor and friend, Roger Tsien, born 1952 February 1. Today would have been Roger's 74th birthday. Most know Roger for his 2008 Chemistry Nobel Prize with Shimomura and Chalfie. Roger made GFP into the versatile imaging method it is now.

Postdoc position in Paris: come help develop new generation human brain computer interfaces ⚡🧠💻 Interested? Contact me if you have experience with machine learning (e.g. simulation-based inference, RL, generative/diffusion models) or dynamical systems. See below for + details and retweet 🙏

Happy birthday Ogawa-sensei! We are proud to have him as our institute's (CiNet) advisor and I was lucky to meet him and present my research to him recently.

Over the years, I have written a few Jupyter/Rmd/Matlab notebooks that attempt to teach some statistical concepts, particularly in neuroimaging. You can find them here: www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/rik.h..., though I will say a bit more about each one in a number of posts over next few days.

Opportunity to move to Canada. 🍁 The Lifespan Institute @brocku.ca is looking to hire a Canada Excellence Research Chair In Healthy Development Across the Lifespan. More info in the job ad (salary negotiable). brocku.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/brocku_caree....

DNNs are the dominant AI paradigm with remarkable performance, but backpropagation, their main supervised learning method, faces challenges in feasibility and biological plausibility. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0893608025005088?via%3Dihub

How do hippocampal pathways contribute to learning regularities and exceptions? To answer this, Melisa Gumus & @drmack.bsky.social use diffusion imaging to identify the endpoints of different hippocampal pathways, and then analyze functional activity within those "footprints". Super innovative!

I love this so much. After pushback on his recent "Medicine is the only field that reaches 6 sigma" with "my field, psychophysics is so awesome" he posted this. Hurray all Psychophysicists. LETS CELEBRATE PSYCHOPHYSICS. An island of large effects is us!

Medicine is the only human-facing science that consistently finds five-sigma interventions. Change my mind.

Psychophysics is a human-facing science with interventions arguably more robust than medicine.

Really thrilled that this paper led by @neurozz.bsky.social is now published in its final version in @elife.bsky.social!! This is a memory-focused (as opposed to RL-focused) account of the detailed characteristics of forward and backward awake and sleep replay! elifesciences.org/articles/99931

As we head into the new year, a reminder that if you're recruiting or looking for a job in Neuroscience (or adjacent) add #NeuroJobs to your post to appear on the NeuroJobs feed. bsky.app/profile/did:... #NeuroSkyence

Some fields list authors alphabetically. Others use norms like "senior last". Others use order to signify relative contributions. In a new paper with @kevinzollman.com, we model the evolution of these norms, and then look at which type of norm is best for science. doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Can humans & animals really use internal maps to take shortcuts? Tolman famously said yes - based largely on his Sunburst maze. Our new review & meta-analysis suggests evidence is far weaker than you might think. 🧵👇 doi.org/10.1111/ejn.... @uofgpsychneuro.bsky.social @ejneuroscience.bsky.social

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

📆 updated for 2026! list of summer schools & short courses in the realm of (computational) neuroscience or data analysis of EEG / MEG / LFP: 🔗 docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Came across this in an old-ish book review: "This is one of the increasing number of books that would be well served by publication with a diskette or CD-ROM of simulations and models."

Our paper on data constrained RNN that generalize to optogenetic perturbations now citable on eLife: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

What has my research lab been up to in 2025? Time for a wrap up of our research! This image is a gathering of key figures from our 2025 publications: Links to publications in the replies: #spierslab #research #neuroskyence

Legit super excited about this work coming out. My amazing doctoral student @ben.graphics has been working on an idea to use physically based differentiable rendering (PBDR) to probe visual understanding. Here, we generate physically-grounded metamers for vision models. 1/4 arxiv.org/abs/2512.12307

Why isn’t modern AI built around principles from cognitive science or neuroscience? Starting a substack (infinitefaculty.substack.com/p/why-isnt-m...) by writing down my thoughts on that question: as part of a first series of posts giving my current thoughts on the relation between these fields. 1/3

Now out in #JNeurosci -- we found changes in medial parietal cortex after manual exploration of everyday real-world objects doi.org/10.1523/JNEU... with Beth Rispoli, Vinai Roopchansingh & @cibaker.bsky.social

Peer review is important and useful but we should focus our efforts on a small number of papers that matter (making big claims, using new approaches) and let the vast majority of work live on a preprint server to be judged by their utility over time to domain experts.

🧠 New paper alert (the 1st one from our new lab)! Led by 1st author & VR wizard @jaquent.bsky.social @natcomms.nature.com How do our brains distinguish novel from familiar places as we explore our environments, e.g., a new city? 🔗 doi.org/10.1038/s414... 🧵 Thread below with key findings ⬇️

Thrilled to announce that I’ve been awarded an ERC grant #ERCCoG to work on disentangling memory and prediction. I’m super grateful to my lab members, collaborators, and mentors! If you’re looking for a PhD/postdoc position, stay tuned! @erc.europa.eu @maastrichtu.bsky.social

There's been much talk about the "Just a Job" piece in Nature Human Behavior — absent an ability of many to read it. The author is here, @laraffington.bsky.social. In the post below, she shares a link available to all.

Spread the word: I'm looking to hire a postdoc to explore the concept of attention (as studied in psych/neuro, not the transformer mechanism) in large Vision-Language Models. More details here: lindsay-lab.github.io/2025/12/08/p... #MLSky #neurojobs #compneuro

We (@esasirius.bsky.social @raymundo-pardal.bsky.social and myself) just published a study on serial dependence during target interception. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

New preprint w/ Malin Styrnal & @martinhebart.bsky.social Have you ever computed noise ceilings to understand how well a model performs? We wrote a clarifying note on a subtle and common misapplication that can make models appear quite a lot better than they are. osf.io/preprints/ps...

A really nice short blog! “yet another theory paper explaining little data” is the bias I need to name here... But it made me blind to a different kind of contribution: papers that open doors... I was asking “what did you explain?” when I should have also been asking “what did you make possible?”

Great read. Too many people assume that the role of theory papers in neuro is to "explain neural data". I'm not even sure we can explain anything yet. Data is more like a muse for theory.

How I contributed to rejecting one of my favorite papers of all times, Yes, I teach it to students daily, and refer to it in lots of papers. Sorry. open.substack.com/pub/kording/...

🚨Job Alert plz RT! Johns Hopkins Psych & Brain Sciences is looking for a new colleague using behavioral or computational approaches to study cognition! We are excited about many areas of (esp higher) cognition in human adults, children, or nonhuman animals Open-rank apply.interfolio.com/178146

Well this is exciting! The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University (@jhu.edu) invites applications for a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member in Cognitive Psychology, in any area and at any rank! Application + more info: apply.interfolio.com/178146

New study out today in Nature Comms: www.nature.com/articles/s41..., in which we set out to test whether ultrasound could influence the reward-related learning computations of the nucleus accumbens, building on decades of work on dopaminergic prediction error and reinforcement learning. And it did.

starting fall 2026 i'll be an assistant professor at @upenn.edu 🥳 my lab will develop scalable models/theories of human behavior, focused on memory and perception currently recruiting PhD students in psychology, neuroscience, & computer science! reach out if you're interested 😊

The Sensorimotor Superlab with @gribblelab.org and @andpru.bsky.social is a unique place to work and learn. We are now accepting MSc and PhD applications for Fall 2026. Join our awesome team at Western University... For application instructions see diedrichsenlab.org and gribblelab.org/join.html!