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!

It feels like the converastion about manifold dimensionality is back, so I thought I'd share a paper that explains nicely why measuring the "embedding dimensionality" of a manifold (e.g., counting PCs) can be very different from its actual "intrinsic dimensionality (DoFs) doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

It is our great honour to announce the APCV Keynote at #epc-apcv-2026: Prof. Hakwan Lau from the Institute for Basic Science in Korea! The call for member-initiated symposia & abstracts is now open: visualneuroscience.auckland.ac.nz/epc-apcv-2026 #psychscisky #visionscience #neuroskyence

As it's hiring season again I'm resharing the NeuroJobs feed. Add #NeuroJobs to your post if you're recruiting or looking for an RA, PhD, Postdoc, or faculty position in Neuro or an adjacent field. bsky.app/profile/did:...

Osaka University is beautiful in Autumn!

Jonny Smallwood @themindwanders.bsky.social was a beloved friend and mentor. He was taken from us too soon. His was a beautiful mind who understood the beauty of minds. As ever before, his kind voice guides me and his work will continue. We miss you Jonny. www.cbs.mpg.de/news/obituar...

I'm leading a session with PhD students on developing elevator pitches for research. Does anyone have suggested readings, websites, or just general advice on the topic? No one ever taught me how to do this and honestly I struggle with this skill. All suggestions welcome!

Do you like RSA analysis, M/EEG and Bayes? Then you'll love Variational RSA for M/EEG, by recently completed PhD student @alexlepauvre.bsky.social from Lucia Melloni's group. It's a method and SPM toolbox for multivariate analysis of M/EEG data. arxiv.org/pdf/2511.01784 . 🧵 [1/4]

The Computational and Cognitive Neural Sciences lab (ballardlab.org) at UC Riverside is recruiting psychology PhD students to join our team! Check out the flyer to learn about the lab and our stellar research community at UCR. Apply by 12/1! drive.google.com/file/d/19m8i...

I am accepting graduate students for the UCI Cognitive Sciences PhD program for Fall 2026. Check out my lab website - www.relcoglab.org for our recent themes. Our funded work focuses on combinatorial reasoning, moral decision-making, and conceptual cognition in humans and large language models.

How does the brain handle semantic composition? Our new Cerebral Cortex paper shows the left inferior frontal gyrus (BA45) does it automatically, even when task-irrelevant. We used fMRI + computational models. Congrats Marco Ciapparelli, Marco Marelli & team! doi.org/10.1093/cerc...

How do humans keep inventing tools and technologies that no single person could create alone? Our new preprint, led by @anilyaman.bsky.social & @ts-brain.bsky.social shows that semantic knowledge guides innovation and drives cultural evolution. 🧠📘 arxiv.org/abs/2510.12837

Picked this one up for reading over the holidays. “The thesis of this book is that the dominant ideas that have shaped #neuroscience are best understood as attempts to simplify the brain.” 🧠 …which is itself a simplification 😂

Seeing lots of reactions to this compelling paper - showing VTA dopamine is linked to cue and outcome induced behavioral reactions: www.nature.com/articles/s41... I have some thoughts…

New paper out in cognition with @arikahn.bsky.social, @nathanieldaw.bsky.social, Cate Hartley, and @katenuss.bsky.social !! We show that children 👶 use predictive representations (e.g. SR) to guide their choices, providing an account of how they can make flexible choices in a changing world

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster...For when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” Friedrich Nietzsche, influential German philosopher, born #OTD 1844. Jenseits von Gut und Böse 1886 | Portrait by Edvard Munch 1906, Thielska Gallery

Think of how much better off we'd be if every established researcher got in the habit of writing papers entitled "Second thoughts on [thing I'm famous for]"

this paper takes me by surprise a bit. of coz, we all know Ned's been thinking along these lines for decades: philpapers.org/rec/BLOBVC but is he really gonna seriously publish a new paper on this now, given all the AI hype & debates re: how unscientific some popular views on C are these days? 1/

🎇 Excited to finally share JL Romero Sosa’s publication! Results are from single-cell imaging in different subregions of rat frontal cortex during ✨de novo learning. Spoiler: everything is not everywhere all at once www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📣 New preprint from the Braga Lab! 📣 The ventral visual stream for reading converges on the transmodal language network Congrats to Dr. Joe Salvo for this epic set of results Big Q: What brain systems support the translation of writing to concepts and meaning? Thread 🧵 ⬇️

🧠 New preprint: we show that model-guided microstimulation can steer monkey visual behavior. Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2510.03684 🧵

We’re recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join our team! 🎉 I’m happy to share that I’ve opened back up the search for this position (it was temporarily closed due to funding uncertainty). See lab page and doc below for details!

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

The current environment is making it near impossible to run clinical trials in the UK. One key issue discussed in @brain1878.bsky.social is the duplication - or worse - of regulatory oversight at NHS hospitals & universities. My views on how to change the system academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

CW: depression, ideation (& the brain) Case study: stimulation of the sustantia nigra produces acute, intense depression that dissipates as soon as stimulation stops. Wow. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17561432/ (FYI: In follow-up, the individual had no mood issues 5 yrs out; whew!).

I'm recruiting PhD students to join my new lab in Fall 2026! The Shared Minds Lab at @usc.edu will combine deep learning and ecological human neuroscience to better understand how we communicate our thoughts from one brain to another.

Postdoc affordability index for ERC starting grants (based on Eurozone inflation) While in 2014, the fixed 1.5 mil EUR budget amounted to 9.84 theoretical 3-postdoc positions, in 2024 we are at 6.67, that's 32.3% loss in purchasing power. I will just leave it here.

👁️🧠 New preprint: We demonstrate the first data-driven neural control framework for a visual cortical implant in a blind human! TL;DR Deep learning lets us synthesize efficient stimulation patterns that reliably evoke percepts, outperforming conventional calibration. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...