I've been waiting some years to make this joke and now it’s real: I conned somebody into giving me a faculty job! I’m starting as a W1 Tenure-Track Professor at Goethe University Frankfurt in a week (lol), in the Faculty of CS and Math and I'm recruiting PhD students 🤗

This looks like it'll be a good week long argument to draw September to a close. 😂

New preprint! What happens if you add neuromodulation to spiking neural networks and let them go wild with it? TLDR: it can improve performance especially in challenging sensory processing tasks. Explainer thread below. 🤖🧠🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint! What happens if you add neuromodulation to spiking neural networks and let them go wild with it? TLDR: it can improve performance especially in challenging sensory processing tasks. Explainer thread below. 🤖🧠🧪 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

@drtnowotny.bsky.social and I have had a busy summer supervising a couple of great Google Summer of Code students on GeNN related projects under @incforg.bsky.social at @sussexai.bsky.social. Read all about their projects on our blog genn-team.github.io/blog/.

Explaining a project idea to a student, doodling diagrams as I go. Look down at my page and see this. 😂

If you're interested in spiking neural networks, you should know about surrogate gradient descent and @fzenke.bsky.social's SPyTorch tutorial which shows just how easy it is to apply this method that's changing the whole field. Check out my paean below. 👇

Truly honored (and a little overwhelmed) to see our work featured in The Transmitter's "This Paper Changed My Life." Huge thanks to @neural-reckoning.org for the kind words - and to our amazing community that keeps pushing spiking neural network research forward 🙏

In our latest “This paper changed my life,” @neural-reckoning.org explains how @fzenke.bsky.social's 2019 paper, and its related coding tutorial SpyTorch, made it possible to apply modern machine learning to spiking neural networks. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/this-paper-c...

Submissions (short!) due for SNUFA spiking neural networks conference in <2 weeks! 🤖🧠🧪 forms.cloud.microsoft/e/XkZLavhaJe More info at snufa.net/2025/ Note that we normally get around 700 participants and recordings go on YouTube and get 100s-1000s views. Please repost.

Has anyone written (or just have ideas about) the best way to approach modeling/theory when you're under-constrained by the data? Normative approaches seem like a possible obvious answer but even those need enough data about goals and constraints to be worth doing.

Submissions (short!) due for SNUFA spiking neural networks conference in <2 weeks! 🤖🧠🧪 forms.cloud.microsoft/e/XkZLavhaJe More info at snufa.net/2025/ Note that we normally get around 700 participants and recordings go on YouTube and get 100s-1000s views. Please repost.

Cool article on neural cellular automata that mentions some work done by my student @solarpunkgabs.bsky.social (which I'll link in the post below if you want to read more).

Become a Theory Fellow at Janelia. 🔍 Use computation & theory to tackle biological problems. 🖥️ Leverage state-of-the-art computational infrastructure 🤝 Collaborate across scientific disciplines Apply by Nov. 3 @ https://janelia.link/theoryfellowprogram

Project management software recommendations for academics? I realised I'm currently involved in at least 15 separate research projects plus teaching, admin, grant apps, talks, etc., and it's more than I can keep track of. What works for you and why? I'd like something affordable for my whole lab.

#Cosyne2026 is now open for business! Show us what you got both for the main meeting & workshop proposals 🧠🥳🧠🥳🧠

Of potential interest to those keen on motor control and/or multi-task networks. Congrats to Elom and Eric. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

🧠 New preprint: Why do deep neural networks predict brain responses so well? We find a striking dissociation: it’s not shared object recognition. Alignment is driven by sensitivity to texture-like local statistics. 📊 Study: n=57, 624k trials, 5 models doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Why hasn't Preprint Peer Review caught on more? I discovered a small, but simple reason - authors are missing out on the JOY of getting feedback because they aren't notified when feedback occurs. more in thread below!

The misleading manifold? The current debate (decoding vs causal relevance) and a toy example I gave in the thread below got me thinking about a related issue: how decoding may reflect structure more than function. 🧵 1/5

No blood moon in London sadly. Cloudless skies in every other direction.

I think @benhayden.bsky.social was quite careful in the wording of his OP, but people seem to be taking him and others as saying something much stronger (and something obviously wrong based on lesion studies). For me, the take home is this post below. The brain isn't the way we used to imagine.

UK academics, be aware that what's happening to universities in the US is coming to us in a few years, in the (unfortunately quite likely) event that Reform wins. Labour needs to get it's act together and give people a reason to vote for them.

We all know that correlation doesn't imply causation. So we took some correlations and tested if they were causal. Here's what happened: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

New paper on covariant #neuromorphic networks! We're connecting decades of work in computer vision with decades of work in spiking networks. And, in an event-based vision task against regular ANNs of similar complexity, spiking networks are doing much, much better! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I think this debate is our Cajal vs Golgi moment but it shouldn’t be. Neural code is most probably both distributed and localized. My issue is why do we treat our decoding results as if they’re causally relevant so we end up inflating the evidence for distributed coding? Marcus has a nice example:

Is anarchist science possible? As an experiment, we got together a large group of computational neuroscientists from around the world to work on a single project without top down direction. Read on to find out what happened. 🤖🧠🧪

These, and other, studies show that you can decode task-related signals from many brain areas. But wouldn't we need causal manipulations to conclude that the brain "uses" them? For example, maybe we can decode equally well from two areas. But, only one impacts behaviour when inactivated.

Is anarchist science possible? As an experiment, we got together a large group of computational neuroscientists from around the world to work on a single project without top down direction. Read on to find out what happened. 🤖🧠🧪

Finding correlates of the same signal in different brain areas is not evidence against specialisation, it is evidence for interconnection. When I flush my toilet, the level in the tank and the flow rate in the supply pipe become perfectly correlated. Yet these toilet areas have distinct functions.

Sad day for peope who still believe brain areas are the primary organizational units of function in the brain. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our multi-sensory integration Neuro-AI paper is now published in J Neurosci www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...

I can't get over this disused copper mine and slate quarry near Coniston in the Lake District. #photography

Very excited to see this, hopefully a new direction for the Green party. Labour looks like it's going to destroy itself over the next few years, so we need a new force that isn't proto-fascist or just representing rich people. Especially as they've said they'll work with the new Corbyn/Sultana party

If Labour continues doing nothing to make life better for the majority of people, and capitulating to all of Reform's racist agenda, then in a few years we will have Farage as PM. The scenes we're witnessing in the US with masked ICE thugs dragging people off the streets will happen here. Terrifying

I find the following sentence interesting: " Instead, the work of Hubel and Wiesel and the Nobel committee's recognition directed brain research along an overly narrow path for over 50 years." onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

What do you all reckon, is the AI bubble about to burst? My ill informed feeling is that we might be close to tapped out with current approaches, and there'll need to be a fundamental new insight to make much progress. It's been 8 years since transformers paper! www.theregister.com/2025/08/25/o...

Our new study (Titled: Memory Loves Company) asks whether working memory hold more when objects belong together. And yes, when everyday objects are paired meaningfully (Bow-Arrow), people remember them better than when they’re unrelated (Glass-Arrow). (mini thread)

The Lake District can be glorious. #photography

It’s been a productive few months for our team! We’re excited to share two more recently published works: 🧵👇

#SilentSunday #photography

It would be interesting to know what fraction of Nature articles are undisclosed paid-for PR. Or maybe this was just a freebie for Microsoft?

Is anyone else finding that multiple Google services are getting much worse recently? I heard they're putting pressure on their various teams to use LLMs for everything, maybe that's why?

Bought this for the kids but I have to admit I'm quite enjoying it.

Really amazing work that challenges some long-held beliefs about cortical plasticity. "We show adult sensory body maps are unaltered after amputation, suggesting deprivation-driven plasticity is even more marginal than argued by the strongest opponents of cortical reorganization."

This is certainly one approach - but it also leaves little time for the unexpected but very important parts of life (a colleague who needs to vent in your office for half an hour, a student who suddenly needs help, a beautiful afternoon that makes you want to take a walk to think)

Great and detailed blog post on compositionality, written by Eric Elmoznino: ericelmoznino.github.io/blog/2025/08... #compneuro #neuroai #neuroscience

My attempts to diet always go off the rails during the holidays and I think it's because I actually have time and energy to cook. Last few days have seen chestnut and chorizo soup, minestrone, homemade pesto, tacos, shortbread, scones, blackberry cake and jam.

I think it's probably worth remembering that tech company CEOs say a lot of nonsense because it gets media attention which helps them get investment. Your mockery helps them. Their actual business plan is not to ask AGI for a business plan, but something like to get access to data and sell it.