@jhennig.bsky.social has shown that dopamine exerts a real-time effect on conditioned responding, beyond its role in learning: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Another indication that dopamine is more than a learning signal! A joint effort with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @mhburrell.bsky.social.

Will be curious to have a play with this.

850 Tomahawk missiles could be $3,060,000,000... That is 3 billion sixty million US dollars. That is 1224 5 year biomedical research grants. Literally, over 6 millennia of biomedical research.

Our latest publication grapples with how the brain could implement gradient descent by sending learning targets top-down, gating plasticity with dendritic inhibition, and updating synaptic weights with biologically observed learning rules like BTSP. www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Open Research Europe is re-launching with a new platform, and broader set of supporters, this fall. It uses the publish-review-curate model. "Publishing will remain completely free for both European Commission-funded researchers and authors from participating countries." home.cern/news/news/ce...

On the latest episode, @braininspired.bsky.social with @juangallego.bsky.social about the wealth of evidence that supports the view that neural manifolds are real and useful, even if they may not completely solve the age-old mind-body problem. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

This trick works once. Next year the people who were fooled by this will take greater precautions (as presumably many people who weren't caught already did this year). Is it over for the highly selective short turnaround mega conference model?

Science would be so much better if we did review (of grants and papers) constructively and collaboratively, instead of only using them to produce binary accept/reject decisions. To do that, we have to separate review processes from decisions. One idea for grants 👇

I’m a little late on this announcement, but ... 🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!🚨 Our work looking at the (in)stability of the evidence accumulation process over the course of a single decision is finally out at PLoS Comp Bio. See thread below for the summary. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Science would be so much better if we did review (of grants and papers) constructively and collaboratively, instead of only using them to produce binary accept/reject decisions. To do that, we have to separate review processes from decisions. One idea for grants 👇

🧵 New preprint led by @bingbrunton.bsky.social, @elliottabe.bsky.social, @lawrencehu.bsky.social We gave a worm brain control of a fly body and it walked What did we learn? Nothing, other than deep reinforcement learning is effective We call it the digital sphinx www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Idea for a different way of doing project grants. Make decisions about which projects to fund based only on the questions asked, and then require successful grantees to go through a multi round post decision review process to sharpen up the methods and make sure they can answer the question.

UNESCO has launched a consultation to explore "fair, inclusive ways to create, share, and access academic knowledge, and to address challenges in building more equitable systems." Deadline for contributions is April 13. www.unesco.org/en/articles/...

Neuroscience has become increasingly concerned with prediction, and machine learning with causal explanation, with each field adopting methods from the other, writes @gershbrain.bsky.social. Will this bring us closer to understanding neural systems? www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

What is representational about drifting representations? press.princeton.edu/books/paperb...

Our paper “Multifidelity Simulation-based Inference for Computationally Expensive Simulators” has been accepted at ICLR 2026! 🥳 We hope this can be a practical solution for anyone analysing and doing inference on computationally expensive simulators. Paper: openreview.net/pdf?id=bj0dc...

if you're in London, don't miss these! next one in a little under a month!

I'm looking for a summer intern to work on computational neuroscience models of navigation and learning. Check out details on this and other project opportunities here: kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/kempner-inst...

Strong statement from UCU on principles for implementing AI in teaching, research and administration. This is much more reflective and comprehensive than the pervasive catch-all of 'responsible AI'. www.ucu.org.uk/media/15656/...

Excited to share some new work from my lab, where we rigorously characterize differences between L5 and L6b extratelencephalic neurons in the auditory cortex!

Had great fun discussing some recent work and the value of toy models in neuroscience last night! Our next workshop will be: * 16.04 * 16-20:30 * At the Crick Sign up (for free) and come along! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/understand...

China could be the world’s biggest public funder of science within two years. Forecast by science-policy researchers raises questions about where the epicentre of global research will shift to in the coming decade. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Cosyne invited me to give a long tutorial (4 hours!) on methods to quantify differences high-d neural recordings across animals, brain regions, deep neural nets, etc. The recording is up on youtube. I hope it inspires more research on this fundamental topic! www.youtube.com/watch?v=n44x...

Every spike has an energy cost, so a priori firing rate ought to tell us how important a message is, not the content of the message. It's easy to decode simple variables from knowing which neurons are currently important. Is this why neuroscientists believe neurons communicate via firing rates? 🤖🧠🧪

Every spike has an energy cost, so a priori firing rate ought to tell us how important a message is, not the content of the message. It's easy to decode simple variables from knowing which neurons are currently important. Is this why neuroscientists believe neurons communicate via firing rates? 🤖🧠🧪

New paper out at iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1... with @jsenk.bsky.social & @drtnowotny.bsky.social. We present what I think is the first framework for flexibly implementing GPU-accelerated structural plasticity rules (in GeNN obvs!) and demonstrate it with DEEP-R & topographic map formation.

How do fish localize sound without interaural cues? @johve.bsky.social et al. found a behavioral algorithm for directional hearing that predicts behavior from a pressure/motion phase comparison and accounts for how this relationship varies with distance. www.cell.com/current-biol...

To my colleagues: as you review the next round of applications, please take into account the unique challenges these candidates have faced. I’m personally witnessing how hard they strive to stay connected despite the brutality of the regime and a devastating war.

To celebrate our new pre-print from @fabricionicola.bsky.social, a few of my favorite animal jumps… www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... youtu.be/OX9GTi-wQ6I

It's nest building time I guess? #photography

I think Fodor & Pylyshyn's 1988 paper is possibly the most mischaracterized paper in the history of cognitive science. It's often cited as arguing that neural networks cannot achieve systematicity, compositionality, and productivity. But that's not what they actually argue...

The arXiv is becoming a nonprofit separate from Cornell, and they're looking for a CEO. Please repost to let good candidates know! @dabacon.tachyon.institute, @harrowing.bsky.social, @michaelnielsen.bsky.social jobs.chronicle.com/job/37961678...

Sharing “Neural Thickets”. We find: In large models, the neighborhood around pretrained weights can become dense with task-improving solutions. In this regime, post-training can be easy; even random guessing works Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.12228 Web: thickets.mit.edu 1/

Super excited that Wellcome is renewing its commitment to @elife.bsky.social and supporting us as we try to help others move to more progressive publishing approaches.

Fox. #photography

If you're in London next Thursday afternoon/evening, come along to our seminar/workshop on how to get theory and experiment working together better in neuroscience. There'll be a short talk by @marcusghosh.bsky.social on "A taxonomy of recurrence" (see below) and a long discussion with free food.

How does the brain build a memory? A common assumption is that the neurons activated during an experience collectively form the memory engram. In our new Nature Neuroscience paper (finally out!), we show that this is not the case. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Always interesting to see what Astera are doing.

Oh wow. I know people here have THOUGHTS. Write them up & submit!! I love that all essays have to be public before entering. This is exactly the type of conversation we need more of. (Also cash prizes + philanthropy is listening) Now which on my list should I pick 🤔? astera.org/essay-compet...

Neuroscientist who is great with new media and cares about scientific rigor? DM me. We want to hire someone like you (part time).

There's no better way to learn than to teach! Help make NMA a resounding success!

If you take a paper and get an LLM to review it, then get the LLM to rewrite the paper and write a reply to the reviewer, and then repeat, what happens? Convergence to something better? Cycles of arbitrary change that never converge? Descent into meaningless drivel?

Very refreshing interaction with the undergrad student form India @kaurarmanjot445.bsky.social ! 🧪 🧠 She was interested in our math equivalence between spike timing and deep relu nets With a short call and few emails she reproduced the work and open sourced a turorial github.com/kaurarmanjot...

What a wonderful election result to wake up to. Greens not only win in Manchester but they win by a huge amount. Not even close. 💚 Gives me a little hope for the future.

DNN models of the brain are getting bigger. Are we replacing one complicated system in vivo with another in silico? In new work, we seek the *smallest* DNN models of visual cortex, balancing prediction with parsimony. It turns out these compact models are surprisingly small! rdcu.be/e5H8G

Really looking forward to participating in this! What a great way to start my next professional chapter embedded in #london #neuroscience: talks on how to get experiment and theory working together better, extended networking/group discussion, and food! Come join us!

London #neuroscience people you may like this. We're hosting a series of talks at Imperial & Crick on how to get experiment and theory working together better. Each session will have a talk around this and extended networking / group discussion on the questions raised. Plus, free food! 🤖🧠🧪

Our new paper is now out showing how time perception in animals is linked to their ecology. Using data from 237 species we show temporal perception is faster in species that fly and pursuit predators www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🌐

We can win a better pay offer in 2026! We've suffered a 9% pay cut in real terms since 2018. Management imposed another real-terms cut last year - insisting that a 2% increase was all they could afford - and then refused to negotiate with the unions. 2026 pay negotiations begin in April.

So what does everyone think of this? Only had a quick glance but there are some good things, like a focus on aspects that might be less well developed by big companies (eg sustainable AI). On the other hand, the total 4 year budget is about 1 months spend by just one big AI company.