⚠️ New paper alert and what a way to end 2025! 🎉 Happy to share our story “Sleep-dependent infraslow rhythms are evolutionarily conserved across reptiles and mammals.” published today in Nature Neuroscience. Sleeping dragons 🦎 and functional ultrasound! Read the full paper here: rdcu.be/eWJHb 1/8

1. My take away from this is A good scientist and a professor should have accountability: Konrad says sorry! Doesn’t say we all make mistakes but the paper found its way anyways… he took the responsibility and apologized. Something that academics should learn.

New post: The Electric Motor and the Drill LLM chat bots are like electric motors: can do anything, bad at everything. The problem is UI/UX. AI should be more like power tools. I built a science planner around this philosophy. 10,000 scientists use it now. open.substack.com/pub/kording/...

1.Ok, If I say something like this to my uncle/MP, I’ll probably hear: “Sure, science is important —but when unemployment kills and families can’t pay rent, why should taxpayers cover lifetime salaries, and multi-million-dollar labs for basic research?” honestly, that’s not an unreasonable question.

As a person transitioning from research to clinic/industry back and forth, I only wish that researchers could understand that science is not under attack, scientists aren't under attack, not even their approach, their manner of practice is…, only if they understood this and improved themselves…

Thrilled to announce I'll be joining the Division of Neuroscience at @manchester.ac.uk as a Lecturer in Feb '26! The DuLab will explore how the brain integrates sensory streams into internal maps 🌐 using the rodent head-direction circuit, the 'neural compass', as a starting point for the journey 🧭

Really excited to share this Opinion piece we've been working on with fellow head-direction cell geeks @apeyrache.bsky.social @desdemonafricker.bsky.social and (bsky-less?) Andrea Burgalossi! While head-direction cells pop up in many cortical regions, we think that one of them is quite unique (1/8)

Deeply embarrassing that Scientific American would lend its name to this claptrap.

1/ I’ve lived this, I’ve studied it, and I’m using my experience to highlight broader inequities that many of us face. BUT I wrote this piece solely with a researcher’s eye 👀 It’s not a personal account. It’s an evidence-based look at how “fit” shapes belonging and power. medium.com/@elnaz.karam...

Fyi if you're an educator looking for videos about the brain and/or how neuroscience is done, check out @brainfacts.org's YouTube page: youtube.com/@brainfactsorg It includes submissions to their Brain Awareness Week video contest, which can be quite fun! #neuroskyence

So excited to see this preprint released from the lab into the wild. Charlotte has developed a theory for how learning curriculum influences learning generalization. Our theory makes straightforward neural predictions that can be tested in future experiments. (1/4) 🧠🤖 🧠📈 #MLSky

Honored to be awarded the FRQ–IVADO Research Chair in "Social Neuro-AI & Inter-Personalized Psychiatry"! Grateful to my team & colleagues at @cra-chusj.bsky.social & @mila-quebec.bsky.social, and my family for their support 🙏 Excited to keep bridging social neuroscience, AI & precision psychiatry🚀

Today is my first day as Director, Research & Innovation and CRCHUM Research Centre @crchum.bsky.social (University of Montreal's main Research & Teaching Hospital). Also starting a new research group @umontreal.ca. Stay tuned for updates along this new collective journey!

"I feel that there’s nothing more important than to pass on, to my son, the little piece of nothing and everything that I’ve observed — the happiness that comes from watching a dragonfly, spider, frog, lizard, elephant, parrot, mouse, orangutan, or ladybug."

Jane Goodall understood better than most the impact humans have had on the planet. Having witnessed so much environmental deterioration during her lifetime, she was as much an activist as a scientist. Read our piece from 2024 on the legendary primatologist. 💚

I am playing with Muse device as a part of my work, Today I tried the resistance meditation that is centered around refuge. I realized that I have no stability refuge except my family, which are in Iran so not a real refuge… I am more nervous after my meditation now 🤦‍♀️

The CTRL-Labs decoding model paper is out! Saw this presented at Cosyne this year, very cool to see it out. I would say this is the clearest demonstration of scaling laws in neural decoding to-date. www.nature.com/articles/s41... 🧠📈 🧪

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. 👇

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... my wife (2nd author) just published in Cell working from home is not without pressure you know? #neuroscience

I am digging into use of HRV in sleep research with the folks in the field. In my latest article, I unpack the science of HRV biofeedback—and how wearable tech is translating this from controlled lab settings into everyday use for stress, sleep, and performance. medium.com/@elnaz.karam...

"Sleep, like aging, may be an inescapable consequence of aerobic metabolism." Really enjoyed this thought-provoking paper 🧠💤🪰 - congrats to @rafsarnataro.bsky.social and team on this impressive work! No wonder the Krebs cycle always put me to sleep 😅 #neuroskyence

This is a great input I received. To respond that: 1/ Social influence doesn’t stop at politics or media—it’s present in science too. Scientists are not immune to bandwagon effects—repeated claims in literature can start to feel more “true” (illusory truth effect), even when replication is weak.

International collaborations enable the sharing of resources and expertise, as well as more broadly applicable and reproducible results. But new U.S. federal funding restrictions are putting them in jeopardy, writes @lucinauddin.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/funding/inte...

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. 🤖🧠🧪

For those interested in open neuroscience learning tools, check out the preprint for “RetINaBox: A hands-on tool for experimental neuroscience" that a couple students in my lab worked on in collaboration with the Trenholm lab: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 🧠📈 🧪

Such a fun collaboration to be a part of! Turns out, like many things in the brain, inhibition-stabilization is the answer. 👀🧭⚖️

Have you ever changed your mind in a meeting, not for evidence but because everyone else agreed? There’s neuroscience to explore 🧠 I just published a piece on how the brain rewards consensus, why repetition feels like truth, and what that means in the age of the infodemic. medium.com/@elnaz.karam...

Just published on Medium: Combating the Infodemic. Personal experience as an Iranian: I’ve felt overwhelmed by headlines during the recent Iran–Israel war—proof of how framing shapes what we feel + believe. Based on brilliant research of @profsanderlinden.bsky.social medium.com/@elnaz.karam...

For anyone interested in an academic job in 🇨🇦, we will soon be advertising an Assistant Prof position in Systems Neuroscience (rodents and other animal models) at ULethbridge. There are many pros and cons of working here, so feel free to DM me to find out more #neuroskyence #academicsky

Dear community, It’s been a long job search, and being Iranian, even while based in Canada, has sometimes limited my options. But I’m still pushing forward 🌱. I bring a diverse set of skills and a scientific mindset, and I’m excited to find my next role.

Planning your first scientific project as the term is about to start? Teaching a project based course? I am working on an app that should help. planyourscience.com Still looking for feedback. Much simpler than any previous version. Works on mobile. Good science, much AI.

Who could answer these questions better than this? Bloody AI...!

A groundbreaking cohort study reveals that multi-modal AI models enhance disease prediction by integrating rich lifestyle and health data. by Reicher L, Shilo S (...) Segal E et 35 al. in Nat Med #MedSky 👉 get more here 📖 read the article:

Demetrios is definitely one of the most fun conference hosts I’ve ever seen! Thank you @mlopscommunity.bsky.social for a day full of things to learn and so much fun.

Echo Chamber xkcd.com/3116/

Super excited to see this paper from Armin Lak & colleagues out! (I've seen @saxelab.bsky.social present it before.) www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... tl;dr: The learning trajectories that individual mice take correspond to different saddle points in a deep net's loss landscape. 🧠📈 🧪 #NeuroAI

Anyone have a good concrete example of this being successfully applied in neuroscience? #neuroskyence #compneuro

Happy 107th Birthday, Brenda Milner! Her contributions to neuropsychology shaped the way we understand the human brain. From surviving two world wars and two pandemics, to paving the way for future generations of researchers, Milner’s legacy continues. @mcgill.ca @cusm-muhc.bsky.social

In case anyone’s wondering, being on the job market, I embrace any opportunity that could take me out of Montreal or even Quebec despite being able to speak French. This province has too many restrictions for one to thrive in almost everything, most of them arising from things similar to this.

Regarding all the theories of consciousness, and metacognition, where does everyone stand on using confidence rating in decision-making experiments?

En route to @cnsorg.bsky.social #CNS2025! ✈️ Talking Wednesdsy at the workshop on NeuroAI, and looking for postdocs - if you’re interested in studying sleep, navigation, or offline learning using a neuroAI approach, come say hi!

On that note, I'll be looking for postdocs, students, and likely a computational lab tech/lab manager or research software engineer. Please share, and if this kind of work (and the prospect of helping get a new lab off the ground) sounds interesting to you, please reach out!

Lucky people who’ll join this team!

I got laid off from work >2m ago (in the worst terms possible). Job market is at the worst. I’m unemployed, penniless, still immigrant, far from my loved ones, my family fled their home in a rush and my home country is at war. Can I be used as a dictionary example for screwed over?

#Faculty members. I hear that the universities are practicing silence regarding Iran-Israel conflict. #University doesn’t have to take any political side to offer support for its community. If you feel concerned, reach out to your department asking for outreach to those affected.Your voice is heard.

🧠 How do transformers learn relational reasoning? We trained small transformers on transitive inference (if A>B and B>C, then A>C) and discovered striking differences between learning paradigms. Our latest work reveals when and why AI systems generalize beyond training data 🤖

Short message: I am not ok… I am miles opposite of ok.

I’ve been going crazy, isolated at home for the last three days and now my family’s neighbourhood is being under attack. Whatever your opinion about this whole thing is, reach out to your #Iranian friends, don’t leave them alone. This amount of stress is paralyzing.

It is important to know that most of the AI products are not perfectly fine-tuned before their public release. What is described here is actually a process of fine-tuning. Stumping the model and see where it fails and improving the model. Sounds like the public users are doing the work!

Positive take away: A while ago I met a young scholar from #Israel in a conference. Today I received a message from them asking if my family are doing well in #Iran. The fact that this individual looked me up just to reach out shows how we can be more united than we are especially in #academia