Fear, monkeys, and institutional courage When news broke of an explosion inside Harvard’s neurobiology building early Saturday morning, every scientist who works with monkeys felt it—an involuntary jolt, a spike of cortisol, the silent thought: what if it had been us? Neither animals nor people…

Considering an “adversarial journal club,” with pro and anti presentations followed by an open discussion aimed at achieving consensus. Has anyone tried this format?

A remarkable monograph.

🚨Job alert🚨 The lab has up to *3 postdoc openings* for comp systems neuroscientists interested in describing and manipulating neural population dynamics mediating behaviour This is part of a collaborative ARIA grant "4D precision control of cortical dynamics" euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/383909

A delightful academic farce.

“Like the reading of tea leaves, this approach can be used to create an impression, by projecting conceptual schemes onto suggestive patterns. … Thus, the search for explicit coding may actually be misleading …”

Stoked to see our study out in final form! Big kudos to @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social for driving this along for the past 5 years.

Thrilled that our paper is out today in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s4...

Apply to become a CSHL-Simons Fellow in Neuroscience! Run your own lab, pursue bold ideas, join a highly collaborative community! All areas including experimental or computational neuro, including NeuroAI & systems PhD required; ≤~1 yr postdoc www.cshl.edu/about-us/car...

🧠🌟🐭 Excited to share some of my postdoc work on the evolution of dexterity! We compared deer mice evolved in forest vs prairie habitats. We found that forest mice have: (1) more corticospinal neurons (CSNs) (2) better hand dexterity (3) more dexterous climbing, which is linked to CSN number🧵

Excited that this work discovering cross-species signatures of stabilizing foot placement control is now out in PNAS! pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... @antoinecomite.bsky.social

🚨Pre-print alert! 🚨https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.17.683171v1 Our new study tackles the question: do all neurons in motor cortices (MC) encode movement & coordinate as we move? Answering this question will be key for effectively targeting motor representations in BCIs.

Agreed! I find Nelson Goodman’s analysis persuasive:

Today my @nytimes.com colleagues and I are launching a new series called Lost Science. We interview US scientists who can no longer discover something new about our world, thanks to this year‘s cuts. Here is my first interview with a scientist who studied bees and fires. Gift link: nyti.ms/3IWXbiE

Neuroscience faculty job Alert! We are hiring at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine! Apply at apply.interfolio.com/171533. Please repost.

Despite These Times...my department is hiring! I really like my department, we have a good mix of disciplines and organisms and we're really low-drama. We also get pizza at faculty meeting. So if you're a computational and structural biologist, join us! 🧪 jobs.rutgers.edu/postings/260...

The neural control & computation lab is recruiting! If you're interested in using large-scale neural population recordings to study how the brain learns to produce complex and flexible behaviours, please get in touch. www.ncclab.ca

The Department of Kinesiology at Penn State is inviting applications for an open-rank faculty position in sensorimotor control and rehabilitation neuroscience. Please share this opportunity with interested colleagues in your network. psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic...

The Agrawal lab is moving! This January we will be setting up shop at #UBC in Vancouver, in the department of #Zoology! We are actively recruiting at all levels, especially masters and PhD students. These position are #funded! Please send anyone interested my way!

My department at Case Western Reserve is recruiting an Assistant / Associate Professor of Neurosciences - come be our colleague! www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Milton’s prose: as timeless as his verse. www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/6...

Now out in @nature.com: Our study discovering a neural circuit in Drosophila that predictively inhibits proprioceptor axons during voluntary leg movements, such as walking and grooming. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Stoked to see this paper finally out! It answers two big questions: where visual objects are encoded in the brain, and how head-direction cells get oriented using visual landmarks. Super fun collaboration with @mace-lab.bsky.social and Stuart Trenholm. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Here, the 'ballistic tongues' paper by Yu Zeng and team www.cell.com/current-biol... plus dispatch by Sam Van Wassenbergh www.cell.com/current-biol...

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...

Preprint - Excited to present WHOLISTIC, which extends the concept of whole-brain functional imaging to the entire body. Pioneering work by incredibly talented Virginia Ruetten @vmsruetten.bsky.social, this platform reveals whole-organism cellular dynamics in vivo. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

A warning from Dr. Johnson (imitating Juvenal): poets.org/poem/vanity-...

📣 This is a big one that we've been cooking for a while! We think it adds to the heart of motor control: 'how does motor cortex work'. Congratulations @mkashefi.bsky.social!

2026 Internships at CTRL Labs at Meta Reality Labs It's intern application season for summer 2026 with the CTRL Labs (Electromyogram (EMG)) team at Meta Reality Labs! 🚀 You can see our latest work covered in this Nature article. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Come join us at University of Toronto. We're hiring a Professor of computational cognitive neuroscience. #neuroAI #compneuro jobs.utoronto.ca/job/Toronto-...

Maps are indispensable in neuroscience. Even when constructed with relatively crude methods, they can reveal clear specialization of brain areas. Here’s a nice example from 1902 (Grunbaum & Sherrington).

If your experiment tells you that all brain areas do the same thing, but is not designed in a way that could replicate any of the key established properties that distinguish neurons in these areas, your readers’ conclusions may relate less to physiology than experimental design.

Thrilled to share our new paper out in BMC, part of my postdoc at @cornellvet.bsky.social! 🐘🐀 We found that larger mammals evolve more diverse morphologies, while smaller ones can explore many locomotor strategies without much change to their forelimbs. bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Sensation ≠ perception: a fascinating case study. A patient with damage to visual cortex points at a light he cannot perceive. academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

Please repost! We have an open rank, tenure-line faculty position in biomechanics in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. At U-M we have great colleagues, exceptional resources, and biomechanics can be found all across the campus. #BiomechSky

The Cullen and Charles Labs (Biomedical Engineering, JHU) are recruiting a postdoctoral fellow to join a multi-PI collaborative project developing a cerebellar neuroprosthesis to restore gait, tremor, and balance in cerebellar disorders. For details, see: thecullenlab.org/opportunities/

ATTN🚨: I will be looking for PhD students through NYU's Center for Data Science PhD program this year. Applicants should have an interest in either NeuroAI (specifically biological attention or AI interpretability) or ML for Remote Sensing. Visit my lab website for more info: lindsay-lab.github.io

Please repost. The School of Kinesiology at the University of Michigan is seeking applications and nominations for our next Dean! Click the "leadership profile" link on the careers page below for full details. And Go Blue!

Jim Hudspeth has died 💔 I am so sad. He was probably my favorite hearing researcher of all time. Absolute genius and also generous - he spent hours on the phone advising me on my career even tho we barely knew each other. May his memory be a blessing. www.ted.com/talks/jim_hu...

Decoding inner speech. A volunteer who cannot speak imagines saying the sentence on the screen. A computer decodes the signals from an implant in her brain and correctly guesses what she's saying to herself. Here's my story (gift link): nyti.ms/3UpEiat

“Apaesthete.” Mott & Sherrington, coining recklessly in 1895.

Grepping dead trees (especially bibliographies): still a vital skill for PhD students.

Excited to announce that my first postdoc paper is now online! Links: www.nature.com/articles/s41... rdcu.be/eAcN7 In it, we examine the perennial question: what changes in the brain when learning a new motor skill? Read more below to find out 👇

On a W. G. Sebald kick. What a weird and wonderful book!

🚨 New preprint + thread 🧵 We've gone back to studying motoneuron control principles and their applications & here's paper #1: A proof-of-concept study showing that people with tetraplegic spinal cord injury can control up to 2DoF from a single intramuscular implant www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Time to measure some receptive fields …

Beautiful music - a creation of the mind of mouse.

Compare the unit response with this remarkable lesion effect:

Is there a clearer example of persistent activity in working memory? journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....

I think my home library needs borrowing cards, too.