The attack-the-academy movement was never, ever about freedom and diversity of thought in the academy. It was always going to play out this way. It’s never been “nobody should dictate thought,” it’s always been “WE should dictate thought.” www.erininthemorning.com/p/texas-tech...

For those interested in memory, engrams, and how scientific ideas and career trajectories evolve over time, I recommend this personal perspective by @sjo09.bsky.social (even though I'm pretty sure I missed many of the Taylor Swift references). www.jneurosci.org/content/46/1...

New Annual Review with @nathanieldaw.bsky.social: “Planning in the Brain: It's Not What You Think It Is.” We argue that the brain's 'planning' machinery is mostly used for learning from simulated experience, and that thinking prospectively at decision time is just one special case of this process.

New work w/ Zach Kelso and @madeleinecsnyder.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Our negative results on classical conditioning in planarian flatworms. This was surprising, given the long history of work (including sensational findings of memory transfer and retention through decapitation).

We're happy to release NeuralSet: a simple, fast, scalable package for Neuro-AI Supports: 🧠 fMRI, EEG, MEG, iEEG, spikes… preprocessing 💬 text 🔊 audio ▶️ video 🏞️ image… embeddings 📦 pip install neuralset 🔍 facebookresearch.github.io/neuroai/neur... 📄 kingjr.github.io/files/neural... 🧵 Details👇

How eyes on modern vertebrae came to be is amazing. There are really complex; it's a multilayered circuit of rods, cones, and rhabdomeric photoreceptors. Getting there was just as complex an evolutionary journey. 🧪 Link: www.cell.com/current-biol...

To accompany my textbook (Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience) and the class I taught this semester, I'm open-sourcing my lectures slides: gershmanlab.com/lectures.html I'll continue to update these as I improve them.

I think this is a super interesting paper from @markhisted.org and co: www.cell.com/neuron/abstr... My personal bet is that the phenomenon seen here would be different for some types of inter-laminar recurrence. #neuroscience 🧪

Going from neural activity to blood flow just became easier! Two brainwide populations, each with its neurovascular coupling. (But going backwards... is now a tad more complicated.) By @agnesland.bsky.social & team. Thanks @intlbrainlab.bsky.social @wellcometrust.bsky.social @simonsfoundation.org

New paper in collaboration with @mhburrell.bsky.social @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social and @gershbrain.bsky.social ! "Phasic dopamine drives conditioned responding beyond its role in learning" 🧵 (1/8) www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Someone needs to make a calculator where the eml operator is the only operator button. This is genuinely very cool though

The basal ganglia famously receive RPE-like input from dopamine neurons. However, dopamine neurons project much more to the striatum than the cortex. Does the cortex receive a complementary learning signal from a different neuromodulator? We think NE is one clear candidate. 13

Delighted to share our discoveries about one of the brain's neurotransmitter systems: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Together with colleagues at the @alleninstitute.org, we have learned a lot about a tiny cluster of neurons in the brainstem locus coeruleus (LC) that releases norepinephrine (NE). 1

New preprint! 🧠 How do RNNs learn abstract rules from sequences, independent of specific stimuli? By Vezha Boboeva, with Alberto Pezzotta & George Dimitriadis "From sequences to schemas: low-rank recurrent dynamics underlie abstract relational representations" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

@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.

If you're interested in emerging ideas in neural interfaces, I humbly suggest my lab's latest: www.nature.com/articles/s42... Neural interfaces create dynamic interactions between the brain & devices. This means mean we need new engineering approaches beyond typical ML to "decode" a static brain

How similar are two activity patterns? We all know that low correlations don't mean that they are necessarily dissimilar – our measurements could be noisy. So how do you correct for this? Our slightly nerdy, but hopefully useful preprint takes a deep dive: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thrilled to share our new paper, which shows that the relative timing of cholinergic and dopamine release dynamically gates whether dopamine acts as an RPE for in vivo plasticity and reinforcement learning. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Have you ever wondered why mice do what they do when they are free to do whatever they want? Check out our latest (and this slightly delayed thread about our recent paper, led by Caleb Weinreb and friends...) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

If there were one fact I wish more people in the field knew, it's that randomly-initialized RNNs can do basically anything (as in reservoir computing)

🧵 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...

This direction is a real game-changer for me and hopefully for others as well. Marlene/Doug/et al are showing us that you can do curiosity-driven systems neuroscience in a way that directly tells us something about human health

I’m excited to share my newest work with @benhayden.bsky.social, and the work I’m most proud of to date, on characterizing semantic coding in single-neuron hippocampal activity in patients with autism during natural language comprehension! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

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...

How do neural circuits in the brain implement normalization? 🧠 In our new paper, we show that just normalizing sensory input isn't enough. Crucially, we must also normalize the error signals! 🧵👇 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2603.17676

Thanks @natmesanash.bsky.social for covering our new work, in @thetransmitter.bsky.social!

New paper hot off the (pre-)press! We dig into the evolutionary origins of neural computations for behavioral control across mice, monkeys, and humans: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6.... As our lab's first foray into comparative analysis of neural dynamics, I’m super excited about this work! 1/18

I want to write a fun little post on what we've learned in neuroscience in the last 20 years. What are the most interesting results you can think of? Biggest trends?

Compositional representation of self, others, and gaze direction in *human* hippocampus - super cool. arxiv.org/abs/2603.04747

Excited to share our latest paper in which we discuss merging theory-and data- driven computational psychiatry in a large transdiagnostic cohort study (N=2400) www.biologicalpsychiatrycnni.org/article/S245... Christopher Pittenger, Godfrey Pearlson @annierhcheng.bsky.social @sobp-org.bsky.social

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

RIP redundancy reduction? Beautiful work by Liu & colleagues showing that neural redundancy increases with learning, as predicted by a Bayesian model: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

brain prize recipients over the years. I remembered that I made this plot last year for a bias watch project (yes, because of that 2013–2018 period 🙃). the prize for this year will be announced later this afternoon, let's see. 🔮

The amount of pain I'm going through just to get an IRB protocol for running innocuous online behavioral studies...sheesh, do not recommend

How does the brain generalize past experiences without confusing memories? 🧠 Our lab's newest preprint reveals a fundamental division of labor between the cortex and cerebellum that solves this problem. (Check out the cortex-cerebellum video below! 👇) 🧵

I am totally pumped about this new work . "Task-trained RNNs" are a powerful and influential framework in neuroscience, but have lacked a firm theoretical footing. This work provides one, and makes direct contact with the classical theory of random RNNs: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Recently, van der Stigchel and colleagues posted a provocative commentary suggesting that we should be wary of bots in online behavioral data collection (🧵by @cstrauch.bsky.social here: bsky.app/profile/cstr...). But should we? Here is my response letter osf.io/preprints/ps.... 1/5

This post really put together the pieces in a way that floored me. Everything is about to change and we have to confront that reality causalinf.substack.com/p/claude-cod...

After several years of work, my lab is starting to put out our first papers on learning in a unicellular organism (Stentor coeruleus). Here we show evidence for a form of associative learning in Stentor: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

NYU's Center for Neural Science is seeking a faculty candidate that would be jointly appointed with our Tandon School of Engineering. We are looking for post-doc applicants with neuroengineering or computational backgrounds. apply.interfolio.com/182074

I dunno if it's true that all lines are straight and parallel. I'm guessing that these little guys, with their bendy lines and implied slant, are doing a lot of the work here

🚨🚨New Preprint Alert!🚨🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Animal learning is painfully slow (at least initially). Yet, well trained animals can learn very fast, sometimes displaying few-shot inference. How does this transition occur?

Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Hippocampal trace coding dominates and disrupts place coding https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.17.706430v1

A new preprint "Anxiety Modulates Event Segmentation" with @yaelniv.bsky.social and colleagues! osf.io/preprints/ps...

With this one in print, I think I finally earned that PhD... 😅 Presented for the first time at the cosyne when the world ended (March 2020). I'll bring over a summary thread from twitter when it was still twitter... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Thrilled to finally share this work! 🧠🔊 Using a new reinforcement-free task we show mice (like humans) extract abstract structure from sound (unsupervised) & dCA1 is causally required by building factorised, orthogonal subspaces of abstract rules. Led by Dammy Onih! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

I've been inspired to become a founder of a new startup that develops brain-to-brain interface technology. It's called Talk. We're going to reinvent communication for the digital age. The best part is that we're able to zero-shot transfer the full computational stack already used by your brain!

In the first systematic, multi-node recordings of spiking activity across the human basal ganglia–thalamic circuit, @dennislondon.bsky.social explains how this pathway integrates cognitive variables with ongoing action. We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thrilled that my paper is out in the @nature.com. We explored how the brain builds complex tasks by compositionally combining simpler sub-task representations. The brain flexibly performs multiple tasks by dynamically reusing neural subspaces for sensory inputs and motor actions rdcu.be/eRVUk