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

New paper alert! 🚨 We found that the brain's compass is remarkably stable at two scales 1️⃣ the system maintains its internal organization for weeks 2️⃣ It "remembers" its orientation for weeks, even after a single visit This may be key to how the brain aligns its other maps. Paper: rdcu.be/e3waP

Our paper is out in @natneuro.nature.com! www.nature.com/articles/s41... We develop a geometric theory of how neural populations support generalization across many tasks. @zuckermanbrain.bsky.social @flatironinstitute.org @kempnerinstitute.bsky.social 1/14

neuroAI comparisons of ANNs to brains do have a range of problems. Even more than I had realized. And I was worried before: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

How do diverse context structures reshape representations in LLMs? In our new work, we explore this via representational straightening. We found LLMs are like a Swiss Army knife: they select different computational mechanisms reflected in different representational structures. 1/

Taking the #GRCBasalGanglia Oath ✋🏼 I acknowledge that the go/no-go model of the BG was useful but it is outdated and incorrect, or at least incomplete. I pledge not to use the go/no-go model as a strawman to motivate my work.

1/7 Can infants recognise the world around them? 👶🧠 As part of the FOUNDCOG project, we scanned 134 awake infants using fMRI. Published today in Nature Neuroscience, our research reveals 2-month-old infants already possess complex visual representations in VVC that align with DNNs.

Reward as drive reduction, the return! This opinion piece on the explanatory and unifying power of the homeostatic reinforcement learning framework is amazingly accessible, despite its technical nature, and extremely insightful 👏 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... 1/2

At @elife.bsky.social you can now include explainer videos with every figure. Like going to a seminar while you engage with the paper. First example here elifesciences.org/articles/106... Click the arrows next to each figure to get a video of @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social explaining it for you!

Oh hi did you know eNeuro @sfnjournals.bsky.social does double-blind peer review and from what I've seen as an editor the past couple years it works really well.

Ripple oscillations are central for memory and sleep. But ripple detection in humans remains challenging. Here we introduce a simulation approach in @natcomms.nature.com as common ripple detectors mainly pick up 1/f noise and not genuine oscillations 👇 www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroskyence

Since the Namboodiri lab isn’t on Bluesky (I think?), I’d like to amplify this cool paper which I and others in the Janak lab made a small contribution to.

My coding life got so much better when I started using uv, in large part because it meant I stopped using conda

This is great - it's about time someone updated the discourse on LLM energy usage to reflect that coding agents use massively more prompts than occasional questions to ChatGPT Simon estimates that a day of coding agent usage comes out close to the energy needed to run a dishwasher

Can reward improve memory for what came before it? 🌟 In a registered report with @duncanlabuoft.bsky.social & @megschlichting.bsky.social, we reconcile mixed findings from past studies: reward retroactively boosts associative—but not item—memory, and only in reward-sensitive individuals!

I love this so much. After pushback on his recent "Medicine is the only field that reaches 6 sigma" with "my field, psychophysics is so awesome" he posted this. Hurray all Psychophysicists. LETS CELEBRATE PSYCHOPHYSICS. An island of large effects is us!

I’m very happy to share the latest from my lab published in @Nature Hippocampal neurons that initially encode reward shift their tuning over the course of days to precede or predict reward. Full text here: rdcu.be/eY5nh

Help! We want to understand multi-task neural representations, but all we have is 24/7 spiking data from human patients in hippocampus and cortex, along with video, audio, speech, heart rate, and so much more! If you can help, please apply to join the lab as a postdoc ☺️ jobs.bcm.edu/job/Postdoct...

When and why do modular representations emerge in neural networks? @stefanofusi.bsky.social and I posted a preprint answering this question last year, and now it has been extensively revised, refocused, and generalized. Read more here: doi.org/10.1101/2024... (1/7)

This is the way. Starting very early, eg with parameter/model recovery, can even inform task design. Wish I was more consistent with this. If you need something to point to, great tutorial paper by Anne Collins & Bob Wilson: elifesciences.org/articles/49547

once again being driven insane by ML conference submissions

With some trepidation, I'm putting this out into the world: gershmanlab.com/textbook.html It's a textbook called Computational Foundations of Cognitive Neuroscience, which I wrote for my class. My hope is that this will be a living document, continuously improved as I get feedback.

Just published my review of neuroscience in 2025, on The Spike. The 10th of these, would you believe? This year we have foundation models, breakthroughs in using light to understand the brain, a gene therapy, and more Enjoy! medium.com/the-spike/20...

🧠 New year, new preprint! Why does motor learning involve multiple brain regions? We propose that the cortico-cerebellar system learns a "map" of actions where similar movements are nearby, while basal ganglia do RL in this simplified space. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New paper from the lab: "Asynchronous firing and off states in working memory maintenance" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

lab preprint! Interopceptive predictions are central to many brain-body interactions theories, but it's unclear if/how they affect bodily physiology. We (fearless Einav Litvak et al) show that insular cortex predictions are essential for glucose homeostasis-THREAD.. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

New Perspective from myself, Sarah Heilbronner and @myoo.bsky.social . “Rethinking the centrality of brain areas in understanding functional organization” in Nature Neuroscience. 🧵 rdcu.be/eVZ1A

📆 updated for 2026! list of summer schools & short courses in the realm of (computational) neuroscience or data analysis of EEG / MEG / LFP: 🔗 docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Our paper on data constrained RNN that generalize to optogenetic perturbations now citable on eLife: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Excited to announce a new book telling the story of mathematical approaches to studying the mind, from the origins of cognitive science to modern AI! The Laws of Thought will be published in February and is available for pre-order now.