Really intriguing result from the Saxena lab in a multi-tasking RNN for motor control: "Across tasks, population activity occupied a shared, low-dimensional manifold, whereas activity across task epochs resides in orthogonal subspaces." @shreyasaxena.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

(1/n) How can we infer single-trial communication between 🧠 regions? Check out our ICML 2025 paper: “Accurate Identification of Communication Between Multiple Interacting Neural Populations,” by Belle Liu and @jsacks.bsky.social in my lab: arxiv.org/abs/2506.19094

one of my favorite games is silently tallying how people pronounce "stimuli" some say "stim-you-LYE," others say "stim-you-LEE", and then there's those (like me!) who switch randomly

I’m super excited to finally put my recent work with @behrenstimb.bsky.social on bioRxiv, where we develop a new mechanistic theory of how PFC structures adaptive behaviour using attractor dynamics in space and time! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New manuscript from the lab! "Mirror manifolds: partially overlapping neural subspaces for speaking and listening" Led by superstar grad student Anilu Chavez (not on Bluesky)! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

This is one of the most outstanding examples of circuit understanding I've seen in a long time. The unification of theory and experiment is beautiful. When Malcolm presented this in my lab, the audience was cheering at the end, and one person shouted (non-ironically) "You did it!"

(edited repost) Thrilled to see our computational work on adaptive shaping of behavior (we call it outcome-based curriculum learning) in PLoS Comp Biol! @wl-tong.bsky.social, @gautamreddy.bsky.social & I formalize curricula in any RL task that can be framed as sequential simple-to-complex behavior.

🚨Our preprint is online!🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... How do #dopamine neurons perform the key calculations in reinforcement #learning? Read on to find out more! 🧵

Very cool work showing how hippocampal representations could span space, and associative/episodic memories. Thanks for the presentation today Sarthak!

Excited to share recent work on an AI model that doubles as a scalable cognitive theory. Basic idea: when learning one task, "preplay" other tasks to learn implicit goal-oriented maps that support fast performance later. This improves AI and predicts human behavior in naturalistic experiments!

Here's a better way of showing this. Each dot shows the average decodability of the stimulus identity (x) and the mouse's decision (y) across neurons within that brain region.

Corollary: If a brain region cares about one aspect of the task it probably cares about other aspects too! This bar plot shows the correlation between how decodable different task features are across brain areas (src: github.com/int-brain-la...)

this is really cool! an rnn paired with continual synaptic plasticity ends up exhibiting a sort of longterm memory that requires the ongoing plasticity

Wrote a eulogy for the yellow letters in my office window. www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

My first paper with @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social is finally out in @natcomms.nature.com ! rdcu.be/eACGf TL;DR: asymmetric learning rates can be induced by shifts in tonic dopamine giving rise to pessimistic/optimistic biases in agents or animals undergoing reinforcement learning .

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 👇

Our paper on foraging is now published in Neuron! Read it here: www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... This project was co-led by Michael Bukwich (not on Bluesky) and me, with major contributions from all co-authors. Huge thanks to the whole team!

Coming March 17, 2026! Just got my advance copy of Emergence — a memoir about growing up in group homes and somehow ending up in neuroscience and AI. It’s personal, it’s scientific, and it’s been a wild thing to write. Grateful and excited to share it soon.

A landmark volume, The Handbook of Dopamine, is now online: www.sciencedirect.com/handbook/han... Big kudos to the editors, Stephanie Cragg and Mark Walton, for putting this together.

How does the structure of a neural circuit shape its function? @neuralreckoning.bsky.social & I explore this in our new preprint: doi.org/10.1101/2025... 🤖🧠🧪 🧵1/9

going to the Exploratorium at SF and looking at the brain/psych exhibit and going Nope, Nope, Kinda, Not Really and then going to the other parts and going Huh, Didn't Know That, Oh Wow

Okay, but there is no actual rule against neurons 🧠 making music, is there? Turn on your sound, I promise it's worth it!

Efficient coding theories often implicitly or explicitly assume slow changes in tuning (e.g., through synaptic plasticity). Arthur Prat-Carrabin has collected psychophysical data showing that it can be fast, and this can be explained by a gain-adaptive RNN: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

New preprint from the team at BCM Neurosurgery, led by superstar neuroscientist / neurosurgeon Vigi Katlowitz! “Attention is all you need (in the brain): semantic contextualization in human hippocampus” 🧵 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Can seemingly complex multi-area computations in the brain emerge from the need for energy efficient computation? In our new preprint on predictive remapping in active vision, we report on such a case. Let us take you for a spin. 1/6 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to share this project specifying a research direction I think will be particularly fruitful for theory-driven cognitive science that aims to explain natural behavior! We're calling this direction "Naturalistic Computational Cognitive Science"

Is it true you use only 10 bits / s of your brain? @andpru.bsky.social and I provide a motor systems perspective on a proposed speed limit for human information processing. Out today in @natneuro.nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

finally found my perfect figure for disussing primary viscerosensory neurons! from www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

Pro-vaccine groups? Really? What’s next? Defining people who accept the laws of gravity as pro-science groups? Pro-gravity groups. This is journalistic malpractice creating a false equivalency between dangerous nut jobs and people who understand medicine.

Nature Neuroscience What dopamine teaches depends on what the brain believes www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Our work with Pablo Tano, @hyunggoo-kim.bsky.social Athar Malik, Alexandre Pouget and @naoshigeuchida.bsky.social exploring how dopamine neurons could enable multi-timescale reinforcement learning in the brain is out in @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Out now in TiCS, something i've been thinking about a lot: "Physics vs. graphics as an organizing dichotomy in cognition" (by Balaban & me) relevant for many people, related to imagination, intuitive physics, mental simulation, aphantasia, and more authors.elsevier.com/a/1lBaC4sIRv...

Your brain-teaser for the day: You have an array of unsorted integers, and you need to remove any gaps so that the set of numbers are consecutive. E.g., if x=[5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3], then f(x)=[4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3] (removing the gap between 3 and 5). Convince yourself the answer is argsort(argsort(x))+1

Tigers are ambush predators. In dense green jungles, they stalk silently and invisibly on padded feet, leaping only when it's too late for the prey animal to escape. So why the heck are they bright orange? Let's talk about the tiger's camouflaged pajamas. (📷: Dave Pearson)

"Women are PIs on 58% of the canceled grants, although they are PIs on only 34% of all active NSF grants. Similarly, Blacks are PIs on 17% of the terminated grants, although they make only 4% of the total pool. Hispanic PIs and those with disabilities were twice as likely to lose a grant."

A battle over academic freedom is being waged in Texas, where the legislature is poised to give the state power to screen faculty, programs and courses in one of the country’s largest public university systems, and experts say the outcome could reverberate for higher education nationwide.

So surreal learning that "mechanistic interpretability" in AI (eg in LLMs) is just neuroscience: - trying to linearly decode task-relevant variables from neuron activations - identifying "circuits" that compute things - causally manipulating circuits by ablating neurons

Our paper on key-value memory in the brain (updated from the preprint version) is now out in Neuron @cp-neuron.bsky.social authors.elsevier.com/a/1kqIJ3BtfH...

Carl R. Olson (1944–2024) www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... #neuroscience

Excited to see this paper out! Really glad I got to be a part of this. Mark/Selina found that changes in dopamine/behavior under contingency degradation (eg when you get cued *and* uncued rewards) can be understood using TD learning with an appropriate state representation.

New Lab Preprint! "Independent Continuous Tracking of Multiple Agents in the Human Hippocampus" led by my graduate student Assia Chericoni. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Excited to present the latest from the lab out today in Cell www.cell.com/cell/fulltex.... See Thread! 1/8

I am incredibly proud to share my first, first-author paper as a postdoc with @benhayden.bsky.social . How does the human hippocampus, known for encoding concepts, represent the meanings of words while listening to narrative speech? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

ah cool the Cosyne Workshops are out! www.cosyne.org/workshops-pr...

I know this site only reaches a subset of neuro/ cog professors. If you know a young professor in the area who would benefit from a week of targeted learning about doing good science, good mentoring, networking etc, it would be great if you could forward them: compneurosci.com/Neuro4Pros/i...

I think one thing that the general public doesn’t fully grasp yet is that American science funding was already teetering on the edge before all this started. www.eenews.net/articles/sci... A short thread on why your scientist friends are freaking out. 1/7

Sabotage. Criminal sabotage. "[The NSF] is planning to lay off between a quarter and a half of its staff in the next two months, a top National Science Foundation official said Tuesday." www.eenews.net/articles/sci...

Today my ChatGPT is responding to everything I ask it with "Got it! Let me know how I can assist you further." I can eventually coax it into answering my question but I have to be super patient. It's like trying to get the attention of a distracted friend