Amazing to see how far this has come in less than a year! Excited to see where this is going next

1/7 🧠 My journey into development begins with this work and question: how does the brain's spatial navigation system develop? We found that the neural networks for spatial navigation (tori and rings) are preconfigured and only later anchor gradually to the world with experience! 🧵

1/N: Dear cognitive map fans, I’d like to share a model I’ve been working on for a while (clearing backlog :). I show how a vector navigation architecture (VNA) and a “positional inference network” (PIN) can build Universal Cognitive Maps (UCMs) for abstract spaces. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Can whole-brain fMRI responses to naturalistic video stimuli be predicted using only transcripts? Last year, I gave a tutorial on exactly that. Since the response was very positive, I’ve now released both the tutorial notebook and the trained models publicly.

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...

“Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords kiki & bouba with spiky & round shapes, respectively...We tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby chickens. Similar to humans, they spontaneously chose a spiky shape when hearing a kiki sound & a round shape when hearing a bouba.”😲🧪

The hippocampal map has its own attentional control signal! Our new study reveals that theta #sweeps can be instantly biased towards behaviourally relevant locations. See 📹 in post 4/6 and preprint here 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 🧵(1/6)

Introducing DroPE: Extending Context by Dropping Positional Embeddings We found embeddings like RoPE aid training but bottleneck long-sequence generalization. Our solution’s simple: treat them as a temporary training scaffold, not a permanent necessity. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12167 pub.sakana.ai/DroPE

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

New preprint! Have you ever wondered, what are these fuzzy simplicial sets, the theoretical framework behind e.g. UMAP? Here we show that you may simply see them as marginal distributions over simplicial sets. This provides a generative model for UMAP. (1/2) arxiv.org/abs/2512.03899

Three German universities offering post-docs for researchers "who cannot conduct or continue their work in the USA appropriately because of actual political pressure. " www.uni-konstanz.de/zukunftskoll...

Foraging in conceptual spaces: hippocampal oscillatory dynamics underlying searching for concepts in memory www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

New preprint from the lab and great work by Fei Wang. We show how subiculum trace vector cells can be modeled consistent with known effects in CA1. Traces are driven by a mismatch learning rule to keep associative memories in line with experience. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Super proud of this collaboration with rockstar Ryan Raut - born out of playing in the sandbox in our last year of grad school! Multi-scale brain activity can be predicted from a simple measure of arousal like pupil diameter. Out with linear causality, in with dynamic systems to explain neurobiology

1/ 🚨 New preprint! 🚨 Excited and proud (& a little nervous 😅) to share our latest work on the importance of #theta-timescale spiking during #locomotion in #learning. If you care about how organisms learn, buckle up. 🧵👇 📄 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... 💻 code + data 🔗 below 🤩 #neuroskyence

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Andrej is a great scientist and teacher, highly recommended!

Congratulations to @reznikdan.bsky.social and @sofievalk.bsky.social for this tremendous achievement!

In sum, we believe this is the first direct evidence in humans of systems consolidation theory for specific memories: the hypothesized transformation of memories from hippocampus to cortex over sleep. Take look for yourself on @biorxivpreprint.bsky.social t.co/xFEDpqVXfE 6/6

🚨We believe this is a major step forward in how we study hippocampus function in healthy humans. Using novel behavioral tasks, fMRI, RL & RNN modeling, and transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), we demonstrate the causal role of hippocampus in relational structure learning.

Now out in @natneuro.nature.com What happens to the brain’s body map when a body-part is removed? Scanning patients before and up to 5 yrs after arm amputation, we discovered the brain’s body map is strikingly preserved despite amputation www.nature.com/articles/s41593-025-02037-7 🧵1/18

#CCN2025 was fantastic!! It was great to meet and catch up with many of you in Amsterdam – Feeling really inspired now by all the cool work I've seen over the past few days @cogcompneuro.bsky.social! Until next year!

Since July 21st, we have a good reason to celebrate the summa cum laude Defense of the newly minted Dr. Hettwer who received her PhD from @hhu.de under the supervision of Prof. Simon Eickhoff @sbe.bsky.social with strongest support of Dr. Sofie Valk! Congratulations Meike!!!🥂👏🏻🥁🎊

Appreciate @davidpoeppel.bsky.social's reminder to scientists of their role in this time, at #CCN2025 (the reminder may be even more pertinent to non-US colleagues who have a chance to prevent the some of the worst effects before they really arrive)

I'll be presenting this work at #CCN2025 tomorrow (A173). Come and say hi or message me if you'd like to meet up!

@fnkp.bsky.social using gen-AI to create awesome new experiment stimuli which nearly look alike visually, but depict completely different things. Fri, C135 (6/7)

We’re very happy to share 3 highlights of our Brain and AI team for #CCN2025 's week: 1. 🏆1st place for the Algonauts competition: paper, thtread and code below 2.🗣Keynote: Language in the Brain: 2025.ccneuro.org/k-and-t-lang... 3. 🚀Tutorial: Scale your decoding pipeline in the notebook

Excited for #CCN2025 where we will share our entry for the algonauts challenge. Join us on Wednesday 10:00 am in A1.03!

Thrilled to have been part of this! Pleasure working with such a brilliant team on the Algonauts 2025 Challenge. Huge congrats to @shreydixit.bsky.social and everyone involved!

Daniel Carlstrom Schad, Shrey Dixit, Janis Keck, Viktor Studenyak, Aleksandr Shpilevoi, Andrej Bicanski: VIBE: Video-Input Brain Encoder for fMRI Response Modeling https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17958 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.17958 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.17958

Serious concerns about a new cortical biomarker for pain sensitivity jamanetwork.com/journals/jam... We (with @tspisak.bsky.social, @christianbuchel.bsky.social) published a commentary on Chowdhury, Bi et al. (2025, JAMA Neurology) raising serious concerns about their reported results. 👇 1/13

New paper from the lab in Cell Reports! Rebekka Tenderra @rtenderra.bsky.social et al show that intelligence is linked to interindividual differences in relational integration in hippocampal cognitive maps, supporting an information-processing-based view on intelligence. www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Humans and animals can rapidly learn in new environments. What computations support this? We study the mechanisms of in-context reinforcement learning in transformers, and propose how episodic memory can support rapid learning. Work w/ @kanakarajanphd.bsky.social : arxiv.org/abs/2506.19686

🚨Preprint Alert: Who Does What in Deep Learning? Multidimensional Contribution of Neural Units using Game Theory: arxiv.org/abs/2506.19732 The result of my MSc thesis is out with @kayson.bsky.social @fatemehhadaeghi.bsky.social @patrickmineault.bsky.social @kordinglab.bsky.social, Claus C. Hilgetag

Excited to share that our work on the interplay of symmetric learning rules and successor representations (SR) is published in @plos.org (comp.bio) Work done together with @doellerlab.bsky.social, @caswell.bsky.social and Juergen Jost. doi.org/10.1371/jour... #neuroskyence #compneurosky 1/n

Sometimes I am amazed by the fact that I can sit on a train and play chess against people around the world with a device that fits in my pocket. Then I realize I am in Germany and there is still no stable internet on trains in 2025...

My colleague Dan Bush (not on BSky) at UCL is looking for a post-doc. Focus on intracranial EEG and single cell recordings from epilepsy patients + MEG recordings from healthy volunteers during spatial and episodic memory tasks. Apply here tinyurl.com/n6nkty8e

New paper from the Neurosurgery Research Team at BCM! "Learning and language in the unconscious human hippocampus" www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

My new approach to higher-order interactions in complex systems is now published in Physical Review Research: journals.aps.org/prresearch/a...

Check out our new preprint on how environmental deformation and locomotion affect 3D maps! Co-led with @reisnerv.bsky.social, alongside Leonard König, Misun Kim, and Christian Doeller. Very proud of this work!

Clearly, AGI has already been achieved since ChatGPT can tell me how to insert a picture in the header of my latex poster without moving ten other things to completely random positions

1/12 How do animals build an internal map? In our new paper, we tracked thousands of mouse CA1 neurons over days/weeks as they learned a VR navigation task. @nspruston.bsky.social & co-1st author @johanwinn.bsky.social Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yw_4... Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Very cool opinion paper by @ckerren.bsky.social and colleagues on the role of dimensionality transformation in episodic memory!

Excited to share that our paper is now published in Nature! In this study, we uncovered a grid-cell-based circuit in medial entorhinal cortex that probes the surrounding environment with theta-paced, sweeping spatial representations 🧵 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/ Super-excited to share our new work “Episodic and associative memory from spatial scaffolds in the hippocampus”, that just appeared in Nature! www.nature.com/articles/s41... Key insights and ideas 👇#tweeprint

Scared to share this after 10 freaking years of waiting, but here we go: We found that temperature *perception* can change the biology of the next generations, even when “it’s just in the parents' head”. Read how C. elegans neurons control epigenetic inheritance! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...