Indeterminism and the physics of open neural dynamics www.cell.com/trends-open/... - the brain is not a deterministic system

Made an AI-curated primate ephys literature database covering ~10000 papers with recording brain regions and target functions. Maybe useful for something. okazawagouki.github.io/NHPLit/repor...

Our new paper is out in Neuron! www.cell.com/neuron/fullt... How does the brain decide how much of the past to use when making decisions? In rapidly changing environments, recent experiences matter more; in stable environments, longer histories are useful.

The cat’s focus and curiosity 😂 TT: Nika_Zubra youtu.be/LNlkBMtstJE?...

Want a dataset to test ideas on neural basis of decision making or how areas interact as we make choices? Check out our data published today @rudebecklab.bsky.social. >16,000 single neurons from 22 anatomically confirmed areas in macaques performing a decision task. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

fs.blog/the-antilibr... The Antilibrary: The Hidden Value of Unread Books The legendary Italian writer Umberto Eco had over 50,000 books in his private library. When asked why so many, he had this to say: "It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy..."

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...

New Neuroscience Masters Degree at Johns Hopkins The M.S. degree in Neuroscience is a full-time in-person program consisting of intensive coursework followed by 12 months of laboratory research. The application deadline is May 15, and more information is available at neuroscience.jhu.edu/graduate/51

In collaboration with @timmytimmytimmytim.bsky.social, @johndmurray.bsky.social, and Max Shinn, we characterized temporal and spatial scales of rs-fMRI during development and aging.

Meet the Caribbean reef octopus. They're known to change color in 0.3 seconds and squeeze through openings the size of their beak! They're problem-solvers & and one of the biggest octopus out there! #ocean #animals #scuba #photography #nature

Some exciting opportunity for NeuroAI research at Johns Hopkins!

This paper completely nails an age old theory, leading to a clear law describing the strength of conditioned associations. elifesciences.org/reviewed-pre...

Hippocampal relay for remote planning from Brian, Albert Lee’s group! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We tend to think of neurons as either excitatory or inhibitory, but some neurons chemically inhibit their downstream targets while electrically exciting their neighbors. What is gained by having an inhibitory neuron excite its neighbor? www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Thank you for having me on BrainInspired, Paul @braininspired.bsky.social! It was such an honor to be on my favorite show—a rare place where we can leisurely talk about manifolds, latent circuits, power laws, and other esoteric ideas, and still be taken seriously in knowing they are all real.

Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins is inviting applications for 3 open-rank tenured/tenure-track positions in (1) Behavioral Neuroscience, (2) Cognitive Neuroscience, and (3) Cognitive Psychology. pbs.jhu.edu/about/jobs/

Birds are both intelligent and incredibly agile, yet they are quite small. How do they achieve this with their little brains? They have twice as many neurons per brain mass than mammals, including primates. www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

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...

Thanks to @pessoabrain.bsky.social and @thetransmitter.bsky.social for featuring our paper and to @aliyarumana.bsky.social and Peter Tse for engaging so generously with the ideas! 😊 www.thetransmitter.org/the-big-pict...

I am excited to announce that the Johns Hopkins University Solomon H. Snyder Department has become an interdivisional department between the School of Medicine and the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, unifying neuroscience research and education across the university. hub.jhu.edu/2025/09/15/j...

How does the brain decide? 🧠 Our new @nature.com paper shows that neural activity switches from an 'evidence gathering' to a 'commitment' state at a precise moment we call nTc. After nTc, new evidence is ignored, revealing a neural marker for the instant when the mind is made up. rdcu.be/eGUrv

Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time — an event-based analog of “object-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

It was an honor to write this, but also great fun. A chance to look back at the classics, and think about the path forward. #Physics is a beautiful human endeavor. journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

Neural manifold properties can help us understand how animal brains deal with competing and multifaceted information, execute flexible behaviors and reuse common computations, writes @mattperich.bsky.social. #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/neural-dynam...

Poor image quality introduces systematic bias into large neuroimaging datasets, new study of ABCD data shows. By Natalia Mesa www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/poo...

If you’ve ever tried to cram for an exam, you know that it’s easier to memorize something if you learn the information in shorter, spaced-out sessions. These dynamics are as relevant to each individual cell’s existence as they are to ours. Claire Evans reports: www.quantamagazine.org/what-can-a-c...

Happy 107th Birthday, Brenda Milner! Her contributions to neuropsychology shaped the way we understand the human brain. From surviving two world wars and two pandemics, to paving the way for future generations of researchers, Milner’s legacy continues. @mcgill.ca @cusm-muhc.bsky.social

In this “Brain Inspired” episode, Paul Middlebrooks and Xiao-Jing Wang discuss how neuroscience has changed over the past 50 years, and how Wang believes modern theoretical tools will lead to a new era of “cross-levels mechanistic understanding.” Listen now: www.thetransmitter.org/brain-inspir...

Domestication of dogs induced the expansion of the neocortex and reduction in size of subcortical structures: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/2... Reminds me of a theory I once heard that humans basically self-domesticated themselves.

Thrilled to see our TinyRNN paper in @nature! We show how tiny RNNs predict choices of individual subjects accurately while staying fully interpretable. This approach can transform how we model cognitive processes in both healthy and disordered decisions. doi.org/10.1038/s415...

The neurons that encode sequential information into working memory do not fire in that same order during recall, a finding that is at odds with a long-standing theory. Read more in this month’s Null and Noteworthy. By @ldattaro.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/null-and-not...

Short new piece on aphantasia just out in TiCS: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Key idea: aphantasia often involves a lack of *visual-object* imagery (explaining subjective reports & objective correlates) but selectively spared *spatial* imagery (explaining preserved task performance).

Wonderful to see this piece out! I really think we as a field are converging on a unified account of the hippocampus as a modality agnostic, task-relevant, sequence prediction machine. I bet that within the next decade we will have a complete computational model of the hippocampus. 🧠📈 🧪

Out today in @nature.com: we show that individual neurons have diverse tuning to a decision variable computed by the entire population, revealing a unifying geometric principle for the encoding of sensory and dynamic cognitive variables. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Delighted to be the opening chapter of this brilliantly conceived (and beautifully covered!) new interdisciplinary collection on Space, Time, and Memory edited by the wonderful Lynn Nadel and Sara Aronowitz. Even better, the whole thing is free to download here: library.oapen.org/bitstream/ha...

Analog = commitment. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq4B...

#MusicSky #MayTheFourth

i have uploaded this preprint a while back, but hadn't promoted it directly here. in this piece i explain why i can no longer recommend trainees to participate in my former home field. The End of Conscioussness - osf.io/preprints/ps... but i've learned a lot. thank you for everything. 🧠📈

Amidst all the arguments, its important to remember science is all about love … #AGIComics

Why acting freely requires constraints (from Sarah Bakewell’s wonderful book about existentialism)

Thrilled to share our work in ScienceAdvances: “Chronic ethanol exposure produces sex-dependent impairments in value computations in the striatum.” Huge thanks to Tricia @janaklab.bsky.social, Daeyeol @ungteoriz.bsky.social, Angela, and my friend Robin! www.science.org/doi/full/10....

How do temporal & spatial scales of resting-state fMRI in human cortex change with age? Research at Neurogazer (company I co-founded) found that they decrease throughout lifespan in most cortical areas but increase until the age of ~12 in the prefrontal cortex. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

It's all about the waves, cats Musical neurodynamics www.nature.com/articles/s41... #neuroscience

We have lost a legend. Yesterday morning, I received the devastating news that Kanzi, the world’s most famous bonobo, died unexpectedly the day before, in the company of his bonobo family at Ape Initiative, in Des Moines, Iowa. I've written here about this tremendous loss. We will miss him dearly.

Time-domain brain: temporal mechanisms for brain functions using time-delay nets, holographic processes, radio communications, and emergent oscillatory sequences www.frontiersin.org/journals/com... #neuroscience

Our memories are not encoded with timestamps. How do we reconstruct the passage of time from our memories? In a new paper (accepted at Psych Science) @samiyousif.bsky.social and I demonstrate a powerful illusion of time that results from repeated experience osf.io/preprints/ps...

Sharing some positivity here! Grateful for the opportunity to connect with old friends and to make new ones at JHU. Thank you @hyungbaekwon.bsky.social for inviting me!