This is the May cover of NN but it has already been debunked on biorxiv www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Such a clear statement about the ridiculous pace of publishing (not just NN).

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! 🧵

Hmm - I wish I knew what social media thought of this @tpvogels.bsky.social opinion

Fun fact: I was asked on radio Oxford just to talk about the Acknowledgements on this paper :)

We are looking for two Research Assistants to conduct experiments and data analyses investigating the neural mechanisms of strategic and social decision-making using head-fixed (1) and freely-moving (1) behavioural paradigms in mice. www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

What is the most interesting part of the brain? pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

I do this all the time. With recent grants, sometimes old grants. With papers. With talks that I think went well. I don't think it's time wasted. It's about learning what good looks like, and reminding yourself that sometimes you can be good. 2 of the most important things for an academic.

Does the brain really know what word is coming next? Insight article by @rjantonello.bsky.social about fascinating research article in @elife.bsky.social by @ines-schoenmann.bsky.social, @mheilbron.bsky.social and others. elifesciences.org/articles/111... elifesciences.org/articles/106...

New peer-reviewed paper w/ @mheilbron.bsky.social, @predictivebrain.bsky.social & Jakub Szewczyk! Pre-onset brain encoding has been taken as evidence that brains–like LLMs–predict upcoming words. We show that the same signatures arise in systems that cannot predict. (elifesciences.org) (1/8)

johnduncananimalandthinker.substack.com First four posts – operating principles; “the other”; two things to teach schoolchildren.

Last year my book The Animal and the Thinker came out. Basic idea – how the operating principles of instinct and reason together answer big human questions. Right and wrong. Culture wars. Family and work. The meaning of life. That sort of thing. Now as an add-on I’m starting a blog…

This looks absolutely amazing. Rats composing long action sequences out of short ones. mPFC constructing the long sequence on the fly. Reusing the primitive representations but composing them with progression along the composite. One of the most impressive things I have ever seen a rodent do.

(And @lhuntneuro.bsky.social has spent the thousand years growing that moustache…)

***4-year Career Development Research Fellowship in Psychology now available at Oxford!*** Open to all areas of Psychology, including Cognitive/Behavioural Neuroscience. PhD in last three years, or be about to submit (some exceptions apply). Deadline: 21st May. www.sjc.ox.ac.uk/discover/vac...

People are great.

Yes very very impressive Scott Waddell

Oh my god, the alt text is a gift. 😹

This is awesome. Kam and Pip are both great!

My son has his version of Cosyne today :)

This is really cool!

What are the systems in neuroscience that we really have something that we can call “explanation” at all relevant levels, other than reflexive feed-forward like circuits. Here are a few that I would argue are getting there. Obviously not complete explanations but genuinely satisfying.

Scientific publishing: Rethinking how research is reviewed and published Review of how the loss of impact factor affected submissions at eLife - uneven drop across countries, but generally holding up remarkably well and shows a new model is possible elifesciences.org/articles/110...

As I've said, the biggest obstacles to innovation in sci comm are Impact Factor & PubMed [for many, without one/being listed, you might as well not exist, and the inclusion criteria constrain process, format, etc]. bioRxiv shows you can get by without them. eLife may do it for peer review venues.

Your regular reminder of the extent of the problem

Hiring, promotion and tenure committees, grant review boards, institutional leadership, and every scientist whose knee jerk response to hearing of a new journal is to ask “what’s its impact factor?”, time to step up…

And if @elife.bsky.social were to achieve nothing more than cure scientists of Impact Factor addiction the project could be considered a triumph.

“Authors [&] reviewers tell us that they have had a more constructive experience…choosing eLife not because of our impact factor, but because of our process” 👆 eLife comtinues to provoke debate but this is perhaps the most important point elifesciences.org/articles/110...

It is absolutely astonishingly impressive how much work scientific publishers have managed to shunt onto authors, who aren't paid, while they continue to increase their enormous profits. The submission process itself takes about 5 hours. I miss the 90s 😢

Cosyne is always the best week of the year but this year it was just spectacular. Congrats @neurokim.bsky.social, @markhisted.org, @glajoie.bsky.social, and Alex Cayco Gajic for one of the best programs ever.

💯agree with the conclusion of the editorial - “Scientific publishing must evolve for the modern era. It must promote science but also provide a framework for honest discourse around science”

1/ Three years ago, we completely changed the way we review and publish research articles. Today, we’re taking a look at how it’s going and what’s next. buff.ly/aHwYNIE

The last year has been an extraordinary journey for us at @elife.bsky.social as we have been establishing a new model of publishing and taken on some of the commercial forces in publishing. We have tried to capture some of the takeaways in this editorial.

Really neat work by Fountas and colleagues at UCL: arxiv.org/abs/2603.04688 They propose that consolidation reflects a form of "predictive forgetting" that aids generalization.

As eLife editor, it has been exciting and we are in a new steady state: quality of papers remains high, variance has dropped; work during the editorial phase has gone up tremendously; review quality is excellent and has improved. Kudos to @behrenstimb.bsky.social and the leadership team.

The last year has been an extraordinary journey for us at @elife.bsky.social as we have been establishing a new model of publishing and taken on some of the commercial forces in publishing. We have tried to capture some of the takeaways in this editorial.

1/Today, we’re pleased to announce Wellcome funding that will support a new initiative – eLife Pathways – in building an open and collaborative ecosystem for alternative approaches to scholarly communication buff.ly/P28V9If?utm_...

Super excited that Wellcome is renewing its commitment to @elife.bsky.social and supporting us as we try to help others move to more progressive publishing approaches.

This is cool!

1/n With Cosyne around the corner, I thought I would: a) make a thread about our “A cognitive map for value-guided choice in the vmPFC” Cell paper (i'm a bit late). shorturl.at/DBA3H

Our contributions to @cosynemeeting.bsky.social #cosyne2026

It's Cosyne time!! Here are some contributions from my lab and some of my close collaborator labs (Thomas Akam, @melgaby.bsky.social, Steve Kennerley, @sameershethmd.bsky.social )

We show that synesthesia is sensory and automatic in nature: the pupil scales with the brightness of experienced synesthetic colors. doi.org/10.7554/eLif... Now in its new dress @elife.bsky.social (convincing & valuable in round 1). If anyone wants to pick up the method, happy to share & explain!

The post will be based in the Neuroinformatics Unit at @sainsburywellcome.bsky.social, working with the Mrsic-Flogel, Branco and @behrenstimb.bsky.social labs. Start ASAP, funded until Sept 2028 in the first instance. Salary £54-62k.

Are you a neuroscientist with great coding skills, or a software engineer interested in the brain? We are recruiting for a research software engineer to help us build pipelines to process weeks of neural and behavioural recordings from freely moving animals. More details: bit.ly/rse-2026a

Peer review would be easier if we stopped treating it like combat with the authors. Results want to be free, and perfect is the enemy of good. Do the data support the conclusions? If so, that’s enough. A paper isn’t a blank slate for projecting your own ideas.

🛠️ February’s most-read Tools and Resources paper introduces idtracker.ai to rethink multi-animal tracking: buff.ly/Ho0b3xz Learn more about publishing your tools or resources with us: buff.ly/pivLQX0

London #neuroscience people you may like this. We're hosting a series of talks at Imperial & Crick on how to get experiment and theory working together better. Each session will have a talk around this and extended networking / group discussion on the questions raised. Plus, free food! 🤖🧠🧪

Triple paper drop from the inimitable @willydorrell.bsky.social : 1) A normative theory of prefrontal working memory slots. 2) A comprehensive review of normative theories of why grid cells look like grid cells. 3) A new theory of convex efficient coding. (0/3)

Great to see work published in @elife.bsky.social by SWC Senior Research Fellow @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social Completed at @college-de-france.fr & NeuroSpin (CEA) with @standehaene.bsky.social, the study explores how we perceive shapes. Blog: www.sainsburywellcome.org/blog/languag... Paper ⤵️

Can confirm it snowed in manhattan too.