People falling in love with LLMs remind me of that guy whose father died when he was 12, so he latched onto Optimus Prime as a father figure. As an adult, he changed his legal name to Optimus Prime and was widely mocked. It's not mental illness or stupidity; it's something much sadder

Just got the summary statement for an R21 resub w/ impact score of 40. Of the 3 major criticisms, the 2 biggest ones were factually incorrect. But there's no meaningful recourse in situations like this. Imagine if applicants could write a one-page rebuttal before the study section meets...

News from central Jersey: I'm running to represent New Jersey's 12th Congressional District. By entering the fray, I hope to bring ideas of repairing our frayed republic. Not only to defend it in 2026, but to build something stronger, for generations to come! samwang.substack.com/p/entering-t...

The bureaucracy of science has grown so much, the system is collapsing upon itself: Scientists have become administrators of grants rather than spending time on science. Paid administrators are demanding even more administrative work from scientists. Administrators are eating the science budget.

AI will not cure cancer, story #587: I have a client who is studying a potential therapeutic target. All the literature suggests that co-targeting their original target and another molecule should be synergistic because they participate in parallel pathways.

The supplementary videos for this preprint are fantastic. Some wild examples of decoding the animal's attentional focus and/or intent www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him. White. Hot. Rage.

Main postdoc study out! We can redefine prefrontal cortex regions with single-unit activity! Grateful to @carlenlab.bsky.social and @weltgeischt.bsky.social who made this crazy project real. Thanks to all co-authors, collaborators, and reviewers. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A humble proposal: all abbreviations in scientific papers should use PDF tooltips to expand the abbreviation when the mouse pointer hovers over them. Anyone agree/disagree?

I’m excited to be an associate member of @acnporg.bsky.social Looking forward to coming to the ACNP meeting regularly! #ACNP2026

The data show that when you let more women and racial/ethnic minorities into your academic society they tend to be overrepresented doing the service work of your society. Isn’t that interesting? #ACNP2026

Following coverage over the weekend of Sir Paul Nurse's comments that suggested that the only reason that a Fellow should be expelled from @royalsociety.org is scientific misconduct, I have written to him to explain the risks such an attitude poses of increasing sexual harassment in STEM.

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)

If you are submitting an NIH grant in February, you will be required to use SciENcv to prepare you biosketch. IT IS MUCH WORSE THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE. Set aside *at least* 4 hours just to transfer an existing an biosketch into SciENcv.

🧠 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...

And immediately after being sworn in, he will launch nuclear missiles at the San Andreas Fault and Hackensack, New Jersey.

One way to understand Isaac Newton is that numerologists had been trying to predict the natural world for thousands of years, and he was the first to get it right.

Insights from my 11 year old: “Is truth serum just, like, alcohol?”

My brother knocked it out of the park this year with Xmas presents for my 8 year old

I started doing "Zone 2 cardio" recently, and it seems too good to be true. I can walk uphill on a treadmill, with almost zero exertion or discomfort, while reading papers or watching netflix, and it will improve my stamina more than a grueling run? It's a little hard to believe

This is a really interesting and provocative paper. Down with brain areas!

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

Sequences are everywhere! In every brain region. And are written in stone. Invariant Activity Sequences Across the Mouse Brain. Out today, by Célian Bimbard, with @kenneth-harris.bsky.social. Based on data by Célian and by @intlbrainlab.bsky.social. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

An interesting article from The Atlantic about what's going on at the NIH (gift link below): www.theatlantic.com/health/2025/...

It’s horrifying that the NIH director’s collaborators are publishing opinions as uninformed and flat out stupid as this. Let’s save American science by removing incentives for foreign researchers to come here! Science isn’t competitive enough! Underreliance on standardized testing is the problem!

Bichan Wu (@bichanw.bsky.social) & I wrote a tutorial paper on Reduced Rank Regression (RRR) — the statistical method underlying "communication subspaces" from Semedo et al 2019 — aimed at neuroscientists. arxiv.org/abs/2512.12467

happy holidays

New preprint from the lab! A frontal motor circuit for economic decisions and actions: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... We use a novel task in mice, cortex-wide imaging and optogenetics, NPX recording and modelling to reveal a circuit mechanism that transforms abstract decisions to spatial actions.

Dimensionality reduction may be the wrong approach to understanding neural representations. Our new paper shows that across human visual cortex, dimensionality is unbounded and scales with dataset size—we show this across nearly four orders of magnitude. journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

immigrants score the lowest on tests, but they also take all our jobs, while at the same time taking all the welfare and buying all the homes

Completely agree. And if I can make a self-promoting plug here, we have a nice table in this paper trying to separate some of these ideas out. The brain is very information-efficient (bits/ATP), while still being very expensive in energy consumption (ATP/sec). www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Soapbox time: the problem with metabolic efficiency arguments in neuroscience is that they often confuse energy efficiency with energy expenditure. Biological systems are optimized for energy efficiency, but that does NOT imply they are optimized for low energy expenditure 🧵 1/

Watching children’s Xmas movies has prompted me to consider the similarities between The Polar Express and Bioshock

First paper from the lab is now online @natneuro.nature.com ! We mapped injury induced enhancers in the mouse CNS and decoded their sequence architecture. Little 🧵 rdcu.be/eSQi1

Brilliant

"I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Y’all are reading this paper in the wrong way. We love to trash dominant hypothesis, but we need to look for evidence against the manifold hypothesis elsewhere: This elegant work doesn't show neural dynamics are high D, nor that we should stop using PCA It’s quite the opposite! (thread)

Re: recent studies about neural coding being high-dimensional, and I thought I'd contribute our recent preprint: www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1... @eliezyer.bsky.social and I will do a full thread on this when the paper comes out, but his work shows it's (as usual) a little more complicated 🧵

Our lab is looking for a postdoc! We have interesting projects and cutting-edge techniques such as Neuropixels Opto, Light Beads Microscopy and more. We would be delighted to receive your application. Deadline is 25 November 2025. More info here: www.ucl.ac.uk/cortexlab/po...

On the event of James Watson's death, I highly recommend this 2023 commentary from @matthewcobb.bsky.social and Nathaniel Comfort with crucial new insights into the discovery of the double helix. (And also check out Cobb's brand new biography of Francis Crick) www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I watched this a bunch of times, trying to figure out wtf could be going through RFK Jr’s head. As much as I detest the guy, the only logical conclusion I can reach is that he was going to get help

The NIH institute director firing last Friday is very bad. I made a video explainer about why. Stay for last post, w link to @science.org story from @jocelynkaiser.bsky.social 1/4 🧪

I made a video about the shutdown, and why this government worker won’t be a pawn. When the president and Supreme Court are both acting lawlessly, Congress must stand up and stop it. US science is collapsing and Congress needs to act. 🧪 Full video here: www.instagram.com/reel/DP1tXXE...

Nolan was the developer of the SNT TMS protocol, the most promising new treatment for depression there is. It’s a real tragedy

A thought-provoking piece in Nature Neuroscience by many neuroscience colleagues: "Science must break its silence to rebuild public trust". Lots to think about here. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

So I get that a Neuroscientist Couldn’t Understand a Microprocessor, and TBH I’m ok with that. But could a neuroscientist understand a deep RNN? Because that seems like a more pressing issue. *assuming you think the brain operates through the parallel activity of many connected input/output units

Anyone interested in optics needs to check out this wild story of how those gigantic photomultiplier tubes were made: www.hamamatsu.com/jp/en/why-ha...